6 ms·

Dear Record Labels: Focus on Buyers, Not Thieves

144 points by earbitscom 15y ago

rflrob 15y ago
> My iPod only holds 30GB of music, and I already have that much on there. So, every time I want to add a new album, I have to get rid of something else. I already chopped my music collection down to the 30GB limit in the first place. At this point, any new album I buy actually displaces an album I already know I love! That puts the price of discovery pretty high. While I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, he really has trouble picking which of the 16 days of music to take off? My iTunes is set up to automatically load the most played couple thousand songs (4-5 days of music or so), the most recently added songs, the most recently played couple hundred songs, and then more or less randomly pick from the rest. There are songs I haven't listened to in literally years, and I find it hard to imagine that I will, while driving or elsewhere away from my computer, suddenly want to start listening to them right this instant. Talk about first-world problems...
- jbri 15y ago
  I hate the term "first-world problems". It seems like every time it's used, it's in the manner of "I don't think this is an issue so I'll dismiss it by comparing it to starving children in Ethiopia". Corporations snooping on all your internet traffic? Talk about a first world problem. Internet passwords being stolen? That's a first-world problem if I every heard of one. Health insurance backrupting you if you actually need to use it? Puh-lease, just having health insurance means you've got it better than most other people in the world! Dismissing something as a "first-world problem" to imply that it shouldn't be worried about is intellectually dishonest.
  - sp332 15y ago
    Agreed. I've usually heard it used by someone to deprecate their own problems, when they know they're whining about something that isn't really a big deal. https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblem https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblem
  - jcampbell1 15y ago
    > I hate the term "first-world problems". It is not meant to be dismissive of arguments as much as self deprecating satire. Cheer up mate.
    - prawn 15y ago
      Agree. In my circles, it's never dismissive but always a brief "If that's a significant problem for you, you have it pretty good" distraction that the group laughs about before returning to the discussion.
  - michael_dorfman 15y ago
    I think in this case, the term was justified, for the reason Louis CK illustrates in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk Here we've got someone who has a magical device not much bigger than a wristwatch that holds 16 days worth of music, and he's complaining that it's not enough. For comparison, I was in college when Sony released the first Walkman, and we thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread-- a device the size of a paperback book that allowed you to listen to 90 minutes worth of music while walking around. So, yeah: 30GB capacity on an iPod is a first-world problem, in my book.
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  i like my months of music. i never know when ill come across some new song ive never heard, but have, and now love. and just because i havent listented to a song in years, doesnt mean i never want to hear it again. maybe i forgot about it. maybe once in a blue moon that old Blind Melon song comes on, and it just takes you BACK! Know what I mean?
- noisebleed 15y ago
  Some people have different use cases than you. Why do you think high-capacity portable music players are still made?
- earbitscom 15y ago
  This still doesn't change the fact that I have to plug my iPod in to get this setup (my iPod currently never leaves my car) and it still means some of my music is always inaccessible. Both of those things discourage me from buying new music.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nl 15y ago
From the music industry point of view, it's not about serving the customer, it's about extracting as much revenue as possible before the recorded music market collapses. See this 2009 article for their thinking: http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not-until-at-least-2011/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-bu...
- earbitscom 15y ago
  I used a quote from this article during our Demo Day pitch. The problem I have with these particular demands is, what if one of the companies the industry cripples and destroys was actually on track to breathe a little life back into the recording industry? I haven't bought this much new music in a long time and it feels awesome. What if they prohibit features that would cause a 10% increase in purchases because Amazon refuses to be strong armed into paying $30M to overcome legal technicalities? Amazon doesn't make nearly what the labels do off of the music, so $30M might be enough to stop them from doing something that drives $1B in growth for the labels. And all of this to stop people from stealing who are not buying anything no matter what you do. It's just bad business.
  - nl 15y ago
    It's just bad business It's actually quite logical, if you agree with their assumptions: 1) The increased availability of digital music will lead to an increase in piracy, and 2) An increase in piracy will lead to less money being spent on recorded music. (Both those assumptions can be argued, but the music industry believes them to be true). Given that, the following argument is logical: 1) At some point in the future the money being spent on recorded music will decrease to a point where it is not a significant source of income. 2) The longer that point can be delayed, the more money can be made from recorded music in aggregate. 3) Anything that makes digital music inconvenient for the consumer will delay the collapse of buying recorded music because it will reduce uptake (!!) 4) Therefor, fight anything that makes digital music better/easier to use. 5) Meanwhile, try and develop new sources of income (360 deals, streaming licencing, game licences etc) From their point of view it's not bad business at all - it's the safest course of action.
inkaudio 15y ago
Majority of the people who pirate music are not going to use Amazon cloud drive to pirate music because: 1.) Amazon cloud drive does not offer music pirates any significant advantage over what they are currently using. 2.) People are already using alternatives for decades, it's hard to get people to switch. 3.) It would be easier for record labels to track down and take down infringers on Amazon cloud drive as oppose to other services. 4.) We've seen this before, it's called lala.com, and it did not become a hub for music pirates.
pacemkr 15y ago
I can't help but draw a parallel to computer games. I find myself buying computer games less and less for this exact reason. If I get the game off a torrent, I will have a better experience. Every time I sit down to play a game I actually purchased, I feel cheated: "insert the disk, connect to the internet, and jump through this hoop please." How about the $60 I just payed? Not proof enough? Piracy is the publishers problem; they insist on making it mine. In fact, I buy more and more Indie games for this reason, even though I don't play them that much. I just like the fact that some still have the balls to offer their work DRM free to ensure a good experience for the paying customer.
- earbitscom 15y ago
  Yeah, I'm not a big gamer but it seems very similar. The simple fact is, a percentage of people will break the law and steal these things, and many of those people take pride in doing it when it's more difficult to accomplish. Meanwhile, the honest people just want to buy the product and enjoy it, and we're constantly penalized, even though the efforts of these initiatives rarely make a big impact on theft.
- benologist 15y ago
  Between Steam and iTunes (and equiv for Android) there's not much disk inserting and stuff to be done anymore. I will say some games are utter shite though with requiring internet - like C&C4 where the game is deliberately married to it and doesn't run without it.
- seabee 15y ago
  This is true when you buy retail, but I find it hard to begrudge Steam. I can buy a game and have it ready to play within the hour. And when I go to the parents' house, I can install the games I bought onto their computer. It's not without its issues, but at least Steam offers added value with its DRM; more than you can say for EA or Ubisoft.
  - pacemkr 15y ago
    I still play games I bought ten years ago. Can you definitively say that the same will be true for content you purchase using Steam? What about 20 years from now? The value of your purchase is now directly tied to the success of the company. In other words, their choice of using DRM is taking actual value away from you. Arguably, a pirate wont have these issues.
trotsky 15y ago
I think taking Mr. Robertson at face value about the industry demands and the purposes behind them is a mistake. We already have an Amazon service with no current legal action, and we'll soon have similar services from Apple and Google. The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end. Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them. The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.
- daeken 15y ago
  The ways he's thumbed his nose at the industry go well beyond my.mp3.com. I was employee #5 or 6 at MP3tunes (don't remember exactly), and saw it from the inception as an indie music store to an advanced locker service. One of the main things that led to me leaving the company was the AnywhereCD service, which -- while being a separate company in theory -- was built in early 2007. The concept was great: you buy a CD, and you immediately get the songs in your MP3tunes locker, along with the physical CD mailed to you. Everything was on track to be awesome; we signed Warner Music on for the initial launch, and all the tech worked brilliantly. Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly did not want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one. MR is far too clever for his own damn good.
gitarr 15y ago
Everybody knows the record companies will fade away. It's not because of piracy though. Two reasons that come to mind are that there are no more physical "records" needed, and, that the quality of the produced music went down the hill since the seventies. There are very few exceptions. What's played on radio and music-tv stations nowadays is just bad and bad music is pushed by the music execs to them. Lady Gaga, Kesha, all the hip hop bullshit, all the alternative crap, most rap, the black eyes peas (!!!) do I need to say more? That's not music, it's a show to make money, and nothing more. No way I, or anyone else interested in music would buy that. I am a musician, I even studied music, and I cannot find a radio station with proper music, I find some streams, the same way I cannot find a record label to produce my music, they say it would be "too unpopular", I find some live concerts though, which keeps me alive. There is no room for just good songs anymore, so there is no room for the record industry, who caused that.
- gigawatt 15y ago
  I think there is actually MORE good music now than there was in the past precisely because there is more music. For every Lady Gaga there is a Radiohead, for every Kesha there is a TV on the Radio, for every Black Eyed Pea(s) there is The Bad Plus. In the 70s, radio stations played Captain & Teneille. The mass market drivel has always been there, you just can't look to the radio for your musical discovery.
wordchute 15y ago
The recording industry's bigger problem has been that for the past twenty years or more, it seems to have gotten the idea that its consumer base consists almost entirely of twelve year old girls, and at the same time the bigger companies have been absorbing or destroying all the smaller labels that actually produce the innovative music that people want to hear and would willingly pay for. You know there's a problem when kids are saying that all the new music is garbage and listen to music that was made before their parents were born. That's not to say good music is not out there, it's just really hard to find sometimes. I have heard a few owners of small labels say that they actually welcome the emerging distribution models, and if some of the music is downloaded or whatever (within reason) then that's cool too. That means that they are reaching an audience that is increasingly hard to reach, and so have the potential to find revenue by less traditional means. So while the days of super-bands are probably over, small labels and bands can actually make a decent living now doing what they love to do - producing good music that people like. Consider this: most bands make their money through live performances and licensing. When you look at the total record sale for a band like the Rolling Stones versus their overall net worth, it becomes pretty apparent that, considering their percentage of the sales, they could not have made all their money by moving boxes full of vinyl, CDs or whatever. The same is true for just about every artist you've ever heard of. To the irritation of the big labels, though, these new models are quickly cutting out the guys in the middle who don't really care about the quality of the music. They don't seem to get the idea that if they made an effort to produce a product that people want, then (surprise) people will but it. Instead of putting a pile of money into five "artists" that suck, spread it out to smaller projects that collectively do well - like the small labels do it. I actually heard one of these boring suits discussing the downloading problem on a business program, and he said that if illegal downloading continued on its present course then they would no longer be able to finance all the mega-expensive music videos. All I can say to that is that we should all fire up BitTorrent and make it happen.

144 points by earbitscom 15y ago

> My iPod only holds 30GB of music, and I already have that much on there. So, every time I want to add a new album, I have to get rid of something else. I already chopped my music collection down to the 30GB limit in the first place. At this point, any new album I buy actually displaces an album I already know I love! That puts the price of discovery pretty high. While I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, he really has trouble picking which of the 16 days of music to take off? My iTunes is set up to automatically load the most played couple thousand songs (4-5 days of music or so), the most recently added songs, the most recently played couple hundred songs, and then more or less randomly pick from the rest. There are songs I haven't listened to in literally years, and I find it hard to imagine that I will, while driving or elsewhere away from my computer, suddenly want to start listening to them right this instant. Talk about first-world problems...

jbri 15y ago
I hate the term "first-world problems". It seems like every time it's used, it's in the manner of "I don't think this is an issue so I'll dismiss it by comparing it to starving children in Ethiopia". Corporations snooping on all your internet traffic? Talk about a first world problem. Internet passwords being stolen? That's a first-world problem if I every heard of one. Health insurance backrupting you if you actually need to use it? Puh-lease, just having health insurance means you've got it better than most other people in the world! Dismissing something as a "first-world problem" to imply that it shouldn't be worried about is intellectually dishonest.
- sp332 15y ago
  Agreed. I've usually heard it used by someone to deprecate their own problems, when they know they're whining about something that isn't really a big deal. https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblem https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblem
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  > I hate the term "first-world problems". It is not meant to be dismissive of arguments as much as self deprecating satire. Cheer up mate.
  - prawn 15y ago
    Agree. In my circles, it's never dismissive but always a brief "If that's a significant problem for you, you have it pretty good" distraction that the group laughs about before returning to the discussion.
- michael_dorfman 15y ago
  I think in this case, the term was justified, for the reason Louis CK illustrates in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk Here we've got someone who has a magical device not much bigger than a wristwatch that holds 16 days worth of music, and he's complaining that it's not enough. For comparison, I was in college when Sony released the first Walkman, and we thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread-- a device the size of a paperback book that allowed you to listen to 90 minutes worth of music while walking around. So, yeah: 30GB capacity on an iPod is a first-world problem, in my book.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
i like my months of music. i never know when ill come across some new song ive never heard, but have, and now love. and just because i havent listented to a song in years, doesnt mean i never want to hear it again. maybe i forgot about it. maybe once in a blue moon that old Blind Melon song comes on, and it just takes you BACK! Know what I mean?
noisebleed 15y ago
Some people have different use cases than you. Why do you think high-capacity portable music players are still made?
earbitscom 15y ago
This still doesn't change the fact that I have to plug my iPod in to get this setup (my iPod currently never leaves my car) and it still means some of my music is always inaccessible. Both of those things discourage me from buying new music.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nl 15y ago

From the music industry point of view, it's not about serving the customer, it's about extracting as much revenue as possible before the recorded music market collapses. See this 2009 article for their thinking: http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not-until-at-least-2011/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-bu...

earbitscom 15y ago
I used a quote from this article during our Demo Day pitch. The problem I have with these particular demands is, what if one of the companies the industry cripples and destroys was actually on track to breathe a little life back into the recording industry? I haven't bought this much new music in a long time and it feels awesome. What if they prohibit features that would cause a 10% increase in purchases because Amazon refuses to be strong armed into paying $30M to overcome legal technicalities? Amazon doesn't make nearly what the labels do off of the music, so $30M might be enough to stop them from doing something that drives $1B in growth for the labels. And all of this to stop people from stealing who are not buying anything no matter what you do. It's just bad business.
- nl 15y ago
  It's just bad business It's actually quite logical, if you agree with their assumptions: 1) The increased availability of digital music will lead to an increase in piracy, and 2) An increase in piracy will lead to less money being spent on recorded music. (Both those assumptions can be argued, but the music industry believes them to be true). Given that, the following argument is logical: 1) At some point in the future the money being spent on recorded music will decrease to a point where it is not a significant source of income. 2) The longer that point can be delayed, the more money can be made from recorded music in aggregate. 3) Anything that makes digital music inconvenient for the consumer will delay the collapse of buying recorded music because it will reduce uptake (!!) 4) Therefor, fight anything that makes digital music better/easier to use. 5) Meanwhile, try and develop new sources of income (360 deals, streaming licencing, game licences etc) From their point of view it's not bad business at all - it's the safest course of action.

inkaudio 15y ago

Majority of the people who pirate music are not going to use Amazon cloud drive to pirate music because: 1.) Amazon cloud drive does not offer music pirates any significant advantage over what they are currently using. 2.) People are already using alternatives for decades, it's hard to get people to switch. 3.) It would be easier for record labels to track down and take down infringers on Amazon cloud drive as oppose to other services. 4.) We've seen this before, it's called lala.com, and it did not become a hub for music pirates.

pacemkr 15y ago

I can't help but draw a parallel to computer games. I find myself buying computer games less and less for this exact reason. If I get the game off a torrent, I will have a better experience. Every time I sit down to play a game I actually purchased, I feel cheated: "insert the disk, connect to the internet, and jump through this hoop please." How about the $60 I just payed? Not proof enough? Piracy is the publishers problem; they insist on making it mine. In fact, I buy more and more Indie games for this reason, even though I don't play them that much. I just like the fact that some still have the balls to offer their work DRM free to ensure a good experience for the paying customer.

earbitscom 15y ago
Yeah, I'm not a big gamer but it seems very similar. The simple fact is, a percentage of people will break the law and steal these things, and many of those people take pride in doing it when it's more difficult to accomplish. Meanwhile, the honest people just want to buy the product and enjoy it, and we're constantly penalized, even though the efforts of these initiatives rarely make a big impact on theft.
benologist 15y ago
Between Steam and iTunes (and equiv for Android) there's not much disk inserting and stuff to be done anymore. I will say some games are utter shite though with requiring internet - like C&C4 where the game is deliberately married to it and doesn't run without it.
seabee 15y ago
This is true when you buy retail, but I find it hard to begrudge Steam. I can buy a game and have it ready to play within the hour. And when I go to the parents' house, I can install the games I bought onto their computer. It's not without its issues, but at least Steam offers added value with its DRM; more than you can say for EA or Ubisoft.
- pacemkr 15y ago
  I still play games I bought ten years ago. Can you definitively say that the same will be true for content you purchase using Steam? What about 20 years from now? The value of your purchase is now directly tied to the success of the company. In other words, their choice of using DRM is taking actual value away from you. Arguably, a pirate wont have these issues.

trotsky 15y ago

I think taking Mr. Robertson at face value about the industry demands and the purposes behind them is a mistake. We already have an Amazon service with no current legal action, and we'll soon have similar services from Apple and Google. The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end. Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them. The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.

daeken 15y ago
The ways he's thumbed his nose at the industry go well beyond my.mp3.com. I was employee #5 or 6 at MP3tunes (don't remember exactly), and saw it from the inception as an indie music store to an advanced locker service. One of the main things that led to me leaving the company was the AnywhereCD service, which -- while being a separate company in theory -- was built in early 2007. The concept was great: you buy a CD, and you immediately get the songs in your MP3tunes locker, along with the physical CD mailed to you. Everything was on track to be awesome; we signed Warner Music on for the initial launch, and all the tech worked brilliantly. Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly did not want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one. MR is far too clever for his own damn good.

gitarr 15y ago

Everybody knows the record companies will fade away. It's not because of piracy though. Two reasons that come to mind are that there are no more physical "records" needed, and, that the quality of the produced music went down the hill since the seventies. There are very few exceptions. What's played on radio and music-tv stations nowadays is just bad and bad music is pushed by the music execs to them. Lady Gaga, Kesha, all the hip hop bullshit, all the alternative crap, most rap, the black eyes peas (!!!) do I need to say more? That's not music, it's a show to make money, and nothing more. No way I, or anyone else interested in music would buy that. I am a musician, I even studied music, and I cannot find a radio station with proper music, I find some streams, the same way I cannot find a record label to produce my music, they say it would be "too unpopular", I find some live concerts though, which keeps me alive. There is no room for just good songs anymore, so there is no room for the record industry, who caused that.

gigawatt 15y ago
I think there is actually MORE good music now than there was in the past precisely because there is more music. For every Lady Gaga there is a Radiohead, for every Kesha there is a TV on the Radio, for every Black Eyed Pea(s) there is The Bad Plus. In the 70s, radio stations played Captain & Teneille. The mass market drivel has always been there, you just can't look to the radio for your musical discovery.

wordchute 15y ago

The recording industry's bigger problem has been that for the past twenty years or more, it seems to have gotten the idea that its consumer base consists almost entirely of twelve year old girls, and at the same time the bigger companies have been absorbing or destroying all the smaller labels that actually produce the innovative music that people want to hear and would willingly pay for. You know there's a problem when kids are saying that all the new music is garbage and listen to music that was made before their parents were born. That's not to say good music is not out there, it's just really hard to find sometimes. I have heard a few owners of small labels say that they actually welcome the emerging distribution models, and if some of the music is downloaded or whatever (within reason) then that's cool too. That means that they are reaching an audience that is increasingly hard to reach, and so have the potential to find revenue by less traditional means. So while the days of super-bands are probably over, small labels and bands can actually make a decent living now doing what they love to do - producing good music that people like. Consider this: most bands make their money through live performances and licensing. When you look at the total record sale for a band like the Rolling Stones versus their overall net worth, it becomes pretty apparent that, considering their percentage of the sales, they could not have made all their money by moving boxes full of vinyl, CDs or whatever. The same is true for just about every artist you've ever heard of. To the irritation of the big labels, though, these new models are quickly cutting out the guys in the middle who don't really care about the quality of the music. They don't seem to get the idea that if they made an effort to produce a product that people want, then (surprise) people will but it. Instead of putting a pile of money into five "artists" that suck, spread it out to smaller projects that collectively do well - like the small labels do it. I actually heard one of these boring suits discussing the downloading problem on a business program, and he said that if illegal downloading continued on its present course then they would no longer be able to finance all the mega-expensive music videos. All I can say to that is that we should all fire up BitTorrent and make it happen.