Tag: music industry

War on the consumer: The DVD War

, , , , ,

Businessweek has
this article about the new DVD standards, which will come locked down with new, onerous Digital Rights Management restrictions. It’s a good overview of how new consumer electronica are being designed to basically protect big corporations from the consumers who buy them.

One point that the article really misses, though, is how DRM isn’t really aimed at pirates, despite all of the entertainment industry’s protests to the contrary. Instead, the only real purpose of this technology is to force you to pay multiple times for same content. Want to watch a movie on your TV? Great! Buy the DVD. Want to watch it on your iPod? Well, here you go, buy it at iTunes. Want that music you downloaded from iTunes as your phone’s ringtone? Cough up more dough. What’s that you say? Fair use? Well, according to the past head of the MPAA, it doesn’t exist.

On a brighter note, Ars Technica has a profile of some of the good guys in the music industry: Emusic. Emusic is a digital music subscription service with no strings attached. No DRM, no limited playlists, no nothing. Just high-quality MP3’s that are compatible with just about all of the digital music players out there. It is interesting to note that they chose to be DRM free not because of any idealism, but because of a sound business decision. They wanted the maximum possible customer base for their product, so they selected the format that is most universal. And they seem to be making money at it, too. I signed up a few months ago, and I have to say I’m a happy customer.

Memo to RIAA: It's not the “piracy” — your music sucks

, , , ,

For about five or six years now, I’ve been hearing the music industry folks piss and moan about how downloads are killing their profits. My usual response has been to observe that (a) while true that CD sales declined in 2001-2004, those were also years of general economic recesion and it was no surprise sales dropped (the music industry has been pretty quite about this since the CD market rebounded along with the economy in 2005); (b) if you put out an over-priced crappy product, the market will respond.

The problem is that most executives in the entertainment industry have enjoyed their monopoly status for so long that when the market finally responds, they get caught completely by surprise and usually enter a state of denial. (This is equally true for broadcasting and movies and cable, al of which have spent the last ten years or so busily consolidating and producing predictable products. Eventually, sales and ratings decline. And these guys are are surprised and looking for some regulatory fix they can plug to solve their “problem” — like broadcast flag or limits on satellite radio.) As a result, they don’t want to hear that they need to stop abusing their customers and work for a living.

A recent poll provides one more piece of evidence which I predict the music ndustry and their lap dogs in Congress will continue to blissfully ignore. A recent poll shows that most music fans don’t “steal music” and are very happy to pay for quality products — particularly things like downloading that really suit their needs. But music lovers are tired of being treated like trained seals expected to buy whatever the music industry offers at whatever price they chose to sell it in whatever format the music industry insists on providing.

Why this trend is so shocking in the music industry when we see it in a variety of other industries (have YOU driven a Ford lately? Probably not, because they offer crappy behemoth-class cars instead of better fuel efficient ones) I have no idea. I guess being a cartel gives you such a sense of security you forget about that whacky free market you’re always praising in Washington.

Stay tuned . . . .

The ongoing war on the consumer

, , , , ,

The entertainment industry continue to pursue what has to be labeled as an all out war on the consumer. We all know about the lawsuits filed by RIAA and the MPAA regarding alleged illegal downloading. Aside from the fact that any sane business model doesn’t include “suing your customers” as a major money making scheme, it seems that the RIAA lawsuits are simply a shakedown… pay us $7500 and we won’t sue you. Fortunately, some people are fighting back with the help of lawyers who realize the judicial system is being used like a bank robber’s gun.

But, of course, there’s another front in this war…

Continue reading

My Day With the Supremes

, , , ,

There are advantages to being a member of the Supreme Court Bar. One is, you get to go and hear the arguments from the Supreme Court Bar section. Guess what I did today! While you will get tons of info from other websites, this is probably the only place you will see someone say that Justice Rehnquist now sounds like a bad combination of Darth Vader and the Emperor from “Return of the Jedi”….

Continue reading