Posted on 01/12/2008 8:58:36 AM PST by george76
Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse.
IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits.
At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business.
But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI's focus group showed: that the record industry's main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected.
More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Hmm. Some of mine were bought in 1983 and they don’t have any damage like that. Maybe the guy storing them in a cabin for a year and a half was part of his problem.
No kidding! I used to use MusicMatch but I ended up not being able to play the songs I bought because of DRM issues. Then I tried Rhapsody. Same thing. Now I will only buy DRM-free MP3’s from Amazon.
Thank you! I’ll use Amazon so I don’t have to steal music. Are all files DRM-free?
Here’s what Bill Gates had to say about DRM issues (source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/bill-gates-on-the-future-of-drm/ )
Microsoft convened a small group of bloggers today at their Redmond headquarters to discuss the upcoming Mix Conference in Las Vegas. Highlights of the day included:
The receipt of a Zune as a gift (the third I’ve received from Microsoft - I now have all three colors)
Seeing the look on Gates’ face when he walked into the room and every single one of us had a Mac open on the desk in front of us - Niall Kennedy had also set up a makeshift wifi network using an Airport
An hour-long anything goes Q&A session with Gates
One of the questions that I asked was his opinion on the long term viability of DRM. I don’t hide the fact that I think DRM isn’t workable, and actively support DRM-free music alternatives such as eMusic and Amie Street. The rise of illegal or quasi-legal options like AllofMP3 and BitTorrent ensure that users have plenty of options when it comes to DRM-free digital music.
Gates didn’t get into what could replace DRM, but he did give some reasonably candid insights suggesting that he thinks DRM is as lame as the rest of us.
Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.
His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.”
He ended by saying “DRM is not where it should be, but you won’t get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don’t have it right with incentives or interoperability.”
These quotes are rough - I was typing fast but it was not an exact transcript. Still, it is interesting insight from a man who is in a position to shape the future of digital music models.
There’s lots of good coverage from other bloggers attending as well. See Steve Rubel, Molly Holzschlag, Ryan Stewart, Niall Kennedy and Liz Gannes. Todd Bishop also has a nice roundup.
What a nasty, worthless post.
Since I have about 15 shelf feet of vinyl ,roughly a hundred 8 tracks, maybe two hundred cassettes,a hundred CDs, some mp3s found on a secondhand computer,and a few dozen reel-to-reels of live performances I wonder what my classification is?
Either the statement about the CDs is a lie, or it was just a big pile of Neil Diamond crap.
Either way, the person who was there has made a statement making the EMI bosses look like morons.
As far as I can tell, yes. I have XM and, when I hear a song I like there, check to see if Amazon has it. So far they’ve had most of it. Mind you, I don’t listen to most current music...
You might want to try something else if your equipment can support it. A 256 Kb/s AAC would probably sound the same as that 320 MP3, and take a lot less space.
The EMI exec did not think to see if the cd’s were anything good.
Most of the time the “freebies” are dead end artists who did not sell in the first place.
Of course, that is wasted production and wasted shipping and wasted “cut money” for the parties along the way.
Under the internet model, no sale equals no major production loss.
it has to be yours on WHATEVER you have. So when laser optic storage hits the market there is no “must buy new format copy” bs.
Thanks, but my car stereo doesn't support them. It only "understands" MP3 and non-DR WMA.
I think that my next car stereo (which I hope I won't need for a long time) will support other formats, as well as having USB flash drive support.
Mark
Equipment support is the hardest part, especially if you have old equipment. I have the same problem in my car, so I have to convert to MP3 to make a disk for it (it’s a crap system anyway, so it doesn’t matter).
But it was pretty easy to find a relatively cheap AAC-compatible stereo for my van. Watch out, the idiots at Best Buy and Circuit City have no idea what they’re talking about. I said “AAC” and just got dumb stares. The light flickered a bit when I said “iTunes,” but they still didn’t get it.
I know what they do with the freebies. A few years back they got busted for price fixing or some such thing and part of the settlement was that they send thousands of free CDs to libraries. Any one library would receive something like 100 copies of "artist nobody cares about's greatest hits."
Bookmark for later...
Yeah, and I’m the guy listening to Uriah Heep while commuting each day.
ok I will pretend to be from rio linda, AAC?
I was shocked to find out they still sell VACUME TUBE amplifiers. (NEW not refubished)
Advanced Audio Coding. You may know the old MPEG1 and MPEG2 media standards (the latter used on DVDs), and MP3 is just the audio portion of these standards. Quite old-tech.
AAC is the audio portion of the newer MPEG4 standard, the video portion of which is used in the new high-definition video formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD. AAC delivers higher quality for the same file size (bit rate), can do twice the sample frequency (how many samples per second of the music), handles high-frequencies better (MP3 loses it at 16 KHz) and can hold more channels.
Right now the program most famous for using AAC is Apple’s iTunes because it’s set to AAC by default and the iTunes store sells only AAC files.
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