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Editorial by Gene Pitts
Owner and editor of the audiophile voice.
Heavy Duty Irony
The G-ds of music and industry must be laughing pretty hard. Just seems to me that it s a too big (and funny) an irony or coincidence to ignore, and I just can't understand why big belly-laughs aren't coming from everyone who cares about music and copyrights and audio gear and computers and getting one’s kids or grandmother sued by the Recording Industry Association or America (RIAA).
As you probably know very well, the RIAA is the record companies' Big-Deal trade association, one of the biggest and most influential such groups in the country, but did you know that their September filing of 261 laws suits included as targets a 12-year-old honors student and a 66-year-old woman who said she'd "never downloaded any songs"? At least, the RIAA had the smarts to "warn" the next 204 before the trade group sued them this month. Naw, can't laugh about that. But talk about shooting yourself in the foot, this technique seems to me as poor a business strategy as Metallica suing Napster to get the group's downloaders, back when, because the fans had traded songs among themselves via Napster. I mean, those fans who got chased off Napster aren't going to be Metallica fans any more, and the band ought to have been trying to hire them as “downloading consultants.” Co-opt them, don't kill them. Besides, that’s a list to do promotion with, not of cops right infringers.
Hadn't the Grey Suits learned anything from the Grateful Dead's relations with the Dead Heads, who are allowed to make recordings during concerts? And then, to make matters even stranger, BMG bought most all of Napster, but the purchase made the guys who engineered that strategy literal outcasts within BMG, that is they were shown the short way to the door out. And, then, perhaps a year later, BMG was sued by Universal, apparently for something like "aiding and abetting," that is for having bought Napster. It was as if I were in the middle of a Salem witch trial, and the mere mention of "Napster" could get me burned at the stake.
Yet, the consumer has had the ability to copy commercial recordings in the privacy of his own home ever since Edison started selling his cylinder machines. And that, friends, is well over 100 years ago, and so, you might ask, what took them so long to get around to suing their customers for the alleged misuse of copyrighted materials? Indeed, a good lawyer might ask a court why, if this is such an important issue to the record companies, did they wait for more than a century to attempt to stop this practice? Or is it just lately that the grass is green enough on the Computer Side of the Fence, that the RIAA has to go graze there?
Well, at one point, I thought they simply objected to consumers having recordings of such quality in their "grubby unwashed" hands, that the Grey Suits thought that the hoi palloi ought not be allowed to base recordings as good as the ones the record company guys routinely had. And then, I realized that, indeed, they really are that blind-greedy, that they really can’t understand that their sales are falling because the’, raised prices too much too quickly, and that sales are also falling because there is so little good music on the CD. And this is not to mention the fact that there are scarcely any singles out there these days, nothing like the 45 for the pre-teen.
Music is an impulse buy and sales are NOT inflexible with price. Buyers don’t want to have to wait to get their music fix; if there were some way I could just punch a button on my digital satellite radio, and then I'd accumulated an hour, at say 79 cents per, base the download delivered, zipped, to my burner, well, then I would subscribe, and I would pay extra for that service. Impulse buy!
And as far as the packaged goods' idea of "inflexible with price" goes, Universal at least has reduced its list prices. We’ll see if it has the desired result, but that seeing is going to take a while.
So, Pitts, why are you laughing? Because while I'd thought that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act had enough skim in it to keep the record companies happy until the figured out a Digital Millennium Download Business Plan, the company that finally did figure it out was the Little Computer Company That Could. Right, Apple and the iPod (now, if that doesn't sound like a rock group....)
Think I’m just blowing smoke? Apple has sold 13 million songs since last April and thinks it will do 100 million during their on-line stores’ first year. And so far, that's just in the minority Mac format, with the PC format just has to come "online" (sorry for that pun, but you know how editors are). And then there’s the 1.4 million Pods they've sold since March 2002, and the new alliance with AOL, and the promotional deal with PepsiCo., with celebrity-flashes by director Francis Ford Coppola, Mickey Hart of the Dead, Mick Jagger, Dr. Dre, and Sarah McLachlin.
So, Pitts, why are you laughing? Because wouldn't it be all too funny if one of the computer companies, say Apple, wound up selling more music than a "Pure Record Company"? Wouldn't it be all too funny if it took a computer firm, say Apple, to show the record companies how to make a business plan for the Digital Music Age? Wouldn't be all too ironic if Tin Pan Alley morph-ed into Silicon Valley. if Apple started signing artists? Laugh all the way to the bank, Apple would.
