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January 14, 2008EMI spends $50 million a year destroying CDs..but is waking up
Marc Andreesssen points to today's FT and says: "EMI, the big music company, spends 25 million pounds a year "to scrap unsold CDs... "To destroy unsold physical inventory in a world of ubiquitous digital distribution. "Oh my." I agree. It's stupid, stupid, stupid to spend money destroying CDs (because no one wants to buy them), then turn around and sue down-loaders (because you can't bring yourself to accept a digital world). But the Financial Times article is a far more interesting read. Guy Hands, the Terra Firma buyout guy who will be leading EMI, is quoted: He identifies three characteristics of today's music business: "The industry is based still on the phenomenon of the 1990s and the CD. It is based on the belief that if you have hits you'll make sufficient money to cover everything else. "It's based on the belief [that] if you have conglomerates of labels they can benefit from economies of scale through manufacturing and distribution sufficiently to make enough money. "It is based on the belief that individuals who know a particular type of music in a multicultural and multi-demographic society can push a product to the consumer. "All three of those, in my view, are complete fallacies," declares Mr Hands, who first studied a bid for EMI in 1995 when he left Goldman Sachs to join Nomura (spun off in 2002 to form Terra Firma). At times Mr Hands sounds despairing: "Can you imagine what would happen if most consumer industries over-shipped by 20 per cent? Can you imagine any consumer industry having 10 per cent of employees as middle management? Can you imagine only 6 per cent of staff in production?" The record business - in which 85 per cent of artists are lossmaking and EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs - "is stuck with a model designed for a world that has changed and gone forever", he says. His solution is to switch from pushing CDs to pulling consumers towards music in different forms. One element will be focus groups. "People say the music industry is more creative and the customer doesn't know, only the creatives do. "When you look at which car companies are succeeding it's the ones which work with their customers. Are clothes not creative? Is fashion not creative? Is food not creative? The only real difference is these industries have learnt to work with the customer and not force-feed them," he argues. Surprisingly, he says that Radiohead, the band that ditched EMI last year to launch their latest album online, made the right choice. "Radiohead had the right idea. They understand their fans. They realise some of them want the premium box set. I'm one who bought one, and paid the full price. What Radiohead showed the industry was that it isn't one answer for all artists or indeed for every customer." If it takes investment bankers buying out record companies to get them to wake up to the 21st century, then bring them on! Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:08pm in Corporate Management, Music, Online Media | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) May 03, 2007Pandora locks out European listeners. RIAA wins, artists and listeners lose
Another "victory" for the intellectual property fascists. I've bought at least 20 CDs, or iTunes CDs, in the last nine months because of what I've heard on Pandora. No more, though. Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora's streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S. It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows. We show your IP address is '62.xx.xxx.xxx, which indicates you are listening from Denmark. If you believe you are seeing this by mistake, we offer our sincere apologies and ask that you please reply to this email. Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play. I guess my problem is that I don't buy Madonna or Shakira. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:48am in Intellectual Property, Music, Online Media | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) February 23, 2006Thai take-out can be a revolutionary experience, comrades
So last night I was at the local Thai place for take-out. I hadn't called in advance, so I had to wait. I didn't mind; they have a sort of open kitchen, and I like to watch cooks work. But the window is cut in such a way that you can only see the cooks from the neck down. Now, most Thai restaurants have some sort of soundtrack of traditional Thai tunes going, but this one doesn't. I didn't notice that until I realized that a tune was picking its way into my brain. At first I thought it was a brain-song... you know, one of those songs you can't shake out of your head, but then I realized this wasn't in my head, but coming from the kitchen. It was a cook whistling. Whistling the Internationale (.mp3), of all songs I never thought I would hear whistled in the 21st century, but there you are. And he was very good, carrying through a couple of verses before he had to stop and talk to another chef. Well, as soon as he got done chatting, he's off again. This time, I swear, it was La Marseillaise. And I mean spirited, I mean spirited-like-in-the-bar-scene-in-Casablanca spirited.When Madeleine LeBeau sobers up and stands at attention with tears in her eyes as she belts it out. About that time, they delivered up my order, so I didn't get to find out what he was going to pull next from the Revolutionary Songbag. I have no idea what motivated it. I don't know if it was a subtle message to management. All power to the workers. And it was pretty good pad thai, too. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:02pm in Bizarre & Amusing, Bizarre & Unexpected, Food, Music | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) November 15, 2005Sony faces another class action
While still clueless, Sony has enough money to fend off lots of lawsuits. Still, it's nice to see lawyers lining up to do what they do best. Here's a snippet from Brian Krebs' post from WaPo: Sony BMG is facing yet another class-action lawsuit stemming from the controversy over its anti-piracy software, this time from a New York attorney who filed a federal case that could potentially include consumers in all 50 states. Krebs links to filings for both the California and the New York suits (PDFs).
Technorati tags: Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:56am in Business, Intellectual Property, Is Tedious in the House?, Marketing, Music | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0) November 11, 2005Doctorow rips into Sony's EULA; Symantec finds Sony worm vulnerability...
Update 13 November 2005: Eric Eggertson is following this outrage pretty closely... I'd quote some of his stuff, but I would swear violently, and I don't like to do that on Sundays. Just go read. Is Sony Music winning this week's Bacon's Information Cluelessness Award? It would appear so. Cory Doctorow uses his bully BoingBoing pulpit to tear apart Sony Music's EULA. Sony's EULA is worse than their rootkit
1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all
your music from your laptop when you get home. That's because the EULA
says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer
possess the original CD.
2. You can't keep your music on any computers at work.
The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a "personal home
computer system owned by you."
3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete
all your music. The EULA specifically forbids "export" outside the
country where you reside.... There's plenty more. Still considering buying Sony CDs. Then ponder this from today's Boston Globe: Computer Worm Exploits Software on Sony's CDs People who bought music CDs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment may have exposed themselves to a dangerous new computer worm. Symantec Corp.,
the leading maker of antivirus software, said the worm has infected
computers that played Sony BMG recordings. Two other antivirus firms,
BitDefender Labs and Sophos PLC, also issued warnings yesterday. The
Sony BMG disks install software that is supposed to prevent the user
from making illicit copies of the music and distributing them over the
Internet. But the anticopying software conceals itself so that the
computer user can't easily remove it. Now someone has written a
''Trojan horse" program that exploits this feature of the Sony BMG
software. The program, which is spread through spam e-mails, uses the
Sony BMG code to hide itself. Then the Trojan horse uses the Internet
to contact its creators for further instructions. Eggertson calls for a Sony boycott: It will be a cold day in hell before I buy anything from Sony. I don't
actually care if they are being scapegoated by bloggers and others.
They deserve every bit of damage to their brand that they suffer. Parmet asks: Why do companies act this way? And what makes them think that in the long run they can get away with it? To which I can add only: Any company promoting Shakira, Ricky Martin, and Destiny's Child deserves an exclusive circle of hell.
Technorati tags: Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:15am in Business, Intellectual Property, Is Tedious in the House?, Management, Marketing, Music | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (1) September 12, 2005Sad Days for the Blues: Gatemouth Brown and R. L. Burnside Hang It Up For Good
We blues fans are having a bad month. Not only is one of the great blues cities devastated. Today comes news of the death of Gatemouth Brown, one of the truly great ones. I heard him a few years ago and was entranced because his music was such a sweet mashup of blues, country-blues, blues-rock, country-rock. He might as well as hung a sign over the stage: Abandon hope, sniveling purists! Brown escaped New Orleans just before the storm. Dying of cancer, learning that his house and all of his career memorabilia were destroyed, he gave up the ghost. That was bad enough. Then I open an email from friend Tom giving me his review of the Bull Durham Blues Festival, in which he obliquely mentions that R. L. Burnside has died. Technorati tags: gatemouth
rlburnside
blues
Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:30am in Music, People of Note, South | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) |
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