The Music Industry is Anti-Innovation
I’ve been following the “Big Four vs Eircom” story today and getting very annoyed over the whole thing. Coincidentally, this month the MP3 Player is 10 years old, and 10 years ago the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tried to ban the sale of the first mass-market MP3 player (Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300). Diamond countersued, and won, claiming that the RIAA’s actions were an attempt to impede the growth of a market (digital music), which it didn’t control.
Rumour has it that in the late 90’s Sony were in the process of developing a hard drive based MP3 player, but pressure from Sony Records (members of the RIAA, and were obviously anti-MP3) meant the project was shut down. Then Apple came along in 2001, launching the iPod, thus reaping the oh-so-many benefits.
Clearly the music industry bosses are just bitter.
They can’t keep up with the market and they certainly can’t control illegal downloading. There is no technical solution to filtering and banning peer-to-peer file transfers and Eircom can’t and won’t do it. There’s no point in trying to control the digital music black market, it will always exist and always HAS existed. What the music industry needs to start doing is offering consumers better value for money and incentives to start buying CDs again.
I mean, for god’s sake, they’ve had the last 10 years to think about it.
Over the last few years I’ve seen some fairly awful attempts to engage the consumer for example: full albums available on 64mb SD or MiniSD cards, access to secret sections of an artist’s website only if you purchase the CD, “bonus” DVDs that are really just teasers/trailers, etc.
I honestly don’t understand why I can’t just walk into HMV and connect my MP3 player via USB and pay to instantly download a full album that comes with a nice little book full of lyrics and artwork. I like lyrics and artwork. Yet, so many bands neglect to include lyrics in the album sleeves. So, why would I bother buying the CD if it doesn’t offer me anything extra, except for being another plastic dust collector on my shelf?
March 13th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I have a whole box full of CD boxes and sleeves if you want them for the pictures and lyrics.
This won’t change until people stop purchasing from HMV at €24.99 a CD. Until those prices come down it will continue and the black market will get bigger and bigger.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I absolutely agree with you. C.D prices are totally outlandish, one of the very many reasons that I only seem to be buying Irish music C.Ds lately - if the smaller labels can live with charging €10 cheaper for a C.D, why can’t the bigger ones too?