Rock star says piracy battle is lost Major record labels are still fighting the piracy battles of 1997 according to a leading rock musician and digital rights activist. Blur drummer Dave Rowntree told OUT-LAW that they should have realised in 1997 that their battle was already lost. "If you turn back the clock when all this stuff was still on the horizon, the key …
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Call me old fashioned but I like to have a high quality hard copy of my music.
If I then wish to have it in digital format, on WHATEVER player, I can make it so. This is my choice as I see it.
I have resisted since the beginning downloading any form of digital music as it is poorer audio quality and locked and into a format (which I may not want)
Transforming the file into another format results in even more loss of audio quality.
Cue yesterday, I am pressured into downloading 2 audio tracks by one of the children.
As I browse the store, again I fail to see the incentive @ £0.79 a track times the number of tracks on the average album 12 = £ 9.48.
I can buy CD's for less than this !
The music industry argument for the expense of CD's in this country has always been: costs, distribution, printing, cases and the actual CD blah blah blah.
Take most of these costs away and the price per track is more ?????
Hosting files must cost a fraction of distributing a CD.
What gives ?
As I proceed any (against my better judgment) I download the tracks from an unnamed but reputable site.
As I attempt to burn to CD (as this is the medium needed), I am told I am not allowed to do this.
WHY ?
I have paid for the music so therefore it is mine to listen to wherever and however I like.
I guess I will not be participating in this venture again in the near future
Another customer lost
I don't totally agree, but then again, it is in the record industry's interest to sell online. Sell an album for 15 euros with 15 songs, or sell online at 1 euro a shout... and not pay for distribution, creation, CD, printing... Internet was supposed to become a cash cow.
What is more, when CD's came out, I remember them being significantly more expensive than cassette-tapes, and those prices never came down, and that was even before people started to share files (as ADSL was not invented, and most people did not even have a modem or a computer).
Most consumer items have gone down in price, but music has gone up. File sharing is an excuse,but there is a direct cause-to-effect situation here: The more they charge, the more likely someone will look for a cheaper alternative. Sell an album for like 5-7 euros instead of 15-20, I believe that people will revert to buying with media, or sell online but for a much more reasonnable amount: 30-50 cents a track for example, though for 7 euros a CD, I'd think about buying an album. At 20, forget it.
And despite all of this, the record labels are still not making a loss... and dispite filesharing, I believe them to be making more than enough money as it is. If they were not, then they would have started to look at why they are making a loss and take action, rather than bitch and rant and go nowhere fast...
The article is totally right, DRM was definetly failed from the outset, basically there is no way to completely stop music from being copied, if it can be played, it can be copied - simple as!
DRM for me has been a massive pain in the arse, I am a DJ and producer, but my main home PC is Linux, Suddenly something as simple as buying tracks and burning them to CD becomes very difficult because of DRM - and im legitimately buying tracks.
And record industries wonder why people are turning to P2P software to get their tracks?
To be honest, i'd rather pick sites that dont use DRM, even for my own productions i'd never want them to go on a site that uses DRM.
Either way they are going to end up on Soulseek within a few weeks - its a fact of life?
The music industry is like any of the other industries that rather than accept that change in inevitable and embrace and support it, they stick with an old dogma and old way of working because it's good for them. These industries then use their large piles of cash to bribe the more corruptable government ministers to change the law to benefit their old way of working, nothing less.
This has happened many times before - the canal industry tried to prevent the train industry (fuel, emissions!, etc), the train industry tried to prevent the car industry (red flags ahead of drivers, safety issues, etc).
Now we have the music industry, too autocratic and stuck in their ways to see change happening as it did and too stupid and greedy to change to a different business model. As a result, they've been bribing corrupt government ministers (there's no other way to phrase this), changing laws and doing their level best to keep the status quo (sic) situation. It'll never work though, at some point non-encumbered music and antiquated licensing schemes will lose out to another scheme. Until then we have to suffer the fools suing customers, purposefly corrupting music CDs and all manner of insane laws to protect their "rights" over anybody elses.
Can't say I ever had much time for Blur and their ilk, being a big death-metal fan, but I'm afraid to say the guy has hit the nail on the head!
Personally I don't rip off music, liking the niche type of music I do it's hard to find it online anyway, so I have to buy CDs. Now I can grab few sample tracks direct from the artist's website, check the artist's forum to see what the fans think of the latest stuff, then using PayPal buy their latest CD at a price the artist determines is fair, without some greedy fat-cat label or record store owner adding on his 50% markup!
Sorry major's but as the man said, you should have paid attention, it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle!
I agree with yourself Daniel. If the record companies allows us to download DRM free music at a much lower cost than CDs. If I could get a high quality copy of an album I wish to download for a few (less than 5) pounds and be freely allowed to copy it to a CD, my MP3 player, my laptop and probably to a pen drive or two for backups and get this music very quickly (i.e. quicker than it takes to get through a checkout!) then there is no way I'd spend time searching through P2P networks for songs which can have varying quality and take varying amounts of time to find and dowload.
Of course there is the risk that once you allow this music to be as freely moved as I would like it then it will end up on the P2P networks. However if the music is so cheap and to get from an online shop then it will win. I believe this because it is clear from downloading on P2P networks that what you actually want to find is always surrounded in guff that isn't quite what you want or has a virus attached etc. Basically you'd be happy to pay for the guarantee of getting what you want safely.
"Can't say I ever had much time for Blur and their ilk..... but the guy has hit the nail on the head!"
Absolutely right, George. Like you, most of the music I listen to isn't handled by the majors and is often ignored by retailers as well. These days I only buy direct or via specialist outlets who get most of their stock direct from the artists.
The big record companies have always shafted their artists. Now they're trying to plook us as well.
Its time to wish them "Goodbye and good riddance".
This gravy train has finally ridden itself off the rails. Gone are the days where record companies find some gimp with a half a grain of talent, put him up as the world's greatest thing since sliced bread only for us to buy the CD for $20 and then find out he's singing one decent song and 8 more tracks that someone banged out on a cocktail napkin while patronizing the girls at Shaky's.
Hopefully, the next "gone" item will be the artist who actually has talent but gets squelched by record companies who don't want to deal with him because he insists on actually being paid for his music.
I say Bravo to those who have helped usher this new age of music in and I await the day where the record companies finally fall under the weight of their own ineptitude.
I think many here think the same thing: online music should be cheaper than buying the CD, and be DRM-free. DRM schemas have shafted the traditional Redbook audio standard, and sometimes I can't even play CD's I've bought!
I started buying from allOfmp3 because it met both criteria: cheap, and DRM free. And as someone else pointed, it guarantees it isn't virus or spyware loaded, like the crap you get from P2P services.
Anyway, P2P is only good these days for anime or porn.
Actually , the piracy war has only just begun , for now the major ISP's like A T & T have only just realized how much more money that can be easily to extracted from the internet user using p2p technology on high speed broadband , for streaming music , TV and movies thanks to Steve Job's and Itunes pioneering ways! , even after making mega bucks from all the dumb lazy mobile phone users seeking the latest fad mobile ring tone!
Currently their black op's in the IT department are dreaming up ways to strangle all competitors streaming using p2p across their network so that they can grab the larger slice of the pie!
So we ain't seen nothing yet as to how far the corporations will go! , to lift all the remaining cash out of your wallet or purse!
So who is pirating from whom , is the question? , given the fact that most of the average baby boomer music lovers must have paid at least three times already for the same piece of music!
My levels of sympathy are not oriented toward the recording industry given I was around when the first format change from vinyl to CD happened. The home taping world was something everyone did because cars didn't have record or CD players.
The industry now wants to cripple the stuff the consumer pays for, downplay all the costs of album cover art creation, printing, pressing and distribution, charge more than what you would pay for a hard CD and then cry poor on the back of massive profits. Why don't they join the movement and release back catalogue recordings of artists they have already made a fistful on (e.g. Jimi Hendrix) as a high quality MP3 disk for the cost of a normal CD album.
New releases should be done at a price point that extracts the former overhead costs (e.g. printing, artwork, distribution) otherwise people will either not take on new artists or will rip them off by other means.
A price war with the pirates is the best way to put them out of business. As long as the price is perceived as being extortion then the pirates will flourish. The unofficial music trade is a direct result of the industry gouging the consumer. If you bleed a source long enough it will die. The music industry is commiting suicide by its own hand.
Talk of p2p reminds me,
this is off topic but I was worried that maybe that new
security feature the no exec bit within the new intel processors
would also be used for DRM however as it turns
out for duo chips at least this is not true as the noexecute
bit only works for one core not both (strue I read it in the errata)
how useful at least one core is safe from overflow exploit or reverse
engineering . The company has no plans to fix the problem heh!
I'm fed up with the whole situation. I currently buy no music whatsoever. I did use allofmp3.com for a while, but gave up when that started looking dicey. It was nothing to do with cost - it was the freedom of choice of format and bitrate, lack of DRM, and their friendly, easy-to-navigate site. I haven't found anything else comparable.
The last CD I bought cam from the USA ... it was manufactured in the UK ... and yet it was still cheaper to buy from the USA than the UK, including carriage (twice over the Atlantic). Ridiculous ... Does anyone in the industry have any clue what they are doing?
On the DRM thing, I agree - it's ludicrous to alienate the honest, paying customers, ie. the only ones who get hit by DRM. It's the same with DVDs / VCDs - only the honest customer has to sit through all the piracy crap with no option to skip.
I agree with the bulk of what you've all said, but not all record labels are the same. Don't make the mistake of bundling the indie labels in with the majors, as most are trying to come up with a more sustainable and fair way to deal with the the crisis that the industry is in. And by doing a 50/50 deal with their artists (as opposed to the standard 80/20 that the majors offer), they're trying to do their best by artists AND consumers. After all, people who run small labels tend to be BIG music fans.
Prices are often controlled by the distributors more than the labels - it's in their interests to keep prices up since their cut is dictated by the published price to dealers. Record labels still see considerably less than 50% of the eventual retail price in the shops. And for digital distribution, bizarrely the cut back to the label is even less - I have yet to work this one out. eg. for a 79p download, the label can sometimes be cut back less than 5p.
to when artists had to work their way up to Number one and when you didn't have to listen to a song for months before its even released. Of course people are going end up downloading the track way before its released. They've brought it all on themselves.
Was it the Arctic Monkeys who finally got it by saying that the first people who will listen to their new album would be the fans first? if they did this more, maybe "earning your fame and fans" might bring back order to this chaos.
Who on earth is leading the record industry to believe that there really is a perfect way to provide music to end-users without a way to copy it? The whole thing is a giant and protracted exercise in rolling peanuts uphill with your nose.
If they invest millions of bucks and thousands of man-hours into making killer copy-protection, the Internet will simply invest an order of magnitude more in cracking them. The crackers are driven by love of the sport and the adulation of their peers, and they're smarter.
Ultimately, all these piddling 'security' system have done is create a market for everyone from (pre-sell-out) Napster to AllofMP3 - who wind up making the money the Industry is after. And when they manage, at great legal expense, to make life difficult for allofmp3, a clone opens up just down the street.
Who can be selling the industry the idea that they really can fight, rather than join? I think they should be kicked inna nads.
CD
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