Angry Birds boss: Piracy helps us 'get more business' Music industry chiefs must have been pleased to hear that the maker of pig-squishing iPhone game Angry Birds has learned from its mistakes in combating piracy. Contrasting the music industry's ignore-then-crush approach to piracy to his own softly-softly approach with Angry Birds, Rovio chief Mikael Hed told assembled music …
If you read the speech, he barely mentions software. It's all about the merch. What he calls "piracy that helps us" is people making Angry Birds T-shirts and hats and plush toys, turning themselves into walking Angry Birds billboards. And these are things where there's a genuine difference--in quality, in durability--between an Official Licensed Product and a cheap knockoff; meaning there's some reason to pay premium prices for Official etc.
"In my humble opinion the music industry is suffering because it has almost nothing substantial left to offer. They are churning out "pop stars", they are not producing musicians. Pop Stars with no apparent musical talent, their talent lies in their capacity to simply "produce" what the Music Company dictates."
Yup. The big problems of late:
1) Autotune. Used subtly, it's pretty unnoticeable. But that's not how it's used any more. Now, there's simply no concern if the artist can hit a note or not, they just crank up the autotune and let it warp the singers voice by an octave or so. This sounds downright bad,. (Note, I'm not counting songs where Autotune is *intentionally* cranked to make the singer sound like a robot., I don't like the sound of that either but that's a special effect)
2) Artist selection by computer. Yes, I read about this years ago, the main record labels throw their existing artists albums (and slaes figures) into a computer, then when they scout *new* bands they feed THAT music into the computer, and just pick out whoever the computer says will have highest sales based on it's model. And you wonder why so many bands sound so similar these days? 8-)
3) Irrelevancy. I've spoken with a few local bands. None had a dream of signing up with some big record company. Firstly, they knew the record co would screw them over. Secondly, they can put up and sell MP3s themselves, and get their own runs of CDs to sell too. Thirdly, in general when a band goes on tour the record co doesn't have anything to do with that either.
A thought for reflection: With AB you pay 99c (or whatever) for dozens of levels. With music, you pay the same for a 3min song. I'd say as a customer one gets a lot more for the buck from AB. Whic is why I was happy to buy it myself. If online music was sold at that rate, say 99c for an album, piracy probably wouldn't be a problem - and I guess people would download more. It's kinda similar for Adobe and other companies offering expensive software: Their way to protect their user base was to offer cheaper versions for, say, students. The studios have a lot to learn about online marketing yet.
I will shortly be releasing 'Angry Turds' on the Android Marketplace - only 59p.
It's a game where you use a catapult to fire different types of turd at record company execs , Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and SImon Cowell. Later upgrades will include more political figures and religious leaders.
Good to know Rovio won't come after me.
<<<< this is a joke.
I signed up for an account here just to tell you I had almost this exact same idea. A year or so back when Rovio said that an Angry Birds release for Windows Phone was going to take a long time because the platform was "harder to develop for" than iPhone/Android, I took them up on the challenge. It took me 20 hours to create the game (graphics, sound, physics, etc). I had every intention of releasing "Angry Turds" before Angry Birds could be released, but it turns out that making the levels themselves is the really difficult part and not wanting to spend hundreds of hours on levels outweighed my goal to show Rovio that their developers suck. I could have released it with just one level, but I wanted it to be polished so people would actually play it. Instead of angry media execs, the name "Angry Turds" came from my imagining angry developers at Rovio staring at some C# code and complaining "it's too hard!" to their bosses.
From passing knowledge of the games industry, having family who are game developers and various friends who work in the industry anecdotally this attitude is more common. Most of the games providers don't necessarily see a pirated copy as a lost sale.
Genuine (non pirates) by the console, and buy games, trade games and swap games. Pirates don't do that. In many cases the pirates wouldn't have bought the console if the games couldn't have been pirated. So there is no increase in sales, or decrease really its the same as it would have been.
By focusing on the paying customer, providing better service, better quality, addons for online play etc etc. The pirates get very little and are not much of a drain. The blockbuster games regularly outsell their film counterparts. As far as I can tell almost every console at some point has had its copy protection broken, with more consoles going online and pirate copies not working in multiplayer environments it all gets to be a crappy experience for the copyright infringer.
The music industry still thinks it can treat us mean and keep us kean. When in fact both the music and film industry have treated us mean, and been told to fuck off. The prevalence of those "don't pirate me" videos in the cinema seems to have dropped. HELLO - you're advertising to the paying consumer and treating us like criminals. More music providers are dropping DRM. Yet the big establish content publishers still don't get it. They are not losing money to pirates, they are losing it to the competition for not giving people what they want. Hopefully we'll see their complete demise soon. They are the dinosaurs, and the asteroid is coming.
They're not kidding about the unauthorized merchandise. We gave out Angry Birds lai si this year, bought from a store in tai kok tsui which also sells Angry Birds-emblazoned versions of just about everything you can possibly make out of plastic for less than $10. Pretty sure they haven't got an official license...:)
I know there are a lot of tight asses out there that want to promote the idea that piracy is ok but it's not. Sure piracy up until now hasn't really been a problem but if everyone takes a "piracy is awesome" attitude then where is the incentive to pay? Once the majoirty of your user base pirates then you're fucked.
Piracy is only ok when most people pay which you won't get if you just consider it aacceptable to pirate. Otherwise the shareware model wouldn't have died.
Piracy can help some but like anything else there is no one size fits all model so just because it worked for AB doesn't mean squat for others.
Had a go on a work colleague's phone, as I was idly curious as to the number of self-confessed AB addicts around me. Played it for about 5 minutes [if that!] before I got bored. Similar experience with FacePuke —setup an account to see what the addiction was and spent a few hours on there, spread over several weeks, before de-activating my account through the sheer fuckwitted idiocy of it all.
I think I should hire myself out as a marketing consultant. If I think your idea stinks, you've got a guaranteed winner on your hands!
"Grateful Dead - A band that went bankrupt and disappeared in the early 70's after they encouraged their fans to copy and swap recording of the bands work"
Rly?
As any Deadhead kno, they finally threw in the towel in 1995 after the death of their lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia.
They did indeed encourage their fans to record their music - setting aside areas at their concerts for that specific purpose. The result was that bootleg Dead albums became immediately worthless and commercially released albums continued to sell very well indeed. As did concert tickets which, given the fact that the band were legendary for their live playing (and thoroughly enjoyed playing live), meant that the band suffered financially not one jot from "piracy".
An interesting paradigm....
Would rather have 1000 customers paying £100 each than 1,000,000 customers paying £1 each. Some execs are realising that freely distributable digital content leads to much greater exposure and familiarity, naturally leading to greater market penetration and secondary revenue streams. Familiarity also gets some higher value products into the hands of up and coming professionals who will soon decide which solution they prefer (e.g. photoshop). Alternatively you can continually try and piss off your potential consumers until they go elsewhere...
"Piracy" should in many instances be looked on as an alternative marketing strategy - the cost saving in marketing alone is probably not to be sniffed at (compared to traditional methods of getting people to know about/familiar with your product)
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