The Failure Of The Music Industry9:01 Jun 22nd, 2009 | 1 note
The case of Jammie Thomas has been bouncing around the news for a while now. With a jury finally deciding to convict her of illegally downloading 24 songs, I feel now is the time to have a huge rant about the whole ordeal. Jammie Thomas is not unique. Music piracy is rife, particularly in my generation who have grown up with the idea of data on a computer not physically costing anything. The problem being, to the record industry, this data costs upwards of AUS$1.69 per unit. It is a fair assumption to make that every student in the NSW high school system with access to a computer has at some point downloaded music illegally. To me, the idea of fining Jammie Thomas AUS$2.4 million is just a sign of how low the RIAA can go in order to preserve their archaic business model. The RIAA don’t choose to fix the piracy problem as a whole, nor do they adapt to the changing attitudes of their market (who find piracy fun and easy). Instead, they choose to sue the living daylights out of one person in a vain attempt to scare people out of downloading music illegally. This pathetic attempt to protect their revenue ignores three vital factors. One, the music industry wants people to buy music, yet they continue to raise prices of songs on Amazon and iTunes. Two, they continue to ignore the willingness of my generation to download music illegally regardless of the consequences. Three, we’re in the middle of a recession, no one has money to buy music with. And let’s think of music piracy as a concept. Those who pirate music were never going to buy those songs anyway. If people genuenly like an artist, they will generally pay for their music. If they are unsure about an artist, why would they pay to gamble on their musical taste? There is no way the music industry can prove that pirated songs means a loss in revenue. They can’t prove that Jammie Thomas would have bought those songs if she could have her time over and they can’t prove 24 songs results in AUS$2.4 million in lost revenue. Applying the policy of suing individuals for AUS$100,000 a song is not only totally disproportionate and an irrisponsible use of power, but is a cowardly and lazy attempt at protecting their copyright. Suing people is the easy option. Changing a long standing business model is hard. If the music industry is serious about the future of their industry, they need to wake up and realize that music piracy will only get faster, easier and is here to stay. If they continue on their way, throwing their weight around in an attempt to solve their problems, they will inevitably end up digging a deeper hole from which to pull themselves out of. With that, I suggest that they should completely change their revenue model to reflect this. Stop charging for music and make it free because honestly, it wasn’t the biggest money maker for you anyway. Make music free to download and put your resources into concerts and merchandise, where the real money lies. Use music downloads as a promotional tool to promote artists and their concerts. The more people who have access to your music, the more will come to like it, the more who will become fans and the more who will pay $200 to go to a concert. In the past, people had something to show for paying $20 for an album. They had a physical CD in their hands. Today, $20 gets you something completely invisible to the naked eye. The progression of technology is destroying the traditional revenue stream of the music industry, but it can also bring about a new one. Apple <3 Twitter10:01 May 1st, 2009 | NotesApple loves making these business profiles about companies that use their products. Recently, this one appeared! That’s right, Twitter!! I love that Twitter use Macs, maybe that’s why I’m so addicted to Twitter. They have a link to Apple! Anyways, click on the link to see the full thing! Is Twitter Becoming too Commercialized?9:34 Apr 24th, 2009 | 1 note
This is one of the hot question of the year I’m discovering. It seams that everyone thinks that Twitter is being overrun with business, PR people, personal aids and only a handful of celebrities who personally use twitter themselves. For me, the answer to this question is no. Twitter is perfect for my needs and has actually surprised me with the ways I find myself using it. Quite a few of my close friends are on Twitter, which is the first reason why I still like Twitter. Without my daily dose of @brokentapedeck (who now has a blog!), @JK__, @ash_wii and @dominicmay (to name a few), Twitter would have lost its appeal for me years ago. Come to think of it, in the early days of Twitter, before anyone had heard of it and no one I knew was using it, Twitter didn’t appeal to me. I was another one of the people who didn’t ‘get’ Twitter. I didn’t know what it was for or why anyone would use it. Then my friends started joining and it instantly became an addiction. Recently, Twitter has surprised me greatly. Yes, businesses have joined. But for me, this has been a fantastic thing. I’ve been contacted by both Telstra and Disqus after twittering problems I’ve had with their products (although the Disqus folks were substantially more helpful than Telstra’s). Twitter is becoming a customer support platform where businesses have to proactively help their customers unless they want them to air their problems for everyone to see. Personally, I don’t think anyone can claim Twitter is too commercialized. Twitter is what you want it to be! No body forces you to follow Britney or other PR twitterers. If you don’t like the commercial people on twitter, don’t follow them! Cut yourself off from them, create your own walled garden, protest against the ‘man’ and make your statement in the only way you productively can; click ‘unfollow’. Twitter has truly become a service where it becomes what you make it. So how can you say it’s becoming commercialized when you have to power to create your own experience? You can’t. Besides, if you think it is commercialized now, just wait until twitter puts it’s business model into action. |
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