slotMusic

First off, after something approaching a week of “update on a Wednesday” policy I’ve decided to push the boat out and start posting on Saturdays too. Also, the Month with Linux preperation continues apace, Ubuntu has emerged as the distro of choice and the Intrepid Ibex (otherwise known as Ubuntu 8.10)  awaits deployment. Stay tuned for the February first start date. And on to your regular scheduled blog...

Sometimes, important stuff slips under my radar. In spite of generally priding myself on being up to date with tech news as it becomes available, I do sometimes miss things. One of those things happened in September, and by sheer dumb luck I stumbled upon it the other day.

Some of you may have heard about this, something called slotMusic (for those who missed it, the story is available at tinyurl.com/8k5uop). I wasn’t actually at the meeting where this new format was conceived, but I can only assume at what happened was that someone decided that if consumers could have CDs only smaller, without the artwork and worse quality, they’d bite. There are 44 comments on that article, and every one that isn’t moaning about piracy is pointing out the blindingly obvious stupidity inherent in this whole concept. This was never a format that was going to take off.

Now I sympathise with the music industry, I do. I appreciate that it must be hard to go from being a source of music everyone adores to being an industry so hated that even otherwise decent people are willing to pirate (not steal*) your products. It’s pretty clear why it’s happened though, and I’m not convinces it’s all really worth repeating here. Perhaps just a quick recap? Okay:

Conveyer belt talent, manufactured talent, unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to try new things, unwillingness to accept new things, unwillingness to view their customers as anything but parasites, suing their customers, inability to realise why their business is failing, complete lack of perspective. And probably some other stuff.

So what I want to do is set down exactly what needs to be done, including things that anyone with half a brain can see to be self-evident. This is, if you like a cut-out and keep guide to the music industry. Unfortunately for them, the first thing that needs to go is them.

A semi-recent article in Rolling Stone Magazine (and by that I mean 2004 - tinyurl.com/3yzvky) shows that on a $15.99 CD the Label and Publisher take $5.43. The artist gets (and a drum roll wouldn’t be inappropriate here) $1.60. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that making music costs money. There does need to be some level of reward for those who find and nurture talent but, and this is important, a) the internet now makes people who “find talent” a little redundant, and b) there’s something wrong when the label makes $1.70 profit per CD and the artist’s total royalties amount to $1.60.

So how better to do it? Well, for a start, let’s get a bit more for our money. I still like CDs, I do, but right now they simply don’t represent value for money much of the time. How about instead of a CD we get a CD and DVD – standard music CD, then a DVD with a higher quality version of the songs (for those who are into that sort of thing) and then various extras – interviews with the band, how long would they take to throw together? I could do it in a couple of hours, couldn’t add noticeably to the cost of the finished product, but they do add noticeably to the perceived value, as well as very strongly differentiating them from downloads.

Speaking of downloads, I must say I feel a little cheated here. Napster was released way back in 1999 (that’s almost a decade ago, remember). There still isn’t an equivalent legal service. You might say “iTunes!” to which I would reply “They charge extra for unprotected songs, and are an absolute nightmare to... actually hang on a sec, that first point is more than enough. I’ve paid for it, why should you get to say what I do with it?”. All the other stores around either suffer from a piss-poor interface, limited range, ridiculous restrictions or unrealistic pricing. I mean, for product with no unit- costs, 99c suddenly isn’t so cheap. And that’s not to mention the fact that there’s geographic restrictions on most of those services so (for example) I can’t purchase music online from amazon or play.

I could carry on further. I could go back to the start of this thing and point out all the reasons why slotMusic was doomed before it began. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll leave with heart-felt plea to all those horribly out-of-touch music executives out there: if you want your industry to survive, get your heads together now and say “we’re floundering, we need to have all the music in the world on one site (or preferably loads of sites) and we need to do it soon” . Or don’t. The world will hardly miss the middle-men of music, will we?

 

*Piracy is not stealing, because stealing implies that something is taken from someone and that that person no longer has that item. While it is certainly a crime, it is not now, nor ever will be, equivalent to theft. And I’ll take no arguments on that either.