As audiophiles, we generally deplore the restrictions that the music business is trying to impose on new formats and equipment, such as watermarking and restricting digital outputs. But does the recording industry have a leg to stand on with their suspicion that we all might be potential pirates?
COMMENTS
What happened when the movie industry was bashing video tapes? They didn't understand (or forgot) that most people buy for the best value(quality+price+varity, etc). And they ended up making more money (and movies). More music = more sales = more profit. Give the customer a better mousetrap/value and they will beat a path to your door.
I buy my music. Why? Because for the most part, anything I rip, mix, and burn myself is of such inferior audio quality that I would rather just spend the money. I say this with some authority, being a computer tech for the last 20 years. Give me an XRCD any old day.
Yes, we are all POTENTIAL PIRATES! How could we dispute that coming from the biggest bunch of thieves. These thieves have been price-fixing the retail price of CDs worldwide. This new technology they are so mortally afraid of will bring them to heel and perhaps force some integrity back into the business. Is it not surprising that everything these days seems to be comodity driven with a few exceptions such as CDs and high end audio? Where do they get off with such outrageous retail pricing on CDs? I suggest to you that $9.99 should be the extreme maximum retail on a CD. All of this new SACD/DVD-A and software is about GREED. However, we the consumers still control the largest weapon, which is to say, our wallets, and we should not hesitate in using it.
Of course they're right. The advent of CD recorders means that CDs can be copied and sold or given away. The record companies spend money to publish music. They expect (and deserve) a return on the investment. Otherwise they will have no incentive to be in the business. When records were the only choice, the likelihood of piracy was much more remote. You're not a paranoid if they really ARE out to get you!
Make a good product at a good price and people will buy it. I know there are bootleggers and people willing to steal the music, but the majority are honest, and will gladly pay a decent price for the product. And they will pay for MP3 too. The recording industry is leaving a ton of money on the table while worrying about the bootleggers. Honest folks are getting fed up. We want the music in a open format, unwatermarked, at a decent price. We are getting real tired of waiting. I went back to analog. Screw 'em! There are tons of used vinyl at a good price just waiting to be heard. And it sounds better than just about anything new out there. Sad, but true.
The recording industry seems to be managed by too many lawyers, too many brain dead marketing people, too many accountants, too few entrepreneurs, too few artists, and too few risk lovers. It does not seem like any of the big players in the industry has any expansive visions on how to develop their business. New business models, value added to the customer etc. for these people seems to be just like another street name in Timbuktu.
I believe that artists and the companies who promote them should be fairly compensated for their work. But when companies own the rights to all artists in perpetuity, enough is enough. I don't buy pirated products, and I don't know anyone who does. Leave my discs and machines the hell alone!
they (the recording industry) have lived through reel to reel recorders, cassette decks, cd burners, and cd recorders and are still ripping off the music buying public and recording artists alike,and have billions of dollars in profits to show for it. they should be concentrating their time on producing better quality product. maybe if they lowered prices to a reasonable level more people would buy their stuff. somehow, the recording industry and the quality gear manufacturers should get together to promote each other.good music is more enjoyable on good equipment.
Professional music pirating won't be slowed one bit by watermarking or any other protection scheme. The relatively few people that "steal" an entire CD of music won't make any discernable dent in music industry profits. Produce great music, and people will happily buy the original disc in all formats. Fear and greed on the part of the music giants only creates the future that they are afraid will come crashing down on them.
Everyone knows that pirated software is inferior to the legal copy. The industry would be better off making people aware of, and more importantly to us as audiophiles, more appreciative of better quality software. People are willing to sette for poor quality bootlegs to get rare or live recordings of their favorite artists. I think it was Pearl Jam who realized this, and combated it with recordings of their live shows straight from the mixing board. The arguments for and against MP3 are almost the same. Most people do not have ISDN or T1 connections to the net, so the must leave their computers on all night to download music. Yes, there are those who do this to rip mixes for themselves, there are those who use this medium to explore new artists and expand their horizions. Again, to do this they endure poor quality and the hassle of long download times. If the recording and movie industries would look at these issues from this perspective, our discussions about this topic would be very different.
1. The recording industry has failed to provide the answer to a question that many free file sharing sites have easily answered. 2. The current price of compact discs is absurd. The cost of manufacturing a disc has fallen tremendously while CD prices have not. 3. The record companies should settle for a small piece of the future before they lose even more. Compression technologies and bandwidth will only increase, furthering the use of file sharing. 4. At this point, audiophiles clearly should not be targets of the recording industry because most are willing and, more importantly, finding it necessary to purchase "factory-produced" discs to acquire the highest level of recording quality (even if that quality is often still rather poor).
I have no faith in the big labels to do what's right for anyone except themselves. The greed factor runs so deep with these people that there can be little trust. Look at the outrageous prices that they try to get for recorded music and the devious ways they try to continue to sell you the same product over and over. If it's not a new remastering of something you already have it's a new format like SACD or DVD-A, hoping you will replace your collection, again. Hell, they are even known for cheating their own recording artists. How can there be trust or confidence that they'll to do what's good for our hobby? If they could have it their way, you'd pay every time you heard a song, and they'd want the money up front. SCREW 'EM!!!
Recording CDs illegally doesn't kill our heroes, it only gets rid off the record companies who have been stealing/ripping off people for years. Singers won't lose any money at all, the only way to keep their income will be to do more concerts, which is much better for everyone!!
The number of dishonest people is certainly not 100%, so they are wrong in thinking that we all might be potential pirates. The recording industry goes out of its way to "lie" about the $$ value of illegal product. Every time a major bootlegger is caught the RIAA just multiplies the number of confiscated discs by a $ value. They conveniently forget that a good portion (sometimes most) of the confiscated discs consist of material that is not avalable for legal purchase. A person buying a bootleg CD of Beatles studio outtakes, for instance, is stealing intellectual property, but is not taking any money out of the record company's hands. If the record company chooses not to release a recording, they can't claim loss of income because somebody bought a bootleg. Also, the bootleg buyer is not spending money on bootlegs instead of buying the lastest Faith Hill or Britney Spears CD, so the record companies can't clain that as a loss of $$ either.
Of course the recording industry has a right to protect their property, but as consumers we also have a right to chose what products we buy. If a product is too restrictive then people simply won't purchase it. This happens every day in the software industry, programs with overly complicated licensing are generally passed up for similar software with easier licensing. In the end we are all pirates in some way, we have all downloaded from Napster or copied a cd, but more importantly for the music industry we are all consumers we love to buy things so long as those things make us happy, and don't make our lives more complicated. Remember DIVX.
The Internet has changed all the rules. Digital data is too easy to copy and distribute. Previous recording formats were never really a threat since you had to know at least one person with the original hard copy to make an illegal copy for yourself. Napster shows us that digital copies distributed over computers are so easy to obtain and close enough for most people in terms of quality, that it represents a measureable threat. Hardware manufacturers are even catering to this by making portable MP3 players, which is a product that wouldn't exist without a large volume of illegally copied music out there (we all know that practically nobody is paying for MP3 downloads). I don't like the paranoia, but I feel that it is mostly justified.
Recall that the music industry was no fan of the audio cassette until they turned it into a profitable pre-recorded format, priced to compete with do-it-yourself dubs (and remember how VHS blanks were supposed to turn Hollywood into a backlot ghost town?). Then DAT was the devil. Every time a genuine innovation is made available to the public the entertainment industry pulls a Chicken Little; they let loose the dogs of law and waste years of everybody's time in a fruitless attempt to stuff the genie-du-jour back into the bottle. The biggest "watermark" is on the zipper area of the middle man's chinos. In the meantime, I quite like the six (count 'em!) analog outs on my DVD-A deck. A rare opportunity to buy more lovely, fat interconnects and tell my spouse it's the fault of an industry that repeatedly refuses to embrace change.
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