I know, I know – I’ve ranted about the music industry before, but they simply won’t go away and that means I have to continue to rant about their overwhelming stupidity.
They are still not content with the billions of money that they make on the crap produced and distributed every year. They are always looking for more.
As I mentioned not too long ago, they are still trying to figure out how to force Apple to give them more money for sales through iTunes. If you’ve been living in a rock somewhere for the past frew years and don’t have a clue what iTunes is, it’s a media player that includes a store where you can downloan music for $0.99 a song. The power of this becomes painfully obvious to anyone with a brain: you no longer have to spend $20 to get 2 songs on a CD that you like. You can go download the songs for $2 from Apple and skip all the rest of the crap that you never intended to listen to in the first place.
For the music industry and the artists who create the songs, this is wholly unacceptable.
From the industry perspective, they spend a lot of money to produce that CD (money that they recoup by screwing over the artists, but they don’t want us to focus on that right now), to promote it, to create videos (again, screwing over the artists to recoup their funds) and marketing and guest spots on Saturday Night Live and MTV and whatever else they can think of. They want that money back. More importantly, they want a return on investment of at least 5000 %. A hit single used to make them a lot of money because people would rush out and buy the CD – hell, I’d rush out and buy the CD. And even when they came up with the idea of ‘singles’ on cassette or CD, they still charged $3.99 or more for it.
From the artists perspective – I do feel bad for them. They get screwed no matter what. They put out a CD of songs that can sometimes represent months if not years of preparation and work and, for the most part, only their die hard fans will ever hear all the songs on that CD. The casual fan who hears a hit on the radio, only wants that song. Of course they want more money for their hard work, the problem is, I don’t want to pay them more.
Yes they put a lot of hard work into that CD, but the odds are low that anyone is going to actually like all the songs. They almost become filler. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a song, bought the full CD and then been disappointed with the rest of the music.
So, the iTunes model of a single song purchase is a dream come true for most people. But not for the music industry who thinks they should be paid more money to recoup the costs of all that producing of utterly crappy music they churn out every year.
In an Article from BetaNews, they went so far as to try and have the royalties rates raised so they could make more money:
The recording industry’s efforts to compensate for lagging CD sales by promoting hikes in royalties rates, suffered another serious setback yesterday in the US as a panel of judges ruled mechanical royalties rates should stay put.
Apple’s threat earlier this week to shut down its iTunes service cast a brighter spotlight on the Copyright Review Board’s royalties review process than at any time since 1909. As of this morning, the CRB hasn’t actually publicly announced its decision yesterday, although the Associated Press learned from sources who participated in the meetings with the three-judge panel that it decided not to raise the rates for mechanical reproduction royalties above the current base rate established in January 2006.
So once again, rather than address the real issue (crappity crap crapola music by cookie cuttered bands designed to look good and dance better), they try to figure out how they can charge more for less.
Will they ever learn? My thought is ‘no’. Emphatically ‘no’. They’re too stupid. They’ll continue to churn out crap and call it ‘music’ and when no one wants it anymore, they’ll run for public office where they’re stupidity will be welcomed.
~P
