Comments on the Music Industry piece

by philg

Hmm… one of the nice things about software like what our students at MIT build and like what’s behind photo.net and philip.greenspun.com is that all postings are stored in a standard relational database management system such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.  It is virtually impossible to lose transactions in a commercial RDBMS.  This server, though, runs its own object database and it seems to have eaten all of the comments on the Music CD item (from Friday).  Fortunately I have many of them in email alerts and I’m posting them here…


Anonymous:  As “anti-corporate” attitudes become more mainstream, it’s become easier and actually enjoyable to help the music industry fail. Many people now *do* think as they download, ha! the music industry just lost my dollar. Watching them fining college kids with voracious appetites for music just makes me want to steal more.


Ted Marcus (http://www.tedsimages.com): The only people the record companies are at all interested in making happy are the executives and shareholders (in that order) of the conglomerates that own the record companies. It’s strictly about greed. And it completely explains the ridiculous behavior of the record industry. As you noted, the conglomerates desperately desire to retain complete monopoly control over the production, distribution, and pricing of the product they call “music.” Unfortunately, the consumers who are supposed to be eagerly paying full price to the conglomerates for their product recognize that the product is overpriced. The product is also of continually declining quality as the conglomerates seek to maximize profit by putting out a narrow and repetitive range of “hits” formulated by accountants to target a particular demographic. The conjoined twin of greed is arrogance, which in this case prevents the media conglomerate executives from recognizing that their overpriced formula-driven pap isn’t attracting consumers. So they resolutely insist that something is wrong with consumers rather than with their industry. In desperation, they declare war on consumers and bring on the legal equivalent of nuclear weaponry to vanquish the “piracy” that they insist is the sole cause of their declining revenues. The only other industry I know of with so much arrogance that it treats paying customers as an “enemy” is the airlines– and we all know what sort of shape they’re in. The arrogance and greed of media conglomerate executives also prevents them from recognizing that their desperate tactics to save their monopoly only antagonize their customers, drive them away, and create further justification for choosing alternatives to paying $20 that contains one worthwhile song. As you also note, the “answer” to this problem is to embrace and exploit the needs and desires of customers rather than waging pointless wars to preserve a dying marketing model (the dinosaur eating its tail). If anything, the capitulation by Universal in lowering its prices is an excellent sign that the executives of at least one conglomerate are beginning to see beyond their own greed and arrogance. Perhaps they will begin to realize that the only way they can survive and prosper is to offer a desirable product at a price (and distribution method) that customers will accept. This realization will require a major paradigm shift, forgoing the “need” for immediate spectacular profit in favor of a more reasonable profit over the long term. If the shift does occur, it may even portend a shift beyond the media conglomerates. But I’m not holding my breath.


Enloop(?): When I was a member of the prime music buying demographic, I bought hundreds of CD’s, often on little more than a whim. Many of those CD’s were played once or twice before taking up residence in a cardboard box in a closet. Price wasn’t really a factor. In addition, many of those CD’s were purchased while I lived in the UK, where prices of 15-20 quid were common. But, somewhere along the line, that compulsive need for a music fix subsided. Today, I might buy 2 or 3 CD’s in a year, if that. (And those are likely to be reissues of music recorded decades ago.) I don’t download music because there’s nothing on offer that I want to hear, whether it is free or 99 cents a track. In other words, I don’t spend money buying music for the same reasons I don’t buy comic books — I’m well beyond adolescence. If others have experienced the same thing as they grow older (and our population is aging) then decreased music sales — via any medium — are here for the long term.


Justin (http://www.streeteclipse.com): If I could go to a record/cd store and put any 20 songs on a cd I would glaldy pay $10-12 for this. It would have to be *any* songs I choose, not just 200 or so. I would even wait a couple of days for this order to happen. The record industry could have been doing this for years.


BadGimp:  Why I buy less CDs these days: I have discovered that I buy less CDs now in part because I have ripped most of my 400+ CD collection onto my PC, and uploaded all of the liabrary of songs to my 20 gig iPod. NOW I find I am listening a lot more to the music I already own and finding that I desire new muisic less and less. Guess I have good taste 🙂


Simon Hawkins:  I sometimes use a Russian service (web site) which allows me to download selected CD tracks (mp3s, actually) for between 2 and 5 cents apiece. I am gladly paying this, and so will many others. Micropayments are definitely better than macropayments.


Albert Lash:  Merchandising, Philip, Merchandising! Several years ago I threw away all my CD cases and sleeves opting for the more convenient carry all. These days, when thinking about inviting prospective dates and girlfriends I kick myself and wish that I could take up all my shelf space with my ultra cool CD collection,! allowing them to freely browse, seeing firsthand what good taste I have. (Here, have some salt.) Now I keep my CD cases so that I can buy a cool CD holder too. I even save my books – I used to give them away after reading them. Also worthy of note is the logevity of CD’s – they don’t last very long! Vinyl records are the best for that, but they REALLY take up alot of space, and worse yet, the most efficient way to store them makes them incredibly hard to browse and organize. Whats worse is that the edges of the sleeves do not last long making them even harder to show off.


Federico Mena: Pay-a-reasonable-amount-to-the-artist may get to work very well for four-guy rock bands, but what about studio recordings of big orchestras? Those take a lot of resources.


Tom Hoffman (http://tuttlesvc.org): See also Steve Albini’s essay, “The Problem WIth Music,” which predates Courtney Love’s speech by a few years. http://www.negativland.com/albini.html


Jagadeesh Venugopal (http://www.jagadeesh.com): The trick is to price music at a cost where piracy would be no longer worthwhile for most people. Imagine you could get a song for 50 cents. And you could transfer this song to any device you wanted without any DRM hassles and with a song buying interface that is straightforward. Would you not want to just buy the song outright instead of tracking down a friend, copying it to a transferable medium, then copying it to your hard disk, etc?


Undertoad (http://cellar.org/iotd.php): Real/listen.com Rhapsody is a similar model; pay $9.95 for all-you-can-stream. For anyone doing most of their listening at/near 128kb or bandwidth, it’s a tremendous deal.

19 thoughts on “Comments on the Music Industry piece”

  2. In addition to the many insightful points that have been brought up to explain the demise of the record industry there is perhaps one more: On the whole (with a few notable exceptions), current music is not very good.

  3. Philip, the comments appear to be in the database, it seems it’s a logical bug in the comments system. If you flip over to view the site from the discussion group, you’ll see lots of comments on Post 1506, which is the piece I think you’re referring to. I honestly think the database is rock solid, of course those are famous last words. “;->”

    BTW there’s an easy way to back up the database that contains your weblog. It’s recommended that you keep a copy locally in case of a meltdown on the server.

  4. Thanks, Dave. So there is hope that the comments will eventually appear in the right place? Do you still have a programmer working on the Manila installation at Harvard?

    And as long as he’s at it… how about my pet feature request of a “go back a bit” button at the bottom of the main page (so that you can scroll through the entire blog in 10 or 15-posting chunks?

  5. >>(so that you can scroll through the entire blog in 10 or 15-posting chunks?
    Is there currently a way to view old blogs without having to click one day at a time (which is a huge pain in the @#$)? I would have thought that this ability is a very basic feature in blogging software…

  6. Why on earth would the fellow who wrote this software feel the need for a proprietary object oriented DBMS? If he wanted to do it cheap, would not PostgreSQL or MySQL or even *shudder* SAPDB have done?

  7. >> like what’s behind photo.net and philip.greenspun.com is that all postings are stored in a standard relational database management system

    I’ve been curious from day 1 why Philip decided to host his blog here rather than on philip.greenspun.com for example, where one would assume there would be no loss of comments?

    Philip’s comment about “commercial RDBMSs” is also conspicious in the absence of mention of two solid, ACID, free rdbms’s, MySQL and Postgresql… remember your roots Philip!

  8. Chris: Not sure that I believe that MySQL is ACID but I should have included PostgreSQL. Still, with tricks such as block commit Oracle can be vastly higher performance when you have a lot of concurrent users.

    Doing the blog thing on philip.greenspun.com would have been bad. It is, I guess, pretty easy to implement the RSS feed stuff but maybe not TrackBack and some of the other things that make blogs different from GeoCities HTML pages. Using Harvard’s server enables me to see how the blog world lives. Maybe one day I’ll write my own software but not until I understand what is good, bad, and ugly about the standard blog world. Too many programmers charge off and rewrite things from scratch before understanding the domain!

  9. Newer openacs installations can avail themselves of Lars Pind’s blog module, lars-blogger; might be easy to mod and add to your ACS-3 era (??) site, or there might be an ACS-3 contrib module…. It has RSS and perhaps(?) trackback functionality.

    Mysql innodb has been ACID for several years?

    In any case, I’m enjoying reading your blogged writings occasionally as time allows. Does the red striping bother you as much as it bugs me? On 4 different browsers (including IE6) on 2 different platforms… must be by design.

  11. Oh look, I didn’t know about that (I’ve been out of the loop for a while). It seems that MySQL supports now not only transactions, but also subselects and even referential integrity.

    Good for them. Maybe now they will stop spreading FUD about how inconvenient and useless referential integrity is (as they used to do when Postgres had it and they didn’t)…

  12. Thanks for the education, guys, regarding MySQL. I’m still not sure that I would trust it as much as PostgreSQL; they seem to be latecomers to the idea of transactions. Though it is good to see that they’ve copied Oracle and PostgreSQL with multi-versioning. In that sense all three of them are ahead of Microsoft SQL Server for real-world applications (in which programmers cannot be relied upon to explicitly specify the level of isolation required and not hold unnecessary read locks).

    presidentpicker: I started using Outlook when I got my Handspring Treo (1.7 years ago; the new Treo 270 is going strong). The software underneath this Harvard blog is Manila, which is available for both Macintosh (!) and Windows. Presumably the Harvard I/S department doesn’t want to maintain a Mac server. I don’t particularly endorse Microsoft if for no other reason than a monopoly doesn’t need my endorsement. You don’t see me endorsing the Cambridge water department or the local power utility. Microsoft tends to be rather sluggish in building solutions for newly identified IT problems. So it took them a few years to catch up to the state-of-the-art in Internet application development tools. But once they did catch up it doesn’t make sense to tell people to avoid using Microsoft tools. If nothing else, an all-Microsoft system will be easy to hand off to someone else for maintenance (since they’ll know what to expect). I think that a reasonable attitude is “Yes, .NET is superior to the Java world but the user experience depends on data model and page flow, both of which are independent of technology fashions.” Remember that the users don’t care what’s underneath!

  13. Sorry Philip, how do I get a budget for a programmer working in Cambridge? That’s not really a joke. Still got some selling to do.

  14. What deeply bothers me is the ability of the RIAA to get you and me (“society”) to pay their costs of doing business…if they really don’t want their customers to have the ability to copy and share music, they should FEEL FREE to engage whatever technical means are necessary to make that happen. There are ways they could get close. The problem is that it’s expensive, and nobody would buy the resulting crappy product.

    We subsidize them through our court system, first, by providing them with free legal assistance whenever they want to haul someone through court; and, we have overlooked the monopoly state of the industry.

    Second, by considering limitations on the free use of our technologies in consideration of their DRM requirements, we are providing them with another major subsidy. Why are we doing this?

    Political contributions, plain and simple.

  15. On mult-versioning — my second summer co-op position, 16 years ago, was writing test driver code for Starbase, Cognos’ repackaged version of the Interbase product. It was multi-version way back then, before it even had SQL… 🙂

  16. Hey Philip, I bastardized forums into blogs about two years ago, and developed RSS feeds for them as well. And Dave graciously let me incorporate the userland icon/picture/glossaries into them.

    Lars implemented Google lookups and trackbacks (I think)

    So there you, GPL, postgres, blogs.

    My advice: probably to use manila, my code is way way old and rotten to the core.

  17. i posted a comment today under the original music entry. still not appearing.

    reading through these comments is surprising… greenspun wrote that web publishing guide years and years and years ago, yet people still have the same questions and problems it talks about.

    maybe everybody should go back and reread it. just because you get fancy new tools with bells and whistles doesn’t change the fact that you are still building a house to cover someone’s head from the rain.

Comments are closed.