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by TankGirl
Their view on new technology and the social developments around it seems to be so distorted and fearful that they end up wasting most of their resources on the futile attempts to destroy p2p, and failing to do so, whatever adaptive measures they take fall inevitably into the category of 'way too little way too late'.
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It's this fear and distorted views of the p2p community this is really hurting their industry. In a sense they are "shooting themselves in the foot", but the worst part is that they aren't realizing it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in places like China many products are banned so there is a huge piracy problem. It has gotten so bad that piracy has become the normal way of getting certain products because there isn't an alternative. I believe this is what we are seeing with file sharing when it comes to downloading content. The alternatives that are available just don't cut it. Most users can't live with the fact that they can't copy or do as they please with something they have basically bought. Users are use to "owning" music as oppose to "renting" them.
As with the China example, p2p users really don't have a good alternative even if they do want to pay for these files.
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They still insist on highly expensive and star-oriented promotion tactics that yield a five percent success rate with only 30 profitable new artists every year.....They should be busily experimenting with new p2p technologies and free peer promotion mechanisms that would yield higher success rates with much lower budgets and break-even points.
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Very good points TG. The power of "word of mouth" has become a lot more effective and powerful with the invention of the internet. It's also a lot cheaper then the conventional ways of promotions. The internet is starting to become the new media of choice and is becoming more common in everyday lives of the general public, but only a very small portion of this relatively new media is used in a business fashion. Of course, there are consumer's concerns with security and privacy issues but these problems are present even in the brick and mortar businesses.
It's just that the brick and mortar businesses have had a very long time to deal with all their problems and opposed to internet businesses. There are possible solutions around these problems like not storing their customer's account information on a system that is accessable to the internet. Also, a lot of users have concerns with giving out their credit card information so why hasn't more internet businesses allow check or money orders? But I think it comes down to the same old problem of businesses not adequately address the concerns or problems of the customers.
The file sharing territory does have a potential business side to it, but the industry is more concern about addressing their own needs rather then the consumer's. Programs like MusicNet and Pressplay are required to put the recording industry's needs first and the consumer's needs a far second. Any 4th grader can tell you that a business it doomed to fail if the consumer isn't priority 1. And their arguement barely has any merit to it. They are afraid that by allowing users to do anything with their downloads it will increase the piracy problem, but it is so easy to buy or even borrow a CD and rip it. The piracy problem is already an issue and there really isn't a 100 percent effective way of copy protecting something anyways.
The recording industry can keep running into a brick wall all the want, but the industry is changing and if they don't learn how to adapt to the change then they will be left behind.