“British music industry major EMI wants to cut its funding to the industry’s trade bodies, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Wednesday, which could deal a blow to the fight against music piracy,” Kate Holton reports for Reuters.
“The source said EMI, which was recently taken over by private equity group Terra Firma, was looking at ways to ‘substantially’ reduce the amount it pays trade groups,” Holton reports.
“The groups, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other national associations, represent music companies and the fight against illegal piracy,” Holton reports.
“Analysts at UBS said any move to reduce the funding to trade bodies could hamper the industry’s efforts to fight piracy and protect music copyright,” Holton reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
DRM is dead. EMI was out front with Apple on this, but even they can do better. Music labels should encourage musicians to make good music and sell it DRM-free at high-quality bitrates everywhere they can. That’s what we’d do – of course, we’re not 68-year-old, out-of-touch, technophobic music moguls who futilely long for “the good old days” or greedy music producers who lack basic business sense and seem only to want to screw music fans. The music business would make more money our way than by trying fruitlessly to place limits on everything which only drives more potential customers to piracy.
So, MacDailyNews is now a business consulting firm?
Hey MDN, why not stick to supplying retread Mac news written by someone else!
Ooooh, “Teflon” . . .
Not enough bran in your breakfast cereal today, huh? Why not eat a very large bowl of prunes and go back to your mama’s basement to relieve yourself?
Most of us adult wage-earners like MDN just the way it is . . . or we wouldn’t be coming here in the first place. So, get out your big tube of zit cream and do your best to become part of the mainstream human race again, OK?
Good.
Teflon (aka Jermaine Dupri or Doug Morris),
If MacDailyNews isn’t a business consulting firm, they should be, for the music business, at least. Their advice is perfect and it’s also how the music business will end up operating anyway whether they go into it voluntarily or not.
Teflon, you comment won’t stick for long.
Die RIAA!!!
Teflon:
Fair suck of the sauce, MDN were only offering an opinion, which is all we do down the bottom here too.
The problem with piracy is that it has become easily available, quickly, with high quality (despite Hollywood telling you otherwise) and obviously cheaply. You can’t beat those who steal – you never could. But I think EMI are seeing the ‘trade associations’ alienating even the paying customers and EMI are paying for this.
Cool EMI – I hope you sign even more bands as a result.
“illegal piracy”? As opposed to legal piracy?
Randian is just MDN writing under another name. Like it always does. ChrissyOne, Zune Tang being two other examples (hence the MDN move to incorporate registraton to protect its seudonyms).
Who exactly is MDN? When will the authors of MDN stop hiding? Hard to take this site serously otherwise. You could be a convicted peadophile for all we know…
It’s just a take Teflon, relax and enjoy.
and chrissy2 is ..teflon?
The age of 68 is irrelevant… point to the fact that the person hasn’t studied the trends and technology… age doesn’t matter here.
Teflon, what part of MDN‘s take did you disagree with?
“Digital Rights” should still be “Managed.” But the music industry needs to move away from putting technical barriers in the way of customers using its product. Imprinting sold media files with identification information about the purchaser (and making it known to the customer that such information is there) will discourage abusive “sharing.” The iTunes Store does that now with its protected and “DRM-free” files.
Honest customer will not be restricted in any way from using the files for their personal enjoyment. Companies selling players and digital media will not need to invest resources to create and maintain those elaborate “barriers.” It would be a win-win-win for the music creators (more sales), music consumers (more freedom), and music product vendors (less overhead). It would also end music-rental schemes, since by definition, they require those technical barriers.
Then again, Apple’s DRM system is pretty much invisible as long as your media player is an iPod. So the music “cartel” can take its sweet time coming to their collective senses, as far as I’m concerned.
Asshat writing as ChrissyTwo.
We know who pays you to astroturf here. We know ChrissyOne is real and Zune Tang is not.
If you do not take this site seriously, why are you posting here? Obviously it’s because the entity that pays you takes this site very seriously.
Rock on MDN.
@ChrissyTwo: “You could be a convicted peadophile for all we know…”
Yeah, sexually abusing peas is just sick, especially the baby french peas.
(BTW: Die, RIAA, die!)
Personally, I think the money they can save from cutting funding to these groups can better serve their stock holders. It’s not like these groups have managed to slow down piracy.
Teflon:
Heard of an opinion? Last I checked we’re all entitled to one (including MDN). God bless AMERICA!
mr_matalino: Heard of an opinion? Last I checked we’re all entitled to one (including MDN). God bless AMERICA!
Fsck Yeah! Thank America for inventing the concept of freedom of conscience.
Regardless of how music is sold, with DRM or without, there will always be pirates. Stupidly the music companies seemed to think that without DRM everyone would be a pirate which is obviously untrue. Their jobs is to minimise the effect of pirating whilst not alienating paying customers. Sure, DRM free products might make pirating easier, even more widespread but it will also boost legitimate sales. If they can make those legitimate sales big enough it will more than offset any potential increase in losses through pirating and they won’t have to waste countless millions fighting with their own customers.
By trying to combat the tiny percentage of “bad” users, they were/are causing a negative reaction amongst those customers who would legitimately pay them money.
“Randian is just MDN writing under another name. Like it always does. ChrissyOne, Zune Tang being two other examples (hence the MDN move to incorporate registraton to protect its seudonyms).”
Funny you’d keep saying that, what with how easy my real identity is to verify. Still, it’s fun being a myth!
Since you brought it up, *I* would certainly like to know a little more about the wizard behind the curtain. I’ve been posting here for over a year, and all I have to go on is the daily news takes and the name “SteveJack”. Who is this person? Personally, I think it’s a gestalt entity, created by crossing DNA from Steve Jobs and Jack Miller in a lab deep in the mountains of Buenos Aries. This “SteveJack” is nothing more than a grey, throbbing brain, resting in a pan of warm honey, attached with electrodes to a bank of X-Serves and plugged in to the world wide web. He may even have WiFi. From there, “SteveJack” plots the worldwide gangster computer-god living-death slavery takeover of the world’s Windows user’s identities and credit history, controlling their minds and making them buy iPods and computers with shiny screens. What an evil genius!!!
…or he might just be one guy who works at Kinney Shoes. Hard to say which.
-c
MW: ‘there is no magic word’ (sad, really)
You certainly can’t digitize the experience of being at a live concert. Artists should be trying to get their music out to anyone they can. The REAL profit for artists is in music publishing. Labels take almost all album/song sales and a good chunk of touring. As was the day before Elvis and will be the case in the distant future, popularity drives revenue. Elvis and the Beatles take in more now through music royalties than they ever did.
ChrissyOne the whore, ChrissyTwo the dipshit — who gives a f-ck.
I once pulled a straight iron rod clear through my anus.
I guess now that business model is changing it is no longer profitable to pay your dues at the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge.
Dupri and Jay-Z will miss them at the annual convention.
Just my $0.02
@ Chunky Butt Micro Fallacy
Wow. You must work out!
If I was a young up and coming musician with I wouldn’t put up the these companies backward thinking idea… there just trying to justify there own jobs!
I would strike a deal with Apple and sell my music direct and let Apple off set my production cost… after all the money is in the tours! That way my music would be owned by myself and in the long run that good!
I simply wouldn’t put up with there crap!
And I think the fans would support such a idea!
The industry really doesn’t need a middle man anymore if they ever did!
Me extreme dislike of the RIAA began all of the way back when they tried to kill the first uncompressed consumer digital audio format – RDAT. They threatened and threatened, but we found a brave and noble consumer electronics supplier in southern CA that we bought several of them from anyway – Nobody got sued and the world was/is a better place for ignoring the self empowered RIAA. I don’t want music to be stolen and I don’t believe the RIAA et. al. are doing anything at all to address this in the real world today. Interestingly however, they continue to make money hand over fist. Anything wrong with this picture?
People!! Our REAL enemy here is Micros**t.
Micros**t.
No, it’s the Judean People’s Front!
mr_matalino:
“Heard of an opinion? Last I checked we’re all entitled to one (including MDN).”
– Um, yeah, and Teflon would be entitled to one as well. So what’s your point?
Or it’s the RIAA – Really Insipid A-Hole Army
@ChrissyOne,
Your SteveJack story was hilarious.
As far as EMI is concerned, nice to see new management realize that paying out the mafia money to the RIAA was a waste. Clearly there was no benefit other than to alienate customers.
_realist_
exactly.
More information on “SteveJack’s” evil plans…
“International Federation of the Phonographic Industry?” Why don’t they just name it International Federation of the Obsolete Technology? Would sound about as modern.
Wow C1, I was just watching that the other day. Spooky!
EMI’s new owners in concert with the continuing management have obviously reached a conclusion which rightly recognises that the RIAA, BPI, IFPI and others are becoming a lobby group for a “luddite” tendency in the music industry led by Universal Music Group.
EMI, by contrast, was the industry standard-bearer for a more enlightened attitude in which customers were no longer treated, by default, as criminals whilst concurrently treating them as fatted calves.
In the pragmatic new economy of bits, as originally envisioned by Nicholas Negroponte (in Being Digital) and realised by Apple and EMI, customers have a right to choose what they purchase, whilst having the option to pay a premium for higher quality and a freedom from a DRM which, even in the first instance, was hardly oppressive; this is a contrast to the cynicism of the old economy of atoms where the vendors’ demands for economies of scale requires a certain degree of bundling in order to suppress the costs of distribution.
EMI, with the support of Terra Firma, obviously intends to sweat the former’s assets in an attempt to eliminate piracy – whether organised or ad-hoc – by making the product affordable, portable and available through a pervasive distribution mechanism; this is almost impossible to do whilst funding trade bodies who talk from both sides of their mouths – simultaneously praising Apple for helping to arrest the scourge of piracy and building the model for the new economy whilst the same bodies and their members brief against the Cupertino using the sort of “good is bad, lies are truth, war is peace” revisionist “newspeak” that Orwell observed in 1984.
Are you sure it’s not the People’s Front of Judea?
No! The splitters…
@Metryq “legal piracy” see symbolic definition of the IRS circa 80’s and 90’s or NYS dept. of taxation and finance currently or NYC Dept of Transportation meter maid or any triple dipper into government pension funds, most if not all of congress and their various appropriations committees,the FCC all legal entities that passively attack your paycheck and with your contribution produce unintended and unwanted results as well as legitimate ones. W4 is a legal document that seems to authorize the commencing of the act sort of like the shot across the bow to heave to and prepare to be boarded.
I don’t want to know who MDN really is. All super heroes need to protect their secret identities.
There are a lot of problems with DRM, granted, but as a musician and published songwriter I have a small problem with MDN’s general approach to the music industry. There is a generally demeaning way they refer to “money grubbing” musicians who create a lot of “filler” crap to put on their albums just to be able to charge more. That is a horrible argument. Ask any serious musician (this excludes folks like Britney Spears et al) about which songs they wrote for “filler” and they won’t have any. Generally musicians put their best into their music, and feel strongly about it. It may not be the biggest hit or your favorite song, but it doesn’t mean it’s intended as filler to make money.
My father is a recording artist and we had our home and meals provided for by royalties and concert money. Musicians need to make a living, some make more than others, but stealing music is stealing. Insulting musicians as greedy is insulting. MDN is a favorite site of mine, but their bitter attitude at anyone involved in the music industry is uneducated and imbalanced. More to come on the history of the album and the song cycle they often get wrong. Sure cavemen sang songs, but do we want to be cavemen now too. Since very early on, songs have been grouped into related categories, stories, and styles. This is not a music industry ploy, this is a cultural holdover since the beginning of catalogued classical and vernacular music. Do your homework before you insult, just like you tell all of your mac critics.
@c1
please check my identity, hurry!
mw: id, as in: does anyone know who i am?
Don’t know why there’s such a big fuss about piracy. No difference in the act compared to the days of cassette decks and turntables…
It’s a good thing you (MDN) fully defined which group of 68 year olds you were talking about. Some of us get pretty testy.
@ Adam:
I agree that there are a lot of problems with DRM, but I also recognize that there’s problems with our systems of Intellectual Property.
Why is it that a piece of music gets a Copyright and thus effectively more than a *CENTURY* of IP protection, but if I invent a profoundly new *physical object*, I can only get a Patent and have my IP protected for roughly 1/10th as long, even though my distribution chain is much longer, difficult and expensive?
Something got lost in the “fairness” concept of risk-taking a long, long time ago.
“My father is a recording artist and we had our home and meals provided for by royalties and concert money.”
And particularly due to the ‘long tail’ revenues now available to you from digital distribution, the royalties on his works (assuming quality) will continue for your entire lifetime and nearly all of your grandchildren’s lifetime. How nice that the ‘Rules’ are rigged so that the efforts of one generation allow your family to be set for three generations.
In the meantime, one Patent for “mechanical artists” has half of its IP timeline eaten up just getting the thing out of the lab and to market.
“Do your homework before you insult, just like you tell all of your mac critics.”
Likewise, friend. If Patent Law were applied to music, everything produced before 1987 would now be in public domain. Suggest you ask your Dad what percentages of his royalties this is today, and what percentage it will be five and ten years from now.
-hh