“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.
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