

The RIAA and MPAA Have Failed To Understand A Cultural Shift - elblanco
http://www.techi.com/2010/04/the-riaa-and-mpaa-have-failed-to-understand-a-cultural-shift/

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wdewind
I used to do some social media consulting for Time Inc. and some of their
subsidiaries (HBO etc.) and across the board what I found is quite simply the
companies are not setup to be able to handle these shifts, it's not really
that they don't have the ability to understand. This is the natural order:
they are too big, and too established to be able to respond to this market
with agility.

Time itself has moved away from the strategy of distribution and is going full
on into content creation because they feel there is still a market for high
quality content. I think they are totally correct about that, but wrong about
what is considered "high quality" at this point. There will increasingly be a
place for "premium information" such as Bloomberg terminals and other
professional related information, but entertainment content has no expertise
to sell. It's either good or it's not, I don't really care who made it.

So I'm not sure it's that they "just don't get it" it's more just the natural
order of things: they are too big to respond quickly.

But I think we also have to think less about convincing people "these
companies are going to die" and more about what we do when an industry goes
out of business. Even if these companies survive, the only way to do it will
be downsizing like crazy (and outsourcing to international stringers), and
that wont really be good for anyone.

All they are trying to do is slow down the shift and preserve jobs. So we can
sit here and criticize the MPAA etc (I know I do), but is what we really want
a sudden collapse of these industries? I'm not convinced.

~~~
lotharbot
_"entertainment content has no expertise to sell. It's either good or it's
not, I don't really care who made it."_

Entertainment is either good or it's not. But I can pretty well count on stuff
coming out of Pixar as being good. So if I have limited dollars and/or
attention to spend on entertainment and there's a Pixar film and something
generic that I don't know if it's good or not, I'm going with Pixar. Clearly
they have expertise to sell. There's also music I'll buy (or at least
consider) just because of the label.

The challenge for Time or any other entertainment-content providers is
cultivating the appropriate quality and expertise, fitting it into an
appropriate business model, and cutting away the cruft. This might mean
downsizing like crazy and outsourcing, or it might not. Some companies will
find a new model that works and survive, while others will struggle and
eventually fail. IMO, one big problem for the MPAA and RIAA is that they've
made some actively-bad choices in that transition, inconveniencing and
alienating consumers while not really protecting what they're trying to
protect.

~~~
wdewind
The key here is less limited $ and more limited attention span. We simply
don't have enough time to consume both our user created content (facebook etc)
AND still support pay content as well. Pixar absolutely has expertise over
movie making, and I'm not saying they particularly are going anywhere, but the
competition they have is NOT with other movie companies, it's with ALL media
for attention span.

When you bring the long tail into this, and as it gets easier and easier to
create what we would call "quality" media for a smaller, fragmented audience,
it's going to be very difficult for consumers to see the value of a Time
magazine-like broad, high level view of the world. This IS going to be
competition for companies like Pixar because the choice isn't "I have 10
movies to see pick one," it's "how should I spend my day," and it's going to
be rarer and rarer that the answer to that is go see the new mass market
movie.

Now of course we are years ahead of the curve here. HNers tend to be pushing
boundaries on stuff like this. So there are still a few years before places
outside of metro America catch up.

I DON'T agree with you about the MPAA and RIAA. Their goal is not to protect
long term, it's simply to slow this transition down so they lose fewer jobs
and have more time to think about it. They NEED to because they represent the
mega companies that need to move this slow. Think of it like a two lane
highway, MPAA and RIAA are side to side trucks driving at 5mph. We'll just
keep hitting detours and exits and eventually there will simply be no one
behind them. So I think their goal is wrong, but I think they've succeeded in
carrying out their mission relatively well.

------
acg
On the radio in the UK recently there was an interview with artists in
Manchester about how budget cuts might affect the city. What came out in the
interview is there are more music artists than ever in the city and many are
making albums in their bedroom. I've a few CDs now that artists have persuaded
me to buy after the gig.

Not a record label or a pirate in sight. Record companies have more than
piracy to contend with. No longer is expensive equipment needed even to
produce a physical album.

~~~
pyre
Labels bring to the table the ability to work with experienced audio
engineers,etc, but IMO it's debatable how much of that makes its way into the
final product since most CDs have no dynamic range.

~~~
nitrogen
_most CDs have no dynamic range_

I thought that music normalized to -13dBFS was as bad as it could get, but I
discovered a new low: some recently-released dance music I examined had an RMS
of -7dBFS over the _entire song_ , including silent parts. Highlighting just
the active parts of the song showed an RMS of -5 to -6dBFS. ReplayGain
scanning says it needed almost 20dB of gain reduction to match reference
volume levels.

The sad reality is that music with no dynamic range sounds pretty good on
audio systems with no dynamic range and no headroom, which basically describes
most car, retail bookshelf, and personal playback (i.e. MP3 player with cheap
earbuds) systems. To get a similar volume level but while preserving full
dynamic range would require 20dBV (i.e. ten times) more amplifier power, not
to mention better speakers, quieter listening environments, etc.

~~~
ismarc
I have a friend who's a professional engineer at a local studio and after
working on some filler for some vocalists (simple drum/guitar parts quickly
banged out so they had something to listen to while recording), I got to hang
around and see famous musician X's sibling attempt to record vocal tracks.
They were so awful that musician X had to sing along so the vocalist could
hear it in the monitor to get close enough to the pitch so the auto tuner
could make something that didn't sound like a robot. After seeing that, I am
no longer surprised at the state of any recent music recordings or
compositions. I first noticed the massive over-use of compression in the
mid-90's, and it's only gotten worse since then.

~~~
nitrogen
There is one area where I don't have a problem with massive compression,
duckers, limiting, and so on, and that's in concerts and dance clubs. Using
duckers and limiters to "pulse" parts of the audio track between beats
simulates the ear's own gain control, and makes music feel a lot louder than
it is, so more dancing can be done at safer volume levels.

------
zaidf
An exec from Sony who spoke at our uni said the labels _know_ and _accept_
music is destined to be free very soon. They just keep charging because there
is a portion of population still willing to pay(aka iTunes).

------
wmf
Related previous discussion: [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-
collapse-of-complex...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-
complex-business-models/) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235153>

------
benologist
Those fools. How could they not embrace the cultural shift towards just giving
their stuff away!

Both sides of the piracy argument have equally retarded expectations and
fantasies for the future.

~~~
lotharbot
It's not so much a cultural shift towards "just giving stuff away" as it is a
shift toward easy access, ease of use, and portability.

The image comparing pirates vs. paying customers is critical. The technology
exists to distribute music and video directly to consumers, with a minimum of
hassle. Consider examples like Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, streaming sports
packages like NBA League Pass and ESPN360, justin.tv, and atdhe.net. These
have various monetization models, but they all share one thing in common: for
me as a consumer, they just plain work. Some of them have short ads, but none
of them make me sit through long previews or make it difficult for me to watch
from my wife's computer.

Load up any one of those things and start watching or listening. Then start
watching something on a DVD, and notice how much more hassle you have to go
through in order to skip previews and such. Or put a DRM-free mp3 file you
ripped from CD three computers ago onto your wife's ipod, and compare the
experience to fighting with DRM-laden files when you replace your device with
a new one.

It's not that the industry needs to "just give stuff away". But they need to
come up with distribution models that give consumers what they want with a
minimum of hassle. Subscription-based streaming services work. Ad-supported
streaming works. Paying for non-DRM digital copies works. Trying to install
spyware on every PC in the US, sue ISPs, and throttle or filter internet
traffic does NOT work, it just further alienates consumers.

