This has to be one of the stupidest stories I’ve read for a while. Sony BMG have finally decided to catch up with their competition and start selling DRM free music. The downside is that you have to go into a store and buy a “Platinum Music…

I agree that there is merit in the idea of not putting your retail outlet buyers in a bad position. But what happens if these passes don’t sell? Will Best Buy keep buying them and store them in a room somewhere? If they make something noone buys, how does that help keep those very retailers in a good mood? How does anyone at all win in this scenario?

Sony is headed for the Dead Pool.

The problem is that it’s simply a stupid plan, destined to fail. That’s why the ignorant masses are shouting you down– none of the reasons why Sony is doing this is a reason for any consumer to actually buy music this way!

It is a clear sign of a lack of real vision for the future and how to get there. It is a sign of wasteful, wrongheaded corporate management that they are committing themselves to a plan that is nothing but a compromise. When you’re forced into an A or B decision that both suck, you change the game and make an option C.

Sony has never been as bold as they need to be right now, and it’s a tragedy given how superior their products are when they get the idea right and focus on engineering and manufacturing– they’re still second to none for hardware. Except for some batteries, but that’s all behind us now.

Nachdem ich schon vor über einem Jahr an einer Sony BMG Umfrage zum Thema Musikdownloads teilgenehmen durfte (wobei ich den MP3 Player natürlich nicht gewonnen habe), hat der Konzern nun endlich reagiert:
Sony BMG bietet endlich “online…

Err, no…

The biggest customers are the end consumers, so it’s the people who go into the stores to buy the music, not the stores themselves. The physical retailers are just a conduit.

So, if you piss off the consumer with a ridiculous business model that is designed simply to apease the retailer, then your model is flawed and will not succeed.

Last year around this same time I wrote on the then current companies killing DRM (Digital Rights Management, music with restrictions). Coincidentally, this year has the month of January giving us even more news on the battle-for-unrestricted-music fro…

http://www.TheFuckSong.com – Stress-Relief 2.0

SonyBMG’s biggest customers are the physical retailers. Get it?

My guess is that SOMEONE on their board gets it, and has been fighting long and hard to get through to the others…..and has had to reluctantly agree to allow the transition away from DRM to follow this route because it’s a win in that there is NO MORE DRM. Even if (when) the strategy fails, there’s no way anyone’s going to say….see? we should have stuck with DRM…..the person or group who has pushed for this is then going to be able to say…ok, let’s try OUR way now…..and consumers win. It’s just internal politics with an obviously stodgy and backward-thinking board.

I also feel that if the recording industry had a crystal ball that could magically see what everyone is really doing, they would suddenly realize the declines in their numbers have nearly nothing to do with an increase in piracy. I don’t even believe piracy has significantly increased. The few folks who are pirating digital content are the same few folks who would have made a cassette (or reel-to-reel) recording of their friend’s albums decades ago. Of course, the RIAA say the ease of downloading increases the likelihood of it happening. Personally, I think the few people too poor (or too bitter) to pop on iTunes to legally download a song are unlikely to have purchased the song anyway, so counting it as “lost revenue” is worse than mentally retarded.

In my own case, I’m tired of being treated like a criminal by the RIAA when I am a legal legitimate paying customer. I never illegally download content. I have always paid for it. So why should I be punished and my content crippled with DRM? Imagine going into a store to buy something and on your way out every customer receives a full cavity search because the store believes somebody MIGHT have shoplifted and they want to make sure they catch the crimial. Would you go back to that store again?

As a result of my bitterness toward the RIAA over their criminal treatment of loyal long-term customers, I had boycotted music purchases completely since the year 2000. I was buying CDs at a rate of 2 per week prior to that and had accumulated over 700. Since then, I have purchased zero CDs. I know I’m not alone in this boycott because I talk to people all the time that say they got sick of the RIAA and stopped buying music (or buy significantly less than they once did). If the RIAA wants to know where their declining revenues are really coming from, they should look in a mirror.

This past year, in moments of weakness I bought a total of 3 singles from iTunes. Why? They were DRM free and they were so easy to get that I couldn’t resist buying them. So, ease of downloading and lack of DRM got me to buy a few songs after 7 years of boycotting the RIAA and when I finally did buy again, I bought singles.

If they want to bring back customers they have lost, and attract new customers, that is the formula. Keep it easy, DRM free and allow the purchase of singles. Sony made a one -third effort at change, making it a guaranteed failure. IMHO, the RIAA members will continue losing revenue until they are all replaced by an Internet-based non-RIAA music publishing company who offers higher royalties to their artists while charging less per song due to their lower overhead and minimal cost of distribution. I can’t wait to start buying music from THAT company.

My view of the future is non-DRM, Internet-based distribution with mix-CD burn stations in retail outlets. You walk into Best Buy, pick up headphones at a kiosk, pick out a variety of songs, or even an album, press a button, and boom-it burns you a CD on printable media. It then prints a label on top listing the songs and the price and you take it to the register to pay for it. This would take care of the folks who want to hit a retail outlet every so often to get a “real CD” and the rest could just pop online to purchase. The beauty is the same back-end distribution could be used for both store and home purchases, reducing overall costs. None of this is new technology and it would return us to the era before the DRM fiasco, when buying and owning music was pleasurable.