The Red Herring is certainly living up to its name.
I wish that I’d been allowed to turn in “reports” like this one while in junior high. 17 paragraphs and 251 words of unsubstantiated data. Not even a link to the source report that the article is based on.
Apple’s iPod is partly to blame for the collapse of the music industry, according to a report Friday from researcher eMarketer.
Nice ambiguous statement “partly to blame”. Actually I think that we can resume the collapse of the current industry known as “financing time for musicians in recording studios, taking the results and distributing it on little shiny discs” has been mostly due to the fact that managing the distribution of something that can be copied electronically is no longer a business model.
The Mac maker helped set the tone for a “rat’s nest of restrictions and incompatibilities” that have stalled the growth of digital music, according to Paul Verna, the author of the report.
If memory serves me correctly, it would be the music industry that requested, or rather insisted, on said rat’s nest of restrictions. Apple can hardly be blamed for incompatibilities since it introduced one standard (Fairplay) and stuck with it as opposed to Microsoft’s PlaysForSure up until it was replaced with a newer incompatible version.
Revenue in the music industry continues to decline in part because of consumer confusion, the report said.
A big part of the reason is music fans are asked to sort out the explosion of incompatible formats, players, restrictions, and retailers. That lack of simplicity has slowed sales.
Apple has been a “double-edged sword” for the industry, the report said. Its closed system works well for iPod users, “but leaves many frustrated consumers outside of that system.”
Yes, well, revenue also declined in part because people have less leisure money to throw around, gas prices are going up, coffee prices are going up and most of what the so called music industry is producing is pap. It’s also declining because they’ve run up against one of the laws of economics. It’s called supply and demand. I suggest that you go check out the course material for Economics 101 - I think that it’s covered there is pretty decent detail. While much of the supply is currently illegal, that doesn’t change the equation as the supply exists and you’re going to have to deal with it. The confusion wouldn’t exist if you supplied music in unlocked standard formats since it would work everywhere.
On the other hand, the only simple solution seem to be coming from Apple which appears to work just fine given that they’ve just passed the 5 billion songs sold mark last week. I would say that the incompetence of the competition is a bigger problem. The frustration of people that don’t want to buy an iPod certainly isn’t Apple’s problem, nor is it a two edge-sword with concern to the consumers. They choose with their wallets which solution works best for them. This issue is that so far Apple’s the only one who’s been able to build a solution that appeals to the consumer.
Digital rights management, or DRM, which restricts the number of places where consumers can copy their music, has also played a major role in hindering digital music sales, the report said.
No shit Sherlock.
In recent weeks the industry has moved to stop the bleeding caused by DRM by removing all DRM restrictions from a number of the major MP3 stores.
Finally the light comes on. If the industry had realized that they were selling unprotected CDs that were the equivalent of selling online without DRM they could have saved themselves a lot of time, money and energy.
The music industry’s long-term game plan was that digital downloads would gradually make up for falling CD sales. But it has not worked out that way. Digital downloads have not come anywhere near to making up for CD sales losses.
Numbers are not yet available for 2007, but the report expects the downward trend to continue through 2007 and perhaps through 2008.
This would be called the digging yourself out of the hole that you dug. At the critical moment of the evolution of the internet, the industry did everything they could to ensure that the easiest method of acquiring music was opening up a P2P client and typing in the name of the song you wanted.
Currently Apple is the only thing keeping the digital download market alive, representing the largest source of online income for the industry. Imagine the current model without the strength of the iTunes Store. The entire download market would be represented in millions of tracks instead of billions. Which would make the music industry’s bottom line even worse than it is today.