Is Piracy Also Increasing The Quality Of New Movies?

from the more-data-from-the-front dept

We recently wrote about how the singer of the popular band the Fleet Foxes felt that unauthorized file sharing has improved the quality of new music, because it allows musicians to experience much more music, and that helps create more and better influences. This makes a lot of sense, as you realize how much creative content is really built on inspiration from other works. So, is the same thing true for movies? In a recent interview with film director and producer Tommy Pallotta (who did A Scanner Darkly), he talks about his latest project, American Prince, and its relationship to unauthorized file sharing. American Prince is a "followup" to Martin Scorsese's documentary American Boy from over thirty years ago. The Scorsese movie is close to impossible to find legally... and, even though Pallotta did get is hands on an "official" copy from the main character in the movie, he downloaded a copy via BitTorrent and found it to be better. With American Prince, Pallotta has also purposely decided to put the movie online for torrenting.

Still, the key point that Pallotta makes seems to fit almost exactly with what the Fleet Foxes were saying:

Scorsese's American Boy has been and is still generally unavailable for over 30 years, yet so many filmmakers have been influenced by it. The way we saw it is through multi-generational VHS tapes. Now with BitTorrent, there is a whole new audience and generation ready to be influenced by that film and I hope mine. Steven Prince is a gold mine of future cinema scenes and I hope a whole new generation of filmmakers will understand how he has influenced American Cinema.

In other words, by getting more people exposed to the film, more can be influenced to make better movies as well. In fact, he seems to view the combination of his own movie and it being available on BitTorrent as film school:

I would really like to encourage people to talk about the film, with each other as well as on the Internet. It would make me happy to see Wikipedia entries and IMDB boards as well as Internet sites. I would love for people to get together and have screenings of it with their friends, or for universities to suggest to their class for the students to watch it. I look at American Prince as the film school I never had, what I always imagined film school to be.

And, of course, unlike what the MPAA claims, Pallotta only sees the positives that come out of file sharing:

I absolutely believe how we watch and share movies will shape the future of film distribution. I believe it will have such a profound influence that it will even change how movies are made. I think it is a win-win for the filmmakers and the viewers. Filmmakers will have a more direct reach with audience and viewers have more to choose from. I wanted to release this film in support of file sharing and to prove to myself and others that it can have a profoundly positive effect.

So, of course, if you want to see the movie, Pallotta hopes you'll download it.

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Popular Band Claims Music Is Better Because Of Piracy

from the helping-to-define-a-sound dept

We just wrote about the Harvard economists who noted that, despite claims that file sharing would decrease the incentive to create content, more music than ever before is being made, and the trends keep going up. That report did note that it couldn't necessarily judge quality, but was simply focused on quantity. However, according to at least one well known band, unauthorized file sharing is absolutely improving the quality of music -- especially the band's own music. This is according to the lead singer of the Fleet Foxes, Robin Pecknold. He points out that his own musical tastes were heavily influenced by what he could download online, and that wide variety of influences has made him a much better musician:

"As much music as musicians can hear, that will only make music richer as an artform.... I think we're seeing that now with tons of new bands that are amazing, and are doing way better music now than was being made pre-Napster."

Now, obviously, this is anecdotal and a single data point -- but the critics (and fans) sure do seem to like the Fleet Foxes' music. Its debut album was named "Best of 2008" by Billboard, The Times, Mojo, Pitchfork and Uncut and hit number 3 on the UK charts (not sure about the US). And, of course, not surprisingly, Pecknold is fine if you want to download his album:

"I've downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records - why would I care if somebody downloads ours? That's such a petty thing to care about."

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If Consumers Won't 'Pay Up' For Quality, Whose Fault Is It?

from the concept-of-value dept

A post over at News.com is decrying the news that Pioneer is pulling out of the TV market as "sad news", because it means "TV buyers won't pay a premium price for a better display." The post comes from a blog about high-end audio, so presumably, the author is a person who sees the value in paying high prices for certain pieces of electronic gear. But if a firm can't profitably serve a small slice of the market -- people for whom normal audio and video gear isn't good enough -- and decides to stop trying, why is that necessarily a problem for the firm or the market? "The market's demands for lower and lower prices eventually take high-quality manufacturers out of the game." That's simply not true: it will eventually take high-quality manufacturers who can't compete out of the game. The assumption here seems to be that high quality has to come with a high price tag, but the "race to the bottom" the writer decries helps, or at least should help, at the high end of the market as well as the low end. Companies that make gear for any segment of the market have to offer value. If Pioneer's high-end, high-priced TVs couldn't offer sufficient value to attract enough high- or low-end buyers to succeed, that's not an issue with the market, it's a problem with the company and its products.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Word Of Mouth Marketing Isn't Effective If Your Product Sucks

from the just-saying... dept

Way too many people seem to think that "word of mouth marketing" is about getting others to spread your marketing message. That is, they think it's about putting words into the mouths of others. But that's not true at all. Real word of mouth marketing is about building a great product, and then letting your customers pass on the news however they see fit. If there's anything to do on the "marketing" side, it's merely to enable the tools for your biggest fans to spread the word, and then get the hell out of the way. However, it appears many marketers still don't understand this concept.

Reader Aaron deOliveira writes in to point out a story about Hollywood studios apparently giving up on word of mouth marketing campaigns targeted at "faith-based" audiences promoting certain messages that the studios hoped would resonate with folks who are religious. In the article, they toss up all sorts of reasons why such campaigns haven't done all that well, but deOliveira points to a blog post by Ben McConnell where he makes a different assertion: perhaps all those word of mouth campaigns failed because the movies just weren't that good. It's just that the studios are so sure of their product that they never even noticed it. So, once again, it goes back to this: word of mouth marketing is never going to make a lick of difference if your product sucks. Rather than focusing on such things, concentrate on making a good product first -- and then worry about the marketing campaign. And if the campaign fails -- recognize that maybe it's got something to do with the product.

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The Way To Beat Scrabulous Is Not With Lawsuits Or Crappy Versions Of Scrabble

from the keep-trying dept

In the ongoing saga of Scrabulous, the unauthorized online version of Scrabble that has found many fans on Facebook but has upset Mattel and Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble), it appears that RealNetworks and Mattel have finally put out an official version of Scrabble for Facebook -- but the problem is that it's terrible. As the NY Times reports, "Facebook Scrabble takes a long time to load, does not always quickly update to show recent moves, and the words the game will accept do not reflect standard Scrabble dictionaries, or even the English language." While it's nice to see that Scrabulous still hasn't been forced offline, it seems odd that the authorized version is so terrible. It still probably would have made the most sense to just do a deal with the brothers who created Scrabulous (and there are still rumors that a deal has been discussed, but without a decent resolution), but if that doesn't work, the way to compete is with a better product. Putting out a product that's not very good isn't likely to win over many fans.

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Lou Reed Upset By MP3 Quality; Has He Ever Listened To Velvet Underground Recordings?

from the it's-not-about-audio-quality dept

Since when is Lou Reed an audiophile? Down at SXSW Reed gave a talk where he complained about the sound quality of MP3 technology and the fact that people didn't realize how awful they sounded. This is a complaint made by quite a few other people as well, who seem to ignore the fact that for most people and most music, MP3 technology is perfectly good enough, and the convenience of being able to carry around more, is a lot more important than a barely (if at all) noticeable change in audio quality. In the meantime, has Lou Reed listened to any of his early Velvet Underground recordings? I don't recall "audio quality" being one of the key characteristics of those songs...

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Your Company Will Be In Trouble If You Don't Focus On Product Quality

from the better-products-needed dept

One of the biggest signs that a business has trouble ahead is when it seems to be focusing on everything except the quality of its products. Back in the dot-com boom it was common to see a bunch of MBAs get together and draw up plans for a technology company, raise a bunch of funding, throw a lavish launch party, buy a Super Bowl ad, and then hire some programmers to implement the product almost as an afterthought. Most of them aren't around any more. If I were a Microsoft shareholder, I think I would be worried about the rumors going around that "an aggressive acceleration of the company's investment in its data center network" will be "one of the cornerstones" of Microsoft's online strategy. Obviously, Microsoft is going to need more and better data centers to compete effectively with Google. But ultimately, success in the online marketplace is the result of having great products, not great data centers. If you've got such a great product that demand is outstripping your server capacity, it's not that hard to buy additional infrastructure. But if your core products suck, a lot of servers and disk space isn't going to do you any good. Indeed, I suspect that it doesn't even make sense to build "data centers" in the abstract. It's hard to know exactly what mix of hardware will be needed and how it should be set up without a specific suite of applications in mind. So it seems like it would make sense for Microsoft to focus its resources on developing and marketing great products (like this one, perhaps) and upgrade their data centers as demand warrants. Treating data centers as a "cornerstone" of their strategy seems like they're putting the cart before the horse.

Techcrunch points us to an even more egregious example of focusing on the wrong things: AOL has been touting the number of new sites it plans to launch in the coming year. It's hard to think of a more meaningless statistic than the number of websites your company owns. AOL says it plans to roll out 30 websites by the end of 2008, but one good website will generate more traffic than 30 bad ones. Google, for example launches new sites all the time, but you don't see them bragging about the number of new sites they're launching. They understand that what their customers care about is what their sites can do, not how many there are. Of course, this is probably an outgrowth of AOL's misguided idea that it's in the advertising business rather than the online content business. When your company focus is on advertisers, then websites probably seem like interchangeable places to sell ads. The problem is that if the content isn't any good, you'll have fewer and fewer eyeballs to sell to those advertisers—even if the number of websites you own keeps going up.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Blaming MP3s And iPods For Ruining Music

from the gotta-love-the-audiophiles dept

It seems that with every new generation of music delivery, there are going to be people who complain that the quality just isn't up to par with what came before. Remember when CDs first came out, there were quite a few upturned noses who insisted the sound quality just couldn't compete with vinyl LPs. And now that mp3s are becoming the standard, folks are complaining that the quality simply can't live up to CDs. This has certainly gone on for a while, as we've noted there are even online stores that cater to audiophiles who believe that compressed mp3s just aren't worth listening to. However, now it's going even further, as the WSJ claims that some audio engineers are saying that the popularity of mp3s and iPods is ruining music. The theory is that audio engineers are using iPods and mp3s as the lowest common denominator for recordings. Since they know that so many people are going to end up hearing the song just through the cheap white earbuds of an iPod, that they don't bother to make a high quality recording that would sound better on high end stereo equipment. Thus, the claim goes, pretty much all music is sounding somewhat crappy, and it's turning people off from the latest crop of new songs. In other words, music is less popular today, because the songs are engineered to sound like crap. This seems silly. It's certainly a different argument than the industry's typical claim that downloads are killing the music business -- but it's equally ridiculous. Sure, there may be some engineers who are doing a cruddy job in engineering the music, but as one audio engineer in the story notes, there's no reason to ever engineer a song "down" to mp3 levels. Instead, you should just engineer it to a higher level and it'll sound fine on a CD as well on an iPod. However, to put the whole thing in perspective: songs compressed to mp3 level certainly do lose some quality at the margin, but there's only a small group of audiophiles who really care or will notice on a regular basis. At the same time, compare that to how much more music is being produced today thanks to cheaper production tools and easier distribution of music through the internet, and I think you could make the case that the mp3 and the iPod has done a lot more to improve music than to hurt it.

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