Andrew Lack Continues To Believe He Can Stop The Tide
from the his-best-skill:-missing-the-point dept
Sometimes you have to wonder how Andrew Lack keeps his job as Sony Music’s CEO. This is the same guy who complained that there could be no business model unless all music was locked down (wrong), and then blamed music fans for forcing him to fire people, rather than admitting that it’s been his own bad leadership and failure to move the company into offering what people want that has caused the company trouble. He also has said that because he can’t figure out how to run his business, he needs the Supreme Court to prop up his obsolete business model. It appears he’s still on the same kick. Paid Content and Buzzhit are taking Lack to task for his latest ridiculous statements, complaining that Steve Jobs can make money on both music sales and hardware sales (wrong again), but he’s stuck on just making money on dwindling music sales. Isn’t he the guy in charge? Shouldn’t he be trying to figure out how to make the business change with the times, rather than whining and begging the courts to save his business model? If someone else is making money and he’s not, doesn’t that speak to his own (lack of) ability in running the company? Of course, it seems the even scarier quote in the article is when he says: “Technology is a friend to the entertainment business and particularly to the music business, but it’s not quite as friendly as it should be and will be in a few years.” The implication, obviously is that in a few years Lack honestly believes that copy protection will work and the technology will only work in favor of the industry. It’s a bit scary that Sony thinks this is the right guy to be running a business going through such a major transition. It’s as if the head of a buggy maker was saying that he was waiting for new automobile-slowing technology to take off — and then he’ll have his business model back.
Comments on “Andrew Lack Continues To Believe He Can Stop The Tide”
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Anyone else out there read “Buzzhit” as “Bullsh1t” the first time they saw it?
Man, are some marketing people dumb.
-UC
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In the NYPost business section, he mentioned how about 10% out of the 6500 employees are A&R.
The rest are business executives, accountants and lawyers.
Come on now! No wonder the music business sucks now. They barely have anybody finding new acts.
new business model?
Ok so I’m sure this has been suggested before, but why don’t the RIAA and MPAA team up? They could simply offer a service using bittorrent technology that allows users to download just as large of a database of movies and albums as is already available (illegally) online (if you know what you’re doing).
They could charge people $30-ish a month for unlimited LEGAL downloading of virtually everything that is “data-form” entertainment. All they’d have to do is host the trackers for the torrent files. Hell they could probably even get away with charging $50 a month. I mean people pay that much for freaking cell phones right now when they have a perfectly good home phone they’re paying for as well. We are consumers.
I don’t think I’m alone here, but before the internet, I certainly wouldn’t buy more than 1 or 2 dvd’s/cd’s in a month simply because they are so damn overpriced. Therefore, for the average person, they’d technically still be making the same monthly amount in sales. I understand that this doesn’t make up for the morons that drop hundreds on cd’s and dvd’s per month, but there are many other expenses they would be saving on to make up for those people.
For example, with bittorrent, there are very low to zero bandwidth costs. They would practically be paying nothing for distribution. How much does distribution cost the RIAA and MPAA currently with shipping all over the world? How much does the fuel cost? Plus there are no material costs. No more making CD’s and Labels by the millions. If they use this idea, once everyone caught on, they would make so much more.
This idea would also replace the need for rentals and increase the industries’ revenue there as well. No more netflix MPAA, you get to reap those profits 100% now with the monthly fee.
I understand that there are current flaws with this. An example is that not all areas that sell CD’s and Movies have high speed internet and tech-savy people to replace their old business model. Also, with unlimited access, people who pay the 30 or 50 a month could technically build their own database of movies/music until they own everything. However, they wouldn’t need to. As transfer rates increase in the future, people would just be able to download what they want in the 15 minutes before watching/listening to it. Plus even if someone did create a huge database of everything and share it with friends, there would still be the constant flow of new material that is always being created. If you want the new stuff, you’d have to keep the subscription.
I personally would be willing to pay for the convenience. The prices are ridiculous, but more importantly, I don’t want to leave home when I need my entertainment. I want it quickly and I want it legally. We are the consumers! We are in charge! We have the power and we get what we want if they want to continue to make money. They can’t sue everyone, and until they change, they will continue to lose more and more.
The bottom line is you’re never going to stop people from downloading illegally if the legal option to download isn’t available. They’ve started to figure this out by offering the IPOD and yahoo’s new service, but this needs to be for all forms of entertainment that can be converted to data only form. The money lost from the people who spend way too much on entertainment would eventually be more than made up by the people who used to NEVER buy anything and decide to pay for the subscription to “save money” and get it legally.
Are there any problems with this I am overlooking?
Re: new business model?
Quite simply, the labels and studios don’t want to let users 0wn the content, just “license” it (DRM). If they really were willing to let their products go as an all-you-can eat sans DRM, they would have struck a deal with a file-sharing service long ago. Furthermore, what scares the shit out of many “artists” more than anything is remix culture, and having a one-stop shop for people to download, re-edit, and distribute major label/studio content would make these files more accessible to a wider audience.
Some folks just don’t have the same moral views relating to copyright as we do. Unfortunately, these maximalists are the dudes running shit now.
Peace!