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30 Years Of The CD, Of Digital Piracy, And Of Music Industry Cluelessness

Music Industry

from the didn't-see-that-one-coming dept

Fri, Oct 19th 2012 07:39pm -

A post on The Next Web reminds us that the CD is thirty years old this month. As the history there explains, work began back in the 1970s at both Philips and Sony on an optical recording medium for music, which culminated in a joint standard launched in 1982. The key attribute of the compact disc was not so much its small size — although that was the most obvious difference from earlier vinyl — but that fact that it stored music in a digital, rather than analog format.

At the time, that probably seemed a technical detail to most people, but it had two profound consequences. First, it began the shift from a world of analogue music recordings — LPs and tapes — to one that was digital. And secondly, it created the pre-condition for the rise of file sharing in the 1990s once the MP3 compression technology had been devised, and the Internet became available to general users — especially younger ones. Services like Napster would not have been nearly so popular had there not been convenient digital files on CDs just sitting there, waiting to be ripped, uploaded and shared. And the reason it was so easy to do that was because CDs came without any copy protection mechanisms whatsoever.

So how on earth did Philips, Sony and the entire music industry make what must appear in retrospect such a huge blunder? Why did they not worry about people copying files from these new CDs? The answer is very simple: because at the time the CD was launched, there was nothing you could copy a CD to.

One year after the CD’s commercial appearance, IBM launched its first version of the PC that had an internal hard disc, the IBM PC XT. Its capacity? A roomy 10 Mbytes. The CD holds around 700 Mbytes, meaning that uncompressed songs typically require around 50 Mbytes of storage each. The cost of any hard disc capable of storing even a single song was so great back in those days, that the idea of digital piracy was self-evidently absurd, since it would have been far cheaper to buy another copy of the CD than a hard disc to store it on.

But what that failed to take into account was the steady and precipitous reduction in the price per Mbyte of hard disc storage that would take place over the next few decades. Today we have reached the point where you can buy a 1 Terabyte hard disc for around $80; that means the cost to store the contents of an entire CD as MP3 files is about $0.005 — and still dropping.

The CD therefore stands as a wonderful symbol of the music industry’s inability to see the deeper, underlying trends in technology, and where they would take us. Back then, it meant that nobody was worried about the idea that people would copy digital files from CDs and share them, because they forgot that technology would make possible tomorrow the things that seemed impossible today. Now it means the copyright industries are still trying to preserve unsustainable 20th century business models instead of planning for the incredible technologies we will have in 10, 20 or even 30 years time. They only have to look at the history of the CD and digital piracy to see just how far things can go — and how wrong our current assumptions can be.

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Comments on “30 Years Of The CD, Of Digital Piracy, And Of Music Industry Cluelessness”

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148 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

“The CD therefore stands as a wonderful symbol of the music industry’s inability to see the deeper, underlying trends in technology,”

Are you suggesting they should have found a way to make each some 4TB big, to stop piracy? 😉

Seriously though, you can get really caught up in looking at the delivery method and totally forget about the product. People don’t by shiny plastic discs to decorate their rooms, their buy them for the music on them.

It’s all about the music, hard disk size isn’t relevant to people’s enjoyment of the music, or desire to have it. It’s a red herring to even go down that road.

Kyle Reynolds Conway (profile) says:

Re: Re:

My reaction to that line in the article was simply that it was a bit unfair. I mean, really, how could the music industry have known that PC’s would dominate, hard drives would exponentially grow in size and lower in cost, copying & compression would be simplified for teenagers, and we’d share bits and bytes from the comfort of our cushions with complete strangers internationally at dizzying speeds.

I’m not saying the industry has been *smart* about much, but I don’t see how they could have predicted the past 30 years with any accuracy (and I wouldn’t want the transition to digital changed if they could have predicted all this).

The real issue is their insistence that the digital reality somehow play by physical rules. That misses all the benefits and opportunities that make my mother say “It’s the Jetsons” in disbelief about video chat, while penalizing an entire generation for being excited by–and interfacing with–21st century realities.

The history is nice–and I’m glad they didn’t see it coming–I’m just not sure how they could have.

Chancius (user link) says:

Re: Re: Re:

According to the book Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner, there were staff at the major labels who not only foresaw the rise of the internet and mp3s, but were very interested to involve their companies in this new venture. Most of the stories resulted in the higher ups not being interested at all and were completely fine with the status quo, but a few important key players in charge even admitted that they knew so little about technology and computers that they didn’t even know who to turn to when it came to the internet, websites, and mp3s. The world and their industry changed so fast that they had no grasp on it. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not the only reason the majors aren’t doing the numbers they once did, but it was very enlightening to discover this straight from the horses mouth!

Free album download at http://www.facebook.com/chancius

Richard (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:

My reaction to that line in the article was simply that it was a bit unfair. I mean, really, how could the music industry have known that PC’s would dominate, hard drives would exponentially grow in size and lower in cost, copying & compression would be simplified for teenagers, and we’d share bits and bytes from the comfort of our cushions with complete strangers internationally at dizzying speeds.

Well Moore’s law was already well known in 1980 and had been going strong for around 15 years.

Andrei Sakharov had already predicted the world wide web.

The internet already existed.

Josef Anvil (profile) says:

Re: Huh ???

I’m not sure you read the article or comprehended it. There is no red herring.

The article explains that the reason there was no copy protection on CDs, is because there was not enough storage space in the consumer world to make copying feasible. Hard disk space is not relevant to people enjoying music, but it was relevant when deciding whether or not to release a product that could be easily copied. If the cost of the copy is several times that of just buying a new original, then there is no need to worry about copying.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Huh ???

Still a red herring. The reality is that digital can be copied, and someone would figure out a way. The lack of copy protection is much more attributed to the relatively low tech standards of the day, and the limited processing available to playback a CD.

The real issue in the end is that computers ended up with CD drives (best way to distribute software), and it wasn’t long before people were trying to figure out ways to copy the music and move it to their hard drives. The rest is history – but still not the point.

All of that concentrates on the delivery system, and forgets that people don’t want to copy a random bunch of 1s and 0s for fun. They want the music, the music is key. 78 record, album, 45 single, 8 track, cassette, CD, digital, or brain wave injection, the song remains the same. Focusing exclusively on the distribution side of the deal is probably the best way possible to entirely miss the point of music.

I can’t imagine why Techdirt spends tons of time on the distribution, and none of the time on the music.

PaulT (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Huh ???

“I can’t imagine why Techdirt spends tons of time on the distribution, and none of the time on the music.”

Several reasons. The first is the one that’s most obvious – while there’s plenty of great music out there, it’s the marketing and distribution methods that need work. The problem is how to get music into the hands of potential fans in the way they want it, not the music itself.

On top of that, this isn’t a music blog. This is a blog for comment on stories about legal, technical and business issues, which sometimes happens to include those of the music industry. The genre, production style or quality of music being discussed is irrelevant to the scope here. There’s plenty of other blogs that focus solely on the music if that’s what you want.

The third is that the distribution IS the story nowadays. From legal online alternatives to SOPA to torrents to CD sales statistics, every problem story has to do with the distribution of the music. You don’t read too many stories about problems with the creation and recording of music, because that’s not the side of the process that’s having so many problems recently.

Oh, and if you think that CD drives on computers was the big problem, you’re the one chasing a red herring…

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Huh ???

Another stunning post. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up:

“Oh, and if you think that CD drives on computers was the big problem, you’re the one chasing a red herring…”

No, I didn’t say it was “THE” problem, it just happened to be the way that CD drives actually really got wide purchase in the marketplace. At the time (back before you were born, I am sure), people were way more likely to have a CD drive on their computer than a CD player in their house. The prices for a naked CD drive in a computer was much lower than a dressed up player model for your home. It didn’t take long for that to change.

CD burners were also a big deal, the ability for a computer to have two CD drives, one reader and one burner, and to knock out decent digital copies much faster than the play time was another significant part of how CD drives changed piracy.

“The third is that the distribution IS the story nowadays. “

No, you guys are making it the story. The story is the music, and for many, the incredible slowdown in production. While some areas are turning stuff out quickly (most of it seems to be quickly forgotten… sad that), the main areas of music such as rock, R&B, and top40 style play lists are often very short of new material. When you have less to distribute, then distribution is only a sideline story.

Remember, the distribution changes, but the song remains the same.

“On top of that, this isn’t a music blog.”

Well, considering the music industry appears to be topic number 1, it’s hard to imagine in not being. I am not talking about music reviews, as much as a more open scope look at music industry as a whole. The myopic stare at the navel of distribution really kills most decent dicussions, because it seems too many here are focused on the rote process of distribution, and not those of actually assuring there is a product.

“The first is the one that’s most obvious – while there’s plenty of great music out there, it’s the marketing and distribution methods that need work.”

Correction: There is plenty of music out there. Greatness isn’t that obvious.

I left your first point for last because you almost hit it on the head, and then promptly got lost again. “marketing and distribution” doesn’t mean only distribution. If it was only about distribution, every band in the world would be equally well known everywhere, and everyone would have their music already. The distribution allows for that. So clearly, the getting the music to the fan / consumer as a pure rote process is more than handled. Spending time refining the process isn’t going to do much at this point, it’s all but perfected already.

Marketing is really the key in the game, and marketing starts with… product.

Ignoring product, and ignoring the effect of product on the rest of the process is to entirely miss the point of the process. There seems to be a denial here that the product matters at all, yet we know how product and the marketing of it are the principal reason why the labels are still the top dogs by far, and the material they distribution commercially is some of the widest pirated stuff as well.

It’s all about the product. The rest is the greasy bits that are unimportant without it.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Huh ???

Marketing is really the key in the game, and marketing starts with… product.

Ignoring product, and ignoring the effect of product on the rest of the process is to entirely miss the point of the process.

All true. Marketing is only successful if you have a thing to sell.

There seems to be a denial here that the product matters at all, yet we know how product and the marketing of it are the principal reason why the labels are still the top dogs by far, and the material they distribution commercially is some of the widest pirated stuff as well.

Product and marketing are the key reason the big producers are on the top. And piracy and counterfeiting are responsible for hundreds of consumer deaths.

It if often said that a good salesman can sell you your own watch, for twice what you initially paid for it. The product is important, and (honest) marketing depends on the inherent salability of the product.

Marketing takes something sellable, and makes it more appealing. Add a cartoon character, make silly commercials, double the price, and you can make a killing on Cardboard-Os, even though they come from the exact same production line that makes Generic Cardboard Rings.

The labels don’t have the market cornered on quality/salability. They certainly have sellable product, but the key culprit is the marketing. For the longest time, they had the market cornered on marketing – if they didn’t push it, it didn’t sell. They’re losing their stranglehold there. Quality aside, we would have never heard of Gotye or PSY if they retained the stranglehold on marketing.

The labels have a solid position from inertia, but the edifice is crumbling. Selling yourself on any degree of scale has always been about getting the attention of the curators. The labels had dominance because they controlled the curators. They’re losing control because they still think their curators are the only curators.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Huh ???

“78 record, album, 45 single, 8 track, cassette, CD, digital, or brain wave injection, the song remains the same. Focusing exclusively on the distribution side of the deal is probably the best way possible to entirely miss the point of music.”

Huh. Last I checked, this article wasn’t about the point of music, it was about industries failing to adapt. The rest of your points stand fairly well however. DRM may or may not have been beyond the capabilities of the playback hardware at the time, and I’m in no position to make a call on that, but it’s certainly worth considering. If your CD players cost an extra 100$ for this ‘functionality’, they would have sunk their own product after all.

“I can’t imagine why Techdirt spends tons of time on the distribution, and none of the time on the music.”

That one is easy. Techdirt discusses tech, not music. Music is completely irrelevant to the point of tech dirt. HOW you get your music is relevant. You may have taken a wrong turn at the lolcats if you ended up here. For future reference, turn right at the lolcats to get to music blogs/news. Turning left gets you to tech blogs/news.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Huh ???

“That one is easy. Techdirt discusses tech, not music. Music is completely irrelevant to the point of tech dirt. HOW you get your music is relevant.”

yes, but in a discussion of successful business models and future planning, you have to consider the whole thing, not just the parts you like. Distribution of nothing leads to nothing.

” You may have taken a wrong turn at the lolcats if you ended up here. For future reference, turn right at the lolcats to get to music blogs/news. Turning left gets you to tech blogs/news.”

No, rather, I remember that I had to walk past some stuff to get to this point, and without it, this wouldn’t be relevant. A discussion that tries to define success only be distribution is doomed to be nothing but a series of red herrings, each more magnificent than the last, because you forget that the people want the music, not the method.

So yes, discussion the methods are fun. Understanding the method as party of a larger process is key.

JEDIDIAH says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Eviscerating the times because you're looking at the sports section...

> yes, but in a discussion of successful business models and future planning, you have to consider the whole thing,

That’s another article.

You’re basically whining that the New York Times doesn’t have news on world events while responding to a Sports article.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Huh ???

“yes, but in a discussion of successful business models and future planning, you have to consider the whole thing, not just the parts you like. Distribution of nothing leads to nothing.”

What does the end ‘product’ have to do with staying current on technology and trying to make technology work FOR you instead of AGAINST you? The ‘product’ exists. It IS. Every single publisher can disappear in a giant ball of flame right now, and their product will STILL exist. “Music” is completely irrelevant here, and only shows up because this is about the music INDUSTRY.

I honestly can’t figure out why you want to talk about music here anyways. The product exists, and there is great demand for said product. The major publishers aren’t having problems propping up their business model because no one likes Justin Beiber (Hint: Just because you hate him doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a large market that loves him).

The only reason “music” can enter this discussion is if you want to push some sort of “I hate popular music” agenda and blame music that everyone else loves for a failed business model.

The product is a pure given. Why do you want to discuss it here? Go to a music site to discuss the music of music. Here, at best, you might get the technology of music.

Richard (profile) says:

Re: Re:

It’s all about the music, hard disk size isn’t relevant to people’s enjoyment of the music, or desire to have it. It’s a red herring to even go down that road.

No delivery system – no music – quite simple really – how come you don’t get it?

(Unless of course you finally realised the consequences of the fact that LIVE music can’t be pirated)

LivingInNavarre (profile) says:

Re: Re:

Speaking of delivery method…I grew up in the days of the first CDs. I remember all the marketing about how the change to CD was going to bring the price down.
Funny, after a few years and CDs had gone mainstream the price of CDs didn’t go down. In fact they went up even after the distributors admitted the cost of manufacturing them was a fraction of the previous formats.
And when they could no longer justify the high cost of a CD album that only contain one cover song they roll out the ‘enhanced’ CD’s…which also contained the infamous rootkits.
There is no argument that can be made about how filesharing is hurting the big music houses that will make me feel sorry for them. They have been ruthless in maximizing their profit and jealously guard antiquated business models.
If the music companies had spent their money on a new distribution system in stead of buying laws and congressman they might have become a viable profit center instead of an antiquated cash cow that requires convoluted laws just to exist.

Anonymous Coward says:

I know you love to use the word “share”, but in the case of music that is illegally copied the correct term is “distribute”. “Share” is typically associated with a small set of personal friends. “Distribute” is typically associated with the world at large. CDs were often shared. Vinyls were often shared. Tapes were often shared. Digital rips shipped off the “The Land of Torrents and the Like” is not at all even close to being “shared”.

PaulT (profile) says:

Re: Re:

“”Share” is typically associated with a small set of personal friends. “Distribute” is typically associated with the world at large.”

Would you mind linking to the dictionary that states that? The ones written in the English language, rather than the industry sycophant dialect you seem to speak, state something rather different.

Wally (profile) says:

"Pirating" Chipmonk music old school...and fun

Before you could share MP3’s in the mid to late 90’s, we had boom boxes with tape recorders in them. It took a bit longer then than it did now. An old and fun trick I did with the Titanic sound track was record “My Heart Will Go On” and then enable the high speed dubbing feature in the recording deck of the boom box (open latch, find easily tripped piece of plastic, hold it and press record) and play the song in high pitch (sounds like an 80’s pop song done by chipmunks).

On the flip side if you grew up in a house like mine where most of the wiring was done in the 1970’s with outlets attached to switches, and one of them just happened to be a light dimmer, you could turn on High Speed dubbing and dim the switch to make Cher sound like a man (Believe was the song).

Either way it was fun to mess around with that kind if thing. I was very grateful we could share tapes and swap CD’s.

JEDIDIAH says:

Re: Re: Re:2 "Pirating" Chipmonk music old school...and fun

Freeloaders simply don’t care about the quality of what they are “stealing”. So the whole distinction between “lossless” and not is entirely artificial. It’s a fantasy created by A&R men to pretend that piracy today is any different than piracy a generation ago.

Some of us recorded from boom box to boom box and we didn’t care.

If the rise of MP3’s and Netflix streaming have taught us anything, it is that most people simply don’t give a crap about quality.

It’s the social networking that’s really important (if anything). Rubes have access to old school bulletin boards with a much bigger audience.

jupiterkansas (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 "Pirating" Chipmonk music old school...and fun

I abandoned cassettes when I could copy onto CD-R simply because it sounded better. Plus it was many years before there were reliable CD players for cars, which kept cassettes alive.

And my Netflix streaming looks awesome. Better than DVD. It’s Youtube that usually looks like crap.

Quality isn’t everything, but it’s something.

Richard (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 "Pirating" Chipmonk music old school...and fun

Freeloaders simply don’t care about the quality of what they are “stealing”. So the whole distinction between “lossless” and not is entirely artificial. It’s a fantasy

Thank you – you just demonstrated how clueless you are.

The quality degradation from ONE copy is nothing to worry about – true – but here we are talking about many generations of copy. Digital files can be copied and re-copied forever and always remain the same. It IS a huge difference.

Why do you think that the record companies freaked out over DAT – demanding such huge restrictions on it that it was stillborn as a technology?

JEDIDIAH says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Let them eat dirt! again

> Why do you think that the record companies freaked out over DAT

They’re idiots just like you are.

You are applying an industry insiders perspective to people that are more interested in price and convenience and will gladly tolerate tinny little transistor radios.

That’s why no “high quality audio” formats ever gained any traction. That’s why low bitrate MP3 became the defacto standard.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

Wally, I found out why I have been targetted. It was a LIE. I helped the police put a couple brothers of someone in jail. She then somehow got in a position of power and has been making my life hell. I figured out who set me up but I ended up on Obama’s death list.

THEY tortured me and twisted me into what I am. I NEVER DID ANYTHING TO ANYONE. I’M ON THE DEATH LIST. WHAT DO I DO?

PaulT (profile) says:

Interesting take on the subject – only, I disagree. File sharing isn’t just driven by the ease of ripping, it’s the desire to share and obtain music. The need to preview albums, share the music you enjoy, copy to a more convenient format and the rest would still be there even without the CD. In fact, once digital players became possible, file sharing may have been even more popular without the CD as it would be so much easier to grab a track that had already been ripped rather than rip your own.

On top of that, if copy protection and region coding and the like had been implemented, I guarantee it would be as effective as the ones on a standard DVD. In other words, when the need arose they would be easily bypassable and barely a speed bump in the road to those wishing to use the CD in a way not pre-ordained by the labels. Mid-90s DRM on DVDs only acts as an mild inconvenience to paying customers, and isn’t even noticed by pirates. I doubt that early 80s DRM on CD would have been even that effective.

Anonymous Coward says:

The basic problem facing the content industry is that they think that they they provide content to a passive audience. Culture is always participatory to a greater or lessor degree, and people share the pieces of culture that they particularly enjoy. People also use ideas, and pieces of the culture around them to make various forms of statement. Modern technology makes it much easier for people to be active in culture, and this is in conflict with the passive model of the content industry.
For the content industry to block videos like this puts in in conflict with most of society. Such use of music does not in any way effect the conten industries income.
This article is closer to the reality of file sharing, than the its is theft of the content providers. With the use of probable music players largely replacing radio, file sharing, either over the Internet or by direct connection and portable media is the way that people discover music. They go on to buy the music that they like, but cannot afford to every track that they only listen to once.
The legacy content industry doe snot know how its industry actually works at the customer level, and will eventually lose to direct to fan models if it keeps on its current course. With the dropping costs and increasing capacity of flash devices, the direct to fan model could work without the Internet.

The Real Michael says:

To be fair, even if they stuck with vinyls up until the PC boom, people would’ve simply recorded the music manually via an audio port, so the entire premise of the article becomes moot.

Even though both the movie and video game industry put out products which required more storage capacity, that still didn’t curb digital transfers. Digital storage costs less and less; you can buy TB’s worth of storage for less than $100. Besides, even if tomorrow the music industry’s new standard somehow took up 100+ TB, people would simply down-convert it to wav/flac/mp3 and that would be the end of it.

Instead of music labels trying to wage war against technology, which is a fool’s errand to begin with, perhaps they should rethink their entire strategy. What do they have to sell besides a song or music album? There must be a lot of unexplored opportunities if they’d care enough to venture out and discover them. But no …they’re content with rushing product to the market, appealing to the lowest common denominator, so who’s fault is it when sales take a nosedive?

How much longer will this charade with the music labels continue? How many more times will they hawk their back catalogs and force-feed the market its patented brand of corporate-manufactured garbage? …Then again, who cares either way. If they want to fail, let ’em. Someone else will pick up the the ball and run with it, similar to how Nintendo resurrected the VG industry after Atari crashed it back in the 80’s.

JEDIDIAH says:

Re: Been there, done that.

> To be fair, even if they stuck with vinyls up until the PC boom, people would’ve simply recorded the music manually via an audio port, so the entire premise of the article becomes moot.

I did that with some snippets from Star Trek movies back in the day. The movies were on VHS and I used an 8-bit sound blaster sound card to do the capture.

I still have those sound files 20 years later.

Anonymous Coward says:

i know it is unusual, but the public were lied to by the entertainment industries (sarc comment). after all the hype about the new, indestructible compact discs, it took very little time to find out that wasn’t the case. had they have been how they were advertised, there would be no need to take a backup of any disc, so basically, the whole backup scenario has been caused by the industries themselves and on that basis alone, there should be no restrictions to copying discs for personal use

That Anonymous Coward (profile) says:

And after the stunning revelations of what happened with CD’s the best answer they came up for the next generation of plastic discs they planned to sell was CSS.
It takes something like 10 lines of code to render it useless.

They spent more time figuring out how to stuff more advertising into customers living rooms, and warnings that making a copy of something you paid for is a crime.

More development was spent on making sure they could make things unskippable than protecting the content. They assumed no one would defeat their system, it would be to hard to do.

They cranked that dial up with BluRay plastic discs, now they have control over how and where you can watch it. They went out of their way to make the technology less computer friendly and alienating the people willing to pay them money even more. People purchased new movies only to find out their $300+ player won’t play it because they refuse to release updates for the security on that one, but buy version 2.0 and you can watch them… until the next new version comes out.

They are blinded by their need for control rather than any thought of would this piss me off if I was the consumer?

They see people who pay them money as the enemy, because everyone just wants to “steal” from them. The more they do to lock it down the more people they push over to the other side.

Coyo Stormbringer (user link) says:

The CD is older than me?!

I cant believe the optical disk is older than I am! Generally in agreement with the article, the concept of monopolistic publishing and controlled distribution is an ancient concept, and will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history.

The second content creators, in order words, authors, artists, and studios, begin catching on to the patterns of technological progress, the vast majority of those actually responsible for creating new content will abandon the “big labels” and self-publish, promoting themselves with the newer digital commission model, pay-what-you-want model, or freemium/subscription style business models.

the old control-based publisher business model relying on the purchase of physical medium riddled with copy-restrictions is going to fail soon enough, despite any lobbying and arm-twisting the old media conglomerates may attempt.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: The CD is older than me?!

The biggest limitation in the old model is the restriction on what gets published. It works where there is competition for manufacturing resources, but fails when self publishing is easy. While this may reduce the average income per work, by removing the middleman the creator can end up better off as they get more of what the fans play.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

This would have a fatal problem for the publishers, no listening without paying, and unless all content is under DRM control people will only try out and support creators that do not use DRM. Tne legacy players do not realize how mush their industry is depend on try before buy. T.V and radio are more or less try before buy for music, so long as the subscription/license is cheap enough.
The subscription services are conspiring with the legacy publishers to spread content out over the available channel in an effort to get people to subscribe for more channels. This is pushing people to cheaper alternatives, and piracy.

Spike (profile) says:

DRM is simply a massive waste of man-hours and drives up prices of product due to the DRM scheme always having massive licensing fees and development costs.

It costs a fortune and it isn’t effective, so what is the point. You have to laugh at the blu-ray guys continuing to create new DRM schemes at our expense, annoying us with required firmware upgrades for every brand new disk, all while charging extortionist prices for physical disks.

Whats to love here?

Anonymous Coward says:

“Freeloaders simply don’t care about the quality of what they are “stealing”. So the whole distinction between “lossless” and not is entirely artificial.”

Only the most dedicated music lover can tell the difference between a quality ripped mp3 and the most awesomest of awesome lossless codec. And even then, it takes a decent helping of expensive hardware. News flash, the other 99.9% of us aren’t trained to hear the almost indistinguishable difference *AND* we don’t have hardware that plays back well enough for it to actually be distinguishable.

Of course, most older mp3’s were pretty crappy rips and anyone can tell the difference. Not all mp3 rips are created equal. If you don’t have high end hardware and can tell the difference between your CD and your mp3, it’s a poor rip, and certainly isn’t the fault of the format. So stop making it sound like the plebes just aren’t sophisticated enough to enjoy proper music.

As the tools exist and proliferate to make better copies, the average quality rises. Boombox to boombox recording happened because they didn’t have better tools. Poor quality mp3 rips showed up because they didn’t have better tools. Now, you can get mp3’s that sound close enough to the same to a CD that very very few people can notice any difference at all, and even then, they’ll misjudge which is the CD and which is the mp3 sometimes.

Anonymous Coward says:

get real.

I take it you weren’t alive during those times to understand those times. It wasn’t a huge blunder. In fact the recording industry made a killing during those times. Even when the first CD-R’s came out that were $1500, the CD-R discs themselves costs as much as prerecorded disc. Hard drive space was equally expensive. Even if you forsaw those items getting much much cheaper, that still doesn’t explain file sharing. At that time it was still inconsevable that people would share music on the internet. Most people didn’t even know what the fucking internet was. Wake up to reality and do some research before you write some scathing criticism on something you don’t know anything about.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: get real.

At that time they complained continually about piracy, as the cassette recorder was available. I saw an article somewhere that suggests that the major piracy problem is removable media, which include connecting mp3 players and phones to a computer.
If the problem is stated as music copying and sharing, then it became a problem with the cassette recorder. It has not destroyed the music industry in its 40+ years of existence.
The record industry started complaining about piracy as soon as the cassette became marginally suitable for music recording.

Frost (profile) says:

An opportunity wasted as well.

CD’s were also created to be a better sounding medium than vinyl. Especially dynamic range was a holy grail on vinyl, albums were made to the greatest dynamic range achievable in that medium.

Then the CD came along and the earliest generations of material was awe-inspiring in that regard. A drum was a drum, that stood out the way a percussion instrument should. And then some jackass figured they’d compress the sound to make it sound “louder” so they stood out when people did trial listening in stores, which leads us to today when the music is so compressed it’s total trash, a mush of compressed noise instead of a proper dynamic piece of music.

The industry should have just focused on quality and continued to focus on quality and not worried about whether or not it could be copied. People buy stuff because they feel it’s worth buying, but these days not even audiophiles buy mainstream CD’s, because they sound like crap. Well, that and because they hold artists that are crap too, if we’re talking major labels.

Milton Freewater says:

Re:

“I know you love to use the word “share”, but in the case of music that is illegally copied the correct term is “distribute”. “Share” is typically associated with a small set of personal friends. “Distribute” is typically associated with the world at large. CDs were often shared. Vinyls were often shared. Tapes were often shared. Digital rips shipped off the “The Land of Torrents and the Like” is not at all even close to being “shared”.”

All of these are examples of illegal copying as defined by the RIAA.

You are completely, perfectly ignorant of your side of this debate, let alone about why TechDirt “loves to use” the terms they do, let alone why people “pirate” and who they “pirate” from.

I agree with you that mass distribution is wrong in a way that sharing with friends is not. But I’m not going to even bother discussing the subject with you.

Mr. Applegate says:

Um, who says CDs couldn't be copied?

Of course they could be copied, just not in a digital format! Having come from the Pre CD era, I can assure you that CD’s were copied, quite regularly, just like LP’s and 45s (and 78s if your that old before them). They were copied and shared with friends, some even sold the copies they made.

However, rather than a digital copy, it was an analog copy made to cassette tape (and before that reel tape). Copying of music has been going on since at least the 1960s! In fact the CD’s forced the tape industry to come out with metal particle tapes (as opposed to oxide tapes) to get better quality.

The music industry introduced the CD which was a huge improvement in quality, and eventually people weren’t happy with lesser quality tape copies, so they would buy the CD even though they may have it on tape.

The same is true for movies. Once VHS (and even Betamax)tapes came out they were quite routinely copied.

Even from the 70s the copying of music has been a wide spread ‘problem’ (used to, for the most part, be called fair use). What the music and movie industries have failed to understand is that the ‘illegal activity’ actually ends up helping them far more than it hurts them. Why? Because in many cases those who get a low quality copy (MP3) will end up buying a high quality copy.

Well that would be true with two changes that the Music Industry (and Movie Industry) could make today, that would greatly reduce the desire to illegally copy music.

1. Provide High Quality lossless files for a reasonable price, probably around 25 – 50 cents a song. No they wouldn’t lose money. In the days of CD’s and Tapes before them the industry had to pay for manufacturing of the CD’s, manufacturing of the Album Art and inserts, jewel cases, assembly, packaging, warehousing, delivery… There were risks if the album didn’t sell as projected. Today other than the recording and mastering costs (which are negligible compared to all the other costs of providing a physical real product) the industry has no real costs. However, to date they have tried to maintain the cost for a digital copy at or above the cost to provide a physical copy.

2. Eliminate DRM. DRM is a huge deterrent to a lot of people (including me). I refuse to be treated like a criminal for spending my money on a product. Almost every version of DRM ever put out has been broken within hours, so all DRM does is punish those willing to pay for your product.

I no longer buy music or movies due to the DRM. In fact I also only very rarely buy software that is DRM’d. Preferring instead to install Open Source and send a donation to the Creator / Maintainers. See I am willing to pay, but I am not willing to pay for the privilege of being treated like a criminal. In fact worse than a criminal who is presumed innocent until proven guilty. When you purchase a DRM’d product you are treated as a known thief with 0 rights. I refuse to pay to be treated like that.

The music industry made their dinner, now they are choking on it and that is just fine by me. I have no intention of performing the Heimlich on them.

Anonymous Coward says:

Huh ???

“What does the end ‘product’ have to do with staying current on technology and trying to make technology work FOR you instead of AGAINST you? “

For staying current, it’s not really an issue in many senses. There is no benefit to rushing towards the next failing format (the music industury still remember such wonderful ideas as 8 track and DAT tapes. The music doesn’t require bleeding edge technology to deliver.

Since most music is currently available for sale online, they have clearly moved with technology. They aren’t ahead of it, they are riding along with it. I don’t really think that anything they would have done differently would change the piracy landscape.

“The product is a pure given. Why do you want to discuss it here? “

It’s not to discuss product by itself. Rather, the understanding that the product is often the reason why things are either successful or not. A great product and a horrible distribution method may still work out, while a horrible product with great distribution may end up as nothing. So any discussion of the business methods in play must start by looking at the source material (and really the artist that made them) to see if it’s related to profile.

nasch (profile) says:

Huh ???

I don’t really think that anything they would have done differently would change the piracy landscape

That’s another funny one!

A great product and a horrible distribution method may still work out

Only if there’s no better distribution method competing with it. The record labels seem to either understand this or have been just forced into it by Apple and Amazon, but the movie studios still don’t seem to get it. There will always be another system distributing the same content, so theirs needs to be at least that good to compete.

The Real Michael says:

Re:

Unfortunately, many independent labels are owned, either fully or partially, by the major labels, yet still maintain their “indie” moniker due to its preceived appeal. And most of those labels that aren’t owned probably wouldn’t turn down a good offer. Therefore, so long as an artist is under contract with an indie label, they’re at risk of being absorbed by a major label at any given time.

If an artist likes artistic freedom, it’s best to remain independent of any label involvement.

anon says:

Re:

Sorry but you are wrong, If i put a cd on a torrent site and share the file with someone even if it is someone i do not know i am sharing, if i ask for any payment to allow anyone to share my cd i am then distributing, a very big difference and one that the Industry should take note of as this is what they are fighting.

If anything they need to become more innovative, as we have seen on this site and many others there are a large number of ways they could still make a lot of money for there artists, but the greed to make all that money now immediately and not to allow the market to slowly start supporting a new system is not in there book of common sense.

If anything as people look and invent new ways to share , some that will eventually make sharing anonymous , they lose the chance to start growing a new system to generate money, and as with every modern invention, once it is created there is no putting it back in it’s box.

I suspect that the movie/music/book/game/software producers have a few years to implement a system that provides what the customer wants at a reasonable price, yes they might not make as much as they did in the past but something is better than nothing.

And before anyone says different just take a look at Steam, they have cornered the games market and made more money for the producers of games than the producers could ever have made otherwise, to the extent that people are buying games they possibly will never play, and why? …becasue the sytem is easy to use and works and is not so expensive that the majority of the population cannot pay.

Now the movies industry has a challenge , but with the fact that they only release around 10 real hits every year for the last few years i suspect they will have a bigger challenge.

Music is also easy to resolve if the studios just got toghter and created a site that sold or made available every single track every created and charged a very low price.

Software, well we see what is happening with mobile phones where software is free and then a fee charged for wither the next few levels or for dlc.Or software programs that are a few cents or a few dollars, the days of high prices for software is over but happily more programmers can now make money from a very easy distribution path i.e the app stores.

And finally books. Here i have a problem as the publishers and authors seem to feel they are owed a living, just because they write. Yes it does take time to write a book and the ideas are sometimes hard or complicate to put down on paper that the average person can understand or have fun understanding.If anything i see the publishers and authors having to swallow there pride and accept that the cost of moving into the new age is going to be books that are very very cheap, and free to share. And if they cannot make money from that they will be one of the millions of writers who have never made a penny from writing.

Anonymous Coward says:

Huh ???

We tend not to talk about the product because the product is what it is. Distribution, in this day, involves a LOT of technology, however. Which would you expect on a technology blog? Seriously, trying to redirect the discussion away from what actually brings most of us here is a little strange. Sure you aren’t looking for a copyright discussion, instead?

Anonymous Coward says:

Huh ???

“Only if there’s no better distribution method competing with it.”

You missed the point. Regardless of their being a better distribution method (and that is debatable, as always), a great musical product will always find it’s way to the people who want it. A crappy musical product, even with the best distribution in the universe, is still crap.

Ask Marcus. He has the whole internet to distribute his stuff, and guess what: nobody wants it.

All the distribution in the world doesn’t mean shit if the product is shit.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Maybe the purpose of the blog *should* be music, but it isn’t. I don’t know how it got the way it was. In any case, once it got this way, it attracted a lot of tech type people who only seem to be interested in laws and news events around copyright and so forth. It gets pretty boring and technical, I can tell you. Definitely not for everyone. If you want to chill out and connect with music…I dunno. You won’t be able to relax here enough to do that. You could try.

JEDIDIAH says:

Re: Not quite.

Decryption tech for BD is not nearly as widespread as it is for DVD. BD is designed to be updated. So you don’t just need some software. You need a “service”. Also, the best known providers of this sort of thing are hiding outside of US and European jurisdiction. That’s hardly reassuring.

It exists but it exist in a grey area and the tech isn’t being printed on the back of t-shirts like it was for DVD.

Still more trouble than your average n00b is likely to tolerate.

The eejit (profile) says:

Um, who says CDs couldn't be copied?

There is literally only ONE form of DRM that I use, and that’s by a small company you might recognize: Valve. Because, for all its flaws, it is still the most workable form of DRM for video games. It also provides value in being a place to keep all your games…for as long as the service exists.

Wally (profile) says:

Re: Um, who says CDs couldn't be copied?

The GCF files act like CD’s which is why for Valve-made games like Half-Life 2 and Portal and others that used CD checking DRM work they way they do on Steam. Most non-valve games work offline as a result. Another great digital district site that actually has no DRM in any of the games is GOG.com. You can download games on your account to any computer any time as many copies as you like.

The Real Michael says:

An opportunity wasted as well.

Vinyls can have much greater dynamic range and a warmer sound quality than a CD. But of course now with computers it’s possible to reproduce high quality music at 24-bit, 92,000KHz. Most people, however, are not audiophiles, so they probably wouldn’t care either way (think SACD).

You’re right about the loudness war. The geniuses over at the major labels decided that music wasn’t loud enough, hence the ‘brick wall of death’ you get when you view most new songs via a DAW. They need to do this in order to compensate for an obvious lack of skill in songwriting, composing and performance. It’s much like someone who takes a picture, uploads it to their PC and then turns up the brightness/contrast in order to hide flaws and blemishes, destroying the integrity of the picture in the process.

Eric Blair says:

You forgot a factor

Ignoring the general failure of media company ‘protection schemes’ there is a factor I did not see in the responses.

The cost to consumers for that ‘protection’ would have been in more expensive machines to decode the protection.

Why would Sony et al want to raise their cost of production, or in fact be unable to deliver a product when they did if the product would have had to decode the CD data?

Author, get back to us once you have a memo from inside the firms backing up what you are just guessing at.

herodotus (profile) says:

Re: Re: An opportunity wasted as well.

“That’s nothing more than a glorified opinion piece with zero relevant facts to back it up.”

It’s a glorified opinion piece written by an electrical engineer who is a member of the AES. I provided it as a form of shorthand.

I have never read a single statement by any reputable EE that stated that the dynamic range of a vinyl recording was superior to that of a CD. Not one. All of the tales of digital audio being inferior to vinyl are written by audiophiles who rely, not on science, but on subjective opinions and informal listening tests.

Furthermore, the era of vinyl records was conterminous with the era of magnetic tape, which is known, conclusively, to have a dynamic range of 55 dB without resorting to companding, while the cd has 90-96 dB

And a youtube video about frequency range differences is completely irrelevant to the claim you were making, which was about dynamic range.

The Real Michael says:

Re: Re: Re: An opportunity wasted as well.

My mistake — greater frequency range. Even so, analog is more accurate when it comes to waveform reproduction. Nevertheless, as I said, most people are not audiophiles and therefore don’t care either way. Heck, they don’t care if they’re listening to a .wav file or a 320kbps .mp3 which truncates the frequency range. A simple solution would be to record a vinyl direct to PC at 24bit, 96,000KHz, thereby accurately preserving the sound quality and warmth.

nasch (profile) says:

Huh ???

A crappy musical product, even with the best distribution in the universe, is still crap.

Correct, but you’re arguing with a strawman. Nobody, anywhere, is saying that people are happy with music they don’t like as long as the distribution is good. I think several people have already explained to you why the quality of the music isn’t the topic here. If you don’t get it by now you probably won’t.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

You’re looking in the wrong dictionary ya dingus. Did you look in a legal volume? It refers to copyright law. e.g. you can watch (“share”) a movie with friends at home, but if you play it to a theatre full of people, that’s “distribution”, and it’s illegal if you don’t own the rights to it.

blatanville (profile) says:

Pricing

As Jaron Lanier pointed out back in the 90s (and, yes, I am aware that Mr. Lanier is something of a crank, and not always correct), the high price of CDs through to the late 90s gave the labels a huge pool of money to work with. The unit cost of making CDs shrank exponentially, but the prices they sold them to retailers didn’t follow the same curve, resulting in massive profits. Some of these profits found their way into the hands of the few sane A&R people out there, allowing them to sign artists from the nascent “alternative” scenes and bring them into the marketing machine that were the major labels.
It could be argued that the CD, and it’s convenience, democratized access to Hi-Fi, and it’s huge profit margin greatly benefited the smaller and middle-ground musical artists by getting them major-market attention they might not have otherwise seen.
As the production costs came down, too, the independent labels were able to find a more competitive ground to work from, enabling them to offer quality goods at reasonable prices while still profiting the label enough to carry on and grow.
And, I suspect that it was mostly the Olde Men at the top of the Major Labels who failed to grasp the potential value of lossless duplication at home.
“Wanna tape an LP? Well, okay, we’ll kick a little, demand a tax on the tape media, and carry on as usual. Wait: They can make a perfect duplicate of a CD? That’s more troubling! What? They can copy a CD, compress it, and transmit it to the rest of the world!? This is WAR!”

disclosure: I worked for HMV Canada for five years in the early-mid 90s. I know what the costs and pricing models looked like in those days, so I know that the majors were making much bank during those years.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Pricing

I remember an album or two that I (silly me) bought on tape instead of CD only to see them go out of print and become no longer available. I have since been able to download those albums and burn them to CD. So it took a few years, but I finally have them on CD.
I also have other things from my youth downloaded and burned off that were never made available on CD, such as the “Star Trek” stories from Power Records (I still have my vinyls of those).

Some Other Guy (profile) says:

30 years? Sheesh that makes me feel old! I remember watching the episode of Tomorrow’s World where they announced the new wonder of the CD, and showed how it was so great at error correcting from radial damage (cunningly not showing how CDs are rubbish at coping with scratches arcing around the disc)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow%27s_World

George Louis (user link) says:

30 Years of Digital and The 92% Solution

There’s a problem that has been ignored by the entire music industry which I believe is really important to music-lovers that I think you might want to investigate. Thank you for your interest. Approximately 32 years ago when digital media was introduced to the music consuming public as a media with “Perfect Sound Forever” the music industry made a huge screw up when it got the playback polarity of digital music on CDs and later DVD, etc reversed (inverted polarity). On a random basis that means that digital media and files are heard in the wrong polarity approximately 85% of the time and either 92% wrong or correct once their audio and video systems are set to a fixed playback polarity.

The bottom line is that the music played in inverted polarity sounds harsh and two dimensional which is probable the major reason that some music-lovers still believe (without knowing the real reason) that analog music media (that plays in the correct polarity over 99.9999 +% of the time and would also sound bad if played in inverted polarity) sounds better than digital media, when in fact it doesn’t sound as good. That often causes music-lovers to spend untold sums of money and time trying to smooth out the edgy and somewhat irritating and flat sound of digital media. This should be an object lesson on how an entire industry with its experts and electrical engineers can get it wrong and not do anything about if for over 32 years and counting!

But there’s some good news here because in many cases, all one has to do is reverse the connections of all their speakers wires at one end only to correct the mistake that’s free for the doing. For more on how do that, see the homepage of my website: http://www.AudioGeorge.com and scroll down to just below the credit cards I accept. Many in the music industry agree with me. I’m know in the industry as The Perfect Polarity Pundit Chief Polarity Buster of the Polarity Police and come companies send me their digital media/components to check its polarity, and do that pro bono for the sake of the music. I’ve written two monographs that go into great detail about the problem at: http://www.ThePolarityList.com, http://www.AbsolutePolarity.com, and http://www.PolarityGeorge.com.

Respectfully submitted,

George S. Louis, Esq., CEO
Digital Systems & Solutions
President San Diego Audio Society (SDAS)
Website: http://www.AudoGeorge.com
Phone: 619-401-9876
1573 Kimberly Woods Dr.
El Cajon, CA 92020-7261

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