Psst, Universal Music, The World Is Global Now
from the learn-to-adapt dept
Is Universal Music really that out of touch with how the world works? It's attacking online video sites that promote its music. It's testing DRM-free music in a way that's likely to fail and apparently wants to claim ownership of CDs it gave away. The company is also trying to push makers of music playing devices to pay Universal a cut for no good reason. The latest may be the best yet, however. Not realizing what a global world we have these days and the easy ability for products in one market to be shipped to another, Universal Music released a CD in Europe only, with a plan to release a US version months later. Yes, this was pretty common for years -- but it's ridiculous to do that these days, because people in the US will still hear about the CD and order it as an import. Now, here's where Universal Music gets even more ridiculous: it's threatening the stores that are selling the import. Again, it seems to think it owns something that it really does not own. And, as the link here points out, all this really does is push customers who actually want to buy the CD to go online and download the music from a file sharing site. That takes a special level of incompetence. First, you make a really bad business decision that doesn't reflect the reality of the market, and then to cover it up, you threaten legal action and drive willing customers away to other sources. Nice work.
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Filed Under: global, music, p2p
Companies: universal music
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Consider SCO.
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Yay for Parallel Importing
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Re: Yay for Parallel Importing
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Cost VS Benefit
So suddenly when a company has to deal with sales of an unpromoted product, which it had no interest to sell in that part of the world, it has to spend some money and effort to block it from causing damage to the official product launch.
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Re: Cost VS Benefit
Movies?? Music?? The promotional campaign may be different but there is no real reason to restrict distribution geographically. (Caveat emptor on the region encoding for DVDs.)
A savvy marketer would actually anticipate that the avant garde set will help pull a release -- exclusivity has usually helped sell things.
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Ownership
Again, it seems to think it owns something that it really does not own.
They do own the recordings. See the Berne Convention
for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of September 9, 1886 and 17 U.S.C. 1. As copyright assignees they have the rights to distribution and recent court decisions in the US, UK and Canada have all declared grey market imports illegal wherever the manufacturer has complained. Stupid? Yes. Wrong? I believe so. But it's the law, nonetheless, at least as written by bought-off legislators and as interpreted by recent courts.
Universal is being stupid on so many levels in so many ways, as demonstrated by some of the examples you linked to. An analogy fails me. But legally -- until their shareholders direct otherwise -- they have every right to be this sort of stupid.
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Re: Ownership
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Re: Ownership
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Left hand.... meet right...
You can see for yourself here
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Re: Left hand.... meet right...
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name change
"Stupid Music" by Universal
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Does it make as little sense to everyone else that you can buy a CD and copy it to your computer or MP3 player (not sure of the legality of that even). Basically you own the CD and the right to use it, in legal ways. However, when you download music, again legally, you can only put it on your computer or in some cases an MP3 player. You don't really have the choice, you have to do what the site that you downloaded it from says. Some of the sites I've seen actually take back the music you legally purchased when and if you cancel your subscription. WTF?! Can they make it any harder to dislike the whole process and remain legit??
buy CD-use anywhere
buy song-barely able to use and lose if you cancel subscription.
WOW this is dumb!
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With local artists, you get fresh, original sounds, and they're so eager to find an audience that they aren't really concerned with how you use their CDs after you buy them.
With home music studios and CD-burning equipment, even new bands can afford to make their own CDs and mp3s, so there's a LOT of good stuff out there.
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to #12
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When they provide music for you to buy, they limit when, where, and how you use the product you purchased.
When they provide music you can use when, where, and how you want to, they charge an arm and a leg for it.
Charging makers of music players a, "cut," is like car oil companies charging car manufacturers a, "cut," because they make a product that uses their gas. It's silly. It's also like phone companies charging phone makers because their product uses the phone lines. Again, stupid.
It is never a sound business practice to over charge for a product, and then make it all but unuseable. Auto makers learned that one the hard way in the 80's by selling expensive cars that were inferior products. Buyers simply went to foreign makers of cheaper, more reliable cars. The music and movie industries are going down the same road. They are making their products less desirable by over charging, and then making it so you can barely use the music/movie. Again, dumb. People are simply leaving the mainstream music and going to indie music and P2P sites. People are fed up with the BS.
You have to please your customers (read: 'the customer is always right') or you will have no customers. I think the vast majority of folks out there would gladly pay a reasonable price for a reasonable product.
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I have a question and I'm showing my ignorance here. If you buy a track from emusic or itms, can you burn it to cd and put it on an MP3 player? Do they limit that or is it like a CD where you can play it on both computers and have a mix CD for each car. I don't even know if those things are technically legal or not, but you can do it.
Educate me, as I've been looking for a good download site where I can play the tracks anywhere, CD OR Mp3 player.
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Re:
iTunes, no, although AIUI you can burn it to a cd and then copy it to an mp3 player.
eMusic, yes, the tracks you get are straight mp3 files with no DRM. You can copy them anywhere, and IIRC the terms of eMusic even say explicitly you can burn them to a cd and copy them to any mp3 player, as long as it's for your own use. (Burning the tracks to cds and handing them out to other people is possible but definitely not kosher.)
the Infamous Joe's statement to the contrary is just wrong, unless you interpret "reasonable price" as "free" or unless you limit yourself to the big labels. (I'm paying $0.25
a track at eMusic, although new subscribers will pay a bit more.) There are other sites besides eMusic where you can get non-DRM tracks from independent labels fairly cheap--there are even some you can get for free, absolutely legally.
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Re: Re:
The problem with eMusic is their selection. They never had anything I wanted.
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XFER any and every..
PS: An app called SENUTI on the mac will allow to xfer songs from any ipod to any other ipod connected to your mac, ie; i have 5 and can connect all at once and xfer any song from any to any even if purchased from itunes.
Guess i better look out for the hit squad for releasing such sensitive info, LOL.
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Dark side
The only place you'll find that, with a reasonable price, is 'illegal' p2p sides and newsgroups.
itunes doesn't have a few DRM free tracks, but at a buck thirty a song, it's not reasonably priced.
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Re: Dark side
Granted I don't use iTunes I used Napster with a program called Sound Taxi so I never had to think about this.
PS. To everyone out there, please use the reply to this comment link that is conveniently placed under every post. it makes reading the replies so much easier.
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Re: Dark side
PS- Using the reply button (as I just did) changes the format of my page to threaded, which I don't like. Now I'm going to have to set it back. *grumble*
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help me i need to get home
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Not the way to go...
Seriously. I only buy used CDs of RIAA backed music (but only as a last resort. I'm not very trusting of buying used music online.) and buy new CDs of any act that is not RIAA backed.
Comment #16: The person who said "the customer is always right" had no way to foresee the audacity of customers these days. I've worked retail and have had customers try to alter price tags in an effort to get an item for cheap. I am all for the customer when the store/company is the one truly at fault but lots of customers today have take that quote way out of context.
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Re: Ownership
mike allen: you're an idiot. No one gives a damn how you think copyrights should work, and I for one am thankful for that; as bad as the system may have been corrupted, it's still at least logical which is more than I'd expect from anything you might devise.
The "stupid law" is nevertheless the law. Copyright is assignable and transferable. The composers and artists you're bleating about assigned the distribution rights (and in many cases, the copyright) to the record label willingly and voluntarily when they signed their contracts. No one forced them to do so; they did it of their own free will.
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Jump to Conclusions Mat!(c)
Well, to be honest, you've misunderstood. He asked for a *good* site to download from, and I said there weren't any that are reasonably priced. Meaning, the reasonably priced ones aren't carrying a good selection (aka, they're not good) and the ones that do carry a large selection also come with DRM and/or an unreasonable price tag. So, I wouldn't really say I was 'just wrong', however, I can see how I could have been misunderstood. :)
This will read all of those cryptic names an "viola" all music is xferable to any and all devices. You people should really do some research before posting stupidity. Have you retards ever heard of google?
Sadly, you're missing the point. We're talking about playing DRM laden songs everywhere. True, DRM notwithstanding, it's fairly simple to get songs from an ipod to a hard drive (I, myself, use Winamp) but until recently, you could not buy a song from itunes and play it in your Zune, or sony mp3 player, or what not. And you could only put it on a set number of computers (3, I think) regardless if you owned 5 computers. DRM is a poor solution to a dying business model that serves only to punish the legit customers and not affect the 'pirates'. So, I think you should be less eager to start calling people names until you're sure you know what we're talking about.
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At last
I've been an Amazon (US) customer since 1999, because it was the only way I could get hold of material that hadn't (yet) been released over here in the UK.
This hasn't gone away - my last purchase from the US was this year - ironically, "Wikinomics".
Now that Universal are targetting Americans in the same way as they've been targetting the rest of us for years, maybe they'll be enough of an "Internet public outcry".
What _really_ annoys me is when it's BBC material I can only get in the US (region 1 DVD), mind :-(
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