Sony, Universal Hope To Beat Piracy With 'Instant Pop' 369
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Britain's two biggest record labels, Sony and Universal, plan to beat music piracy by making new singles available for sale on the day they first hit the airwaves hoping the effort will encourage young people to buy songs they can listen to immediately rather than copying from radio broadcasts online. Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale, a practice known as 'setting up' a record. 'What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of — or had already pirated — new singles,' says David Joseph. Sony, which will start the 'on air, on sale' policy simultaneously with Universal next month, agreed that the old approach was no longer relevant in an age where, according to a spokesman for the music major, 'people want instant gratification.'"
Beating Piracy is easy... (Score:2, Informative)
You know, music that people actually want to BUY.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Adjusting business practices to a changing mark (Score:5, Informative)
Not true.
We jest, but in fact this is precisely how the entertainment industry has worked for decades, if not over a century.
1. New technology which impacts entertainment comes out.
2. Industry fights tooth and nail to eliminate it.
3. Industry adopts it and winds up embracing it so thoroughly that they make even more money than before.
The time between step 2 and 3 varies, but the end result is always the same. The only time this hasn't been the model followed is when the technology is developed hand-in-glove with the entertainment industry (eg. DVDs) or it is only practical for big companies to set up and produce (eg. CDs before the advent of CD burners).
It happened with recorded music (artists complained that nobody would want to see them play, eventually started selling their own music), it happened with radio (who will buy the record if you can just listen to the radio? Eventually the radio became a marketing tool), it happened with videos (who will go to the cinema when they can tape the movie? Eventually they sold pre-recorded videos), it happened with compressed digitised audio (who will buy the CD when they can pirate it online? Yet today we have a whole slew of online music stores).
I guarantee if CD burners had become cheap and half-decent five years earlier than they did, we'd have had the music industry trying to ban them too.
Re:You see? They *are* changing their business mod (Score:4, Informative)
That would be 2 am Monday morning for you guys.
I guess you missed the point by miles. This isn't the Cataclysm release where people go batshit crazy to get online within ten minutes of release. I'm not talking about it being aired a few hours or even days earlier or later. I'm talking about it taking months and years and sometimes not at all.
Typically the first season is aired only in the US. If it's a success then that season is typically sold to EU networks next year so we're a full season behind. Since for the most part they can't catch up - with some exceptions during the author's strike - they stay a year behind. Even if they stretched the seasons they'll be completely out of touch with season endings and such and they can't send two full seasons in the time the US sends one.