"if Virgin Music and EMI etc., would have bought Napster (instead of suing it and closing it down) and then converted the site into their official mp3 website, iTunes would have been a me-too and not the gorilla it is today" This part is interesting. Not so because of the concrete actors mentioned, but overall. It raises the question about the way the whole film/game/music industry battles piracy. Do You think they t…
The "music industry" got screwed on like 4 fronts at once. Actual piracy hurt, but the move from $20 CDs to $1 singles killed the "2-4 singles and 6-10 fillers" album model (now you're getting $2 for something you could have gotten $20 for, and sales didn't quintuple), falling production costs made Label Loan Sharking less attractive, and a rise of new distribution venues (MySpace and YouTube, where recorded music is…
Now there's inexpensive cloud re-encoding, first i've noticed is http://zencoder.com/ apart from upload speeds, resampling even ridiculously high bitrate video will not be something you need a local cluster or multi socket multi core even to accomplish.
I'm not convinced that the industry buying Napster would have done much but incentivised someone to start over with another illegal sharer.
But, to a certain extent, if i was dealing with a naturall declining business, i'd prefer whack-a-mole to decade long lawsuits which (exp post show) so poor effect for the music biz execs. This isn't so far distant from what pharmas do when a big product runs to off - patent. Lots of R&D in reformulations, lots of trying to stem the generics tide, but it's a fading game, you're just being rational about extending revenues as long as possible.
I think your point about the move to "all singles" is maybe the most powerful. That's the one musicians i know get confused about the most, including one who had a proper "one hit wonder" in the eealy MTV years. I see concern about this as far as the question of audience and composition, i.e. what are you writing and for whom. Though my sample is statistically useless of course. We're only just one generation past the concept album, depnding how you count. Meanwhile the long established artists are simply charging was way way too much for live tickets, so you have a problem as to the context in which your music is presented which i think is more confidence destroying for some than revenue declines. (my artist sample are already comfortable financially)
I'm unconvinced wholly as to the value of 2K and above home distribution. I suppose that living in a expensive crowded city, i simply don't have the room size to view any benefits. Oft cited is the 8 line pair per mm limit of human visual acuity, which - i ought to check - may be optimum, or a kind of 20:20 average. (i'd sure buy well above 2K projectors of control room use though, if i could afford, but you can always just get more of what's affordable in that scenario)
As or surviving, as far as i recall, in total volume terms, i though that CDs and DVDs were actually growing a some 10% a year. This was a article in the FT a couple years back. Anyone got recent figures? There was also the leaked MPAA slide deck of the amazing margin improvement DVDs provided which accreted steadily after the VHS phase-out. Those recalled bits of info (recollection to vague to asert them as data) ought to be very attractive aspects. If you want to see a group of musicians dying financially, try UK based classical performers / composers. The collection agency in the UK decreed that they'd not bother any more with I also found the article title misleading. They didn't "partner" with pirates, they changed their software features. If you could really partner, then agree such a distribution network wouldn't just be good, but it's be freaking awesome, you'd have all the inbound tracking, revenue splits from off - game landing pages, a lot of insight into cultural regional forms of discovery of your product. But they don't say they did that. Such a partnering network would be very valuable indeed.