No More White Boy Whingeing
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
Despite having two or three other blogs currently in gestation, I saw something online today which made me sit back and think . . . about how little I am buying certain things (and why), as well as what a restrictive lifestyle we seem to have, and how some factors seem not to be noticed . . . what follows is my take on the whole "online piracy" fiasco.
The article in question was at The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/18/tera_downloads_study/), and reported on yet another music industry whining session. It seems that for some inexplicable reason, the "music establishment" cannot fathom the fact that the environment in which it operates today is no longer the same as it was fifty years ago. It wants to dominate and control the production and distribution of music; it's as simple as that. But the trouble is that media are now digital and in an age dominated to a greater or lesser extent by the Internet, they are also easily transferred between physical locations.
The electronic nature of the medium also consequentially dictates the electronic and portable nature of many players, so there has arisen a whole methodology of purchasing the media and transferring them between devices. So I might purchase a physical CD, for example (the last one was a "John Denver's Greatest Hits", would you believe), then rip it to one (of several) hard drives, firstly to listen to in situ at home on one of (currently) two computers, two operating systems and an array of players, and secondly transferred to my little mp3 player (now, alas, ageing somewhat – can you believe it only has half a gigabyte of storage???) to be listened to while I am walking to work or otherwise whiling away my life somewhere away from my domicile.
Of course, there is really nothing new in all of this. Before the arrival of the CD, LPs would be routinely recorded to cassette tapes after purchase, and for good reasons. Firstly, if I considered an LP to be of value, I would not want to be playing it until the stylus wore the thing through; far better to avoid wear and tear on the original item by listening to it on tape, which as a blank medium could be purchased in bulk (and replaced when it wore out) cheaply. The difference is that it is now possible, because of the aforementioned digital transformation of the medium, to cut out the physical medium entirely, and many of us as customers would hail this as a form of progress – not least because it also cuts out the often tedious (and expensive) fact that most tracks on a full LP or CD would often be dreck, put on the physical item for no better reason than to pad it out. Small wonder, then, that when the opportunity arrives for people to buy single tracks, online, as digital media, from the comfort of their own homes, it takes off, and outlets make billions of dollars from it.
Secondly, of course, there was the question of the sheer inconvenience and lack of portability of both the medium and the player. Nobody would consider it either logical or cool to try to make twelve-inch LPs and their players portable (although it would look amusing); cassette players could be carried around, and the small players such as the Sony Walkman and its imitators (my first two were actually Toshibas, and they were great, if somewhat resembling a brick) were a logical extension whose time had arrived. This portability has simply become more extreme with the arrival of digital media; and the law protects customers who do this. It's called fair use.
Now comes the crunch: in a digital, networked world, media in digital format can be transmitted and received virtually anywhere; the only real cost is electricity, equipment and bandwidth, and the second of these is mitigated by the fact that the equipment used – a PC – is a multi-purpose, multi-tasking machine capable of doing this and a couple of dozen other things, all at the same time. One might add to this the observation that the filesystem of one "certain" proprietary OS was wide open, and file-sharing software had no difficulty in identifying which folders music (for example) was located in ("My Music", anyone?). Add to this a certain amount of ignorance on the part of the owner, plus a feeling of convenience that the software did all of this for them and saved them actually having to think too much about it, and we can see that right at the beginning, a lot of media in fact made their way onto the Internet and other peoples' hard drives purely accidentally. Interestingly, this "involvement" (some might call it "complicity") on the part of that "certain" OS is rarely mentioned . . .
As a result, the dynamics of the whole music industry has been changing. More and more media have been moving to the Internet – not just selling it there but also making use of streamed music and video, both as free-standing services and also as embedded components in web pages. The middleman becomes squeezed as more and more artists are able to record and master their digital offerings and sell them more cheaply, and their fans – devoted or casual – can buy them directly. One of the ironic facts about the music industry's complaints is that although many people download music and video from the Internet, in practice this is often only discarded later when they decide to actually go out and buy the physical media, for example a DVD, because that is what they really want; repeated surveys all point to this. Customers may rip media to their hard drives but again, in a modern setting where technologies converge in the home and a PC also functions as a radio, music player, TV and even a recording/editing studio, this is only sensible. Like recording an LP onto a cassette tape to avoid unnecessary wear and tear, the hard drive is probably the best place to keep these large files, allowing them to be brought up and played quickly, and protecting the investment in the physical media from repeatedly adding to the kind of damage that regular usage causes (not to mention making reconstituting the collection much easier if the hard drive suddenly dies!!!). In a modern, networked home, this means they can also be stored in one physical location and streamed to another for convenience. There is nothing unreasonable in this. It's called fair use (just re-emphasising the essential point here).
The truth is that after decades of not only calling the shots but also dictating which media music and video could be enjoyed from, the cat is out of the bag. No longer are fans forced to purchase singles months before the LP comes out, and then buy one or two good tracks in a record packed out with fluff; and it is no longer possible to force fans to re-purchase their whole collections due to a format change (LP to CD) which renders the old materials obsolete. Anyone with any one of a range of operating systems and players/editors can produce their own materials and sell them online, and a huge amount of online audio is actually free.
With their constant desire to prosecute "customers" who do not want to play the media moguls' game, plus their clear lobbying to have new and unnecessary legislation enacted by lawmakers when they cannot get their way, the media producers have come to be seen as persecutors of their own customers, and the only way is down. They have lost all respect, and the fact is that it's nobody's fault but their own. Here we are in a situation where their products are transported to customers, for free (because the customers are the ones paying for the electricity, the Internet cable and the equipment) and without the need for packaging, and for some bizarre reason not only are they unable or unwilling to capitalise upon it, they cannot reformulate it into some kind of opportunity, or even offer it at a more acceptable (i.e. cheaper, for the reasons just mentioned) price.
If – for example – a customer downloads a product and doesn't want to (or maybe even cannot, according to circumstances like what country they are living in) pay for it, why do the producers suddenly decide that expensive litigation is the only option? Do they not understand, can they not comprehend the psychological effect upon the rest of their customers when one of their number receives heavy fines and/or a prison sentence for merely downloading a popular music file, something which can actually be lost when power is turned off? Who in their right mind would want to be the willing customer of a company which sooner or later must do the same to them?
Instead, why not make them a nice offer? "Hey, did ya like that? Well, ya really oughta pay for it, but hey, tell ya what, we'll offer it at a reduced price if ya buy another (film, album, file). How does that get ya?" – I'm sure a lot of people would jump at the opportunity. But then, maybe the entertainment industry needs to recognise that customers will not see the same "value" in the product as they do – especially when downloading means that you don't get all the traditional things like covers and what not, which the traditional fee was supposed to pay for.
The industry also seems to have a problem with understanding that if you want to carry on business online, there are other consequences. Since there cannot be a "physical" shop counter for the customer to come to and discuss the sale, physical purchase is impossible; they need to pay by other means, for example by credit or debit card, or through some other electronic currency transfer system like PayPal. They might find that this is a problem for many customers, due to their personal economic (i.e. they don't have any money, so they cannot be issued with a card) or locational (wrong part of the world) circumstances. How can you reasonably make a sale when confronted with these things? Yet at the same time, don't you want as many customers, wherever they may be, as possible?
To all of the above, I would add one more accusation: a lot of this whining is pure White Boy Shit. What I mean by this is that those who are complaining so loudly are really established (Western) producers, only talking about their own products, and really only addressing one notional group of customers; one question not apparently addressed in their constant whingeing is whether their earnings are falling because of purely demographic changes.
Consider the following: in an ethnically homogeneous population, it is reasonable to assume that because of shared cultural motifs and values, any particular group of artists or solo performers would have wide appeal. But we have come to live in an age in which this is no longer true. The demographics of many states have been changed by mass migration, and it follows that tastes also change, not only through introducing new shared cultural motifs and values, but also by reducing the proportion of the total population of potential customers within a given geographical area who share the old ones. Income from the older group must therefore necessarily decline, as new opportunities arise from within the newer group. This is all true globally, but my point is that it is increasingly true locally, as well.
Now, the newer group(s) probably already have established suppliers who cater to their needs; some of the older group will be attracted to them and consequently, suppliers to the older group must see a decline in revenues. I personally see no mystery in this. To some extent, the proportion of disposable income formerly spent in one area must transfer to another. What is a mystery to me is why the entertainment industries are themselves so fixated upon certain areas; they cannot adapt.
As for the customers in the new ethnic groups, they have a perfect right to pick, choose and purchase as they please. You can either get in on the action, or go the way of all things. But if they see you as irrelevant, you're onto a loser. Perhaps you also have to become extinct as a result. As I say: there is no mystery in this. Many is the fine beast that has failed to survive, and ended up as a fossil, buried deep in the sands of time.
Finally, let me make one more comment. Since I left Blighty back in 2002, I have been to a cinema only once. Yes, you did read that right. In all that time I have only seen one new film. And the reason is not laziness on my part; it is complete disinterest in the products being offered. Likewise with CDs – in all this time, I have perhaps purchased ten at most. This is not because I dislike the CDs, although there is the question of having to transport them occasionally which makes a large collection of physical media impractical; no, it's because the availability of free streaming media (usually from http://magnatune.com/, go see) makes them largely irrelevant. The background music to my day can be entirely free, and online, all day, every day.
In the case of the film industry, modern products leave me cold. They have no originality and no storyline, their logic would make Mr. Spock turn green and curl up at the edges (although that was never difficult in Doctor McCoy's surgery) and as for anything like modern "science fiction", well, it would be nice to see some kind of "science fact" to validate it occasionally, rather than the outdated, stereotyped and factually incorrect and falsified college textbook crap obviously rehashed from the likes of Discovery Channel, nowadays a hideously lame cable outlet. We are constantly bombarded with meaningless special effects which really add nothing to the plot – assuming that there really is something approximating to a "plot" – when a good script and some actual drama would go a long way. Well, I can dream, can't I?
So I find myself sitting here on a Saturday afternoon, with free streamed music coming in from California, typing away on a non-proprietary OS which I use for virtually everything. My Mandriva Linux systems run a free OS and are great for watching all types of video, and listening to audio files, as well as editing and producing them myself. I don't buy anything I don't want, and as a lot of Western stuff can be hard to come by in South Korea, this means I don't spend a lot on CDs or DVDs – or anything else, come to think of it.
And this really is the bottom line, particularly in times when people are struggling to keep their jobs and pay for more important things: when you are in an industry which depends on the disposable income of others, you better have good products and a good business model, because in times like these, irrespective of "online piracy" and a host of other manufactured ills, the fact is that you are a poor competitor when faced with the need for essentials like food and clothing, and paying the electricity bill. You're disposable, and with a lot of your modern products being so missable, you're no longer essential in everyone's lives.
So you have a stark choice: change your greedy middleman ways and get relevant, or get in the dole queue behind those old buggy whip manufacturers.
Andrew. ^_^
Tags: elementary, entertainment, film, lifestyle, media, movie, music, online piracy, school, South Korea, teaching, video
