Obviously, I'm not suggesting this is the solution. But I think there is a solution out there.
I highly doubt that. You would need a huge group of electronics, IT, and music companies to come together and attempt to form a standard. Oh, wait, they actually did that.
IN 1998! 13 years ago! It was called
SDMI, and after a year of work, they couldn't come up with anything workable, and it fizzled.
Eventually, Microsoft and Apple came up with their own proprietary DRM systems. Consumers hated them, and they did absolutely nothing to stop piracy.
4 years ago, Steve Jobs wrote
an open letter succinctly explaining how DRM will be eternally counterproductive.
2 months later, EMI removed DRM restrictions in the iTunes store.
For the last two years, downloadable music in the iTunes store, and at every other electronic music retailer, has been completely DRM-free.
Every step in the last 5 years has been AWAY from DRM. The record companies were the only ones who ever wanted it, and even they decided to move away from it. No one is going back.
On top of that, it's been years since the record companies have practiced the adversarial tactic of suing their customers. They have essentially conceded that battling piracy head-on is futile, and they are wisely trying to find ways to adapt to the current environment, rather than fight against it.
Thus, there is surely no great R&D effort underway to invent the World's Greatest DRM system. However, I have no doubt that the business minds at the major labels have been putting in plenty of resources for years trying to figure out how to make money in a challenging environment.
One of the major shifts coming is a move to streaming services. So your decade-old idea about a portable music player phoning-home over the Internet is sort of true, except instead of just DRM information passing over that link, the MUSIC will come over that link too. And if they can get customers to pay for that service, or advertise to them, it might work.
Competition in the industry should drive sales down for individual artists, but not the sales of the industry as a whole. Those sales should remain fairly constant.
Sales actually were fairly constant. Once again, it's good to remind ourselves how incredibly old this terrible "crisis" is. Metallica sued Napster 11 YEARS AGO! There are 10-year-olds currently discovering their own musical identities who weren't even born then, a date when the music industry was supposedly headed for imminent demise. Here are the
RIAA's numbers. In 2000, revenue was $14.3 billion. It dropped to $13.7, then spent 2002-2006 bouncing around between $11 and $12 billion. So, seven years of piracy without a significant dropoff. The precipitous fall has only happened in the last few years, so just looking at the numbers, piracy isn't an obvious culprit.
It does correlate nicely with the most serious economic shock since the Great Depression, however. Another big revenue problem recognized by the industry is the unbundling of the album. Only in the last few years have electronic music sales really taken off, and as that has happened, people have shifted much more to buying single tracks for $1 rather than spending $15 to get that single track they wanted. In the electronic realm, 60% of revenue comes from single-track downloads. In the physical realm,
0.07% of revenue comes from singles, and 94% comes from albums. Holy shit. The fact that consumers can now easily pay only 1/15th of what they were paying before to get the song they want must have a huge impact.
Anyhow, the original post in this thread was not about the fortunes of the music industry as a whole, but about the fortunes of individual artists and the ability of artists to make a living. That seems like a more practical concern, particularly for music fans. Who cares how much the corporations make, or if any artists can be come millionaires off their music anymore.
More relevant is the question of whether any musician can pay for his food and rent with his music. As the gatekeepers of old continue to fall by the wayside, allowing a tsunami of music and musicians to flood the market, the price any musician can charge, even in a magical world completely free of piracy, will continue to fall. From that perspective, it's easy to see that while piracy may be a problem, it's not the overriding one, or the one that will dominate in the long term.
It's obvious that as the numbers of artists putting out music and touring increases, each gets a smaller piece of the pie to fight over. Less obvious is the fact that this causes the pie to shrink as well. It does this by two methods, one straightforward, and one more speculative. First, artist competition, like in any industry, drives prices down. This lowers the price consumers need to pay for music, and since music purchases are generally not limited by the monetary factor (they're limited by time available to listen to music, interest in new music, etc.), cheaper prices don't mean that people will by more music, they'll simply pay less for the same amount. Second, music is a social phenomenon, and popularity is hugely important in determining what people buy. In a world of overwhelming choice with fewer obvious blockbuster artists to signal to consumers that they should spend their money on music, people won't, and to some extent will opt out entirely. Just as many people only buy lottery tickets when the jackpot gets above $300 million, many people only buy music from mega-stars, and as mega-stars fall off in number and scale, industry revenue shrinks with them.
The original article was pretty dumb because the "solution" in the second half didn't do a darn thing to address the problem described in the first half, but that problem statement was certainly a good one.
Neil
