Fire Alarm Companies

Last we heard from Rob Levine, he said that people 'eighth t to \ what' in the music industry shouldn \ s popular on file sharing networks, because you 't can learn something from it. That was when he was editor of Billboard, and clearly tried to Billboard 's outdated list of what was popular to defend. Very, very shortly after that he was from a job Billboard quit. Now he is 's back and it seems as if he' s hardly a shock to say lost clueless things. He 's out a new book how the Internet has arrived and destroyed all the evil media, and kick some publicity for him, he' s got a piece in The Guardian about, that you simply submit 't stop. It 's provocative title: How the Internet has destroyed everything, but the market for movies, music and newspapers.

Of course, that's fascinating, since pretty much every study we've seen shows that the market for films and music has increased, and while for News papersit has shrunk, that 's unfair to limit the market to the paper side. The market for News continued to grow. Most seem Levine 's article to be made of typical wishful thinking, the careful selection, as defined markets, and a strong dose of traditional economic fallacies, with only a dash of Luddism. The article begins with the classic trick of pretty much anyone who 's data can' t back up what they sell 're: use random correlations, rather than any evidence for a causal relationship. He talks about the decline of NBC, EMI, the Washington Post and MGM. And somehow, that 's proof that the internet is at fault. I have to go 't in each case, but there are many, many other reasons why each of these four companies ran into hard times recently, almost none of which do with the Internet (and do too many of them with ridiculous had poor management).

From there he takes a giant leap in fact the blame \ the tech industry for the entertainment industry's problems. Stop me if you ve 'heard it before. Apparently you can see, The Pirate Bay, Google sucked & the Huffington Post every other industry dry. This is obviously not true. It 'sa story startle made for entertainment industry executives and politicians. I mean, this kind of fear mongering Sun was debunked many times that you 'd think Rob must have in rehashing old news to anyone for how to pay. Let 's dig into this a little:

Pirates and respected technology companies alike - has in the past ten years, much of the value of music, films and newspapers created other company benefits. The Pirate Bay site made money by illegally with a major label albums, as well as music sales at less than half of what they fell 10 years ago.

The Pirate Bay has a tiny amount of money - hardly a blip on the radar - and in view of ongoing research to show that the use of sites like The Pirate Bay \ for the industry 's tend best customers , It 's quite clear (unless you are willfully ignorant), that the problem is a business model problem, where the labels not to offer what consumers want . In addition, he brings "Music Sales," he 's simply wrong . The sale of Recordings have left, but when you actually fall on the appearance real market discover the Levine ignored comfortable to live whatever, publishing, advertising, direct-to-fan, and others that the money actually goes Musician has been enormous. Sure, the record companies are suffering, but that 's because they applied only to the portion of the business that got disintermediated focus.

YouTube uses clips from shows such as NBC 's Saturday Night Live, a company that will build that Google bought for $ 1.65 billion.

Ah, the industry 's wrong line again. YouTube made available free Software and free Bandwidth (at a huge cost to the firm) and combined, become a great community, the de facto place for online video that. Many intelligent people - including NBC 's Saturday Night Live, eventually learned to embrace that and use YouTube as a tool to attract viewers. In fact, if you will benefit more from the SNL 's videos appear on YouTube's' Search sat pretty strong argument that it was SNL ... no YouTube.

And the Huffington Post was one of the most popular online news sites largely by rewriting newspaper articles.

Nice line. If only it were true. It 's not. The Huffington Post launched with a ton new and unique Content from many people. Huffington called in a bunch of favors and had to write a ton of her celebrity friends to the site from day one. In addition, the company has a great reporting staff, which does a lot of unique and original reporting - many of which accounts for their transactions. Yes, it does some aggregation of content - but nothing to do all the other news publication couldn 't as good. If it 's really true that HuffPo somehow hurt other media, they could just tack on the same kind of aggregation. Anyone who believes that HuffPo was claimed by rewriting popular newspaper articles, is lying.

This isn 't the inevitable result of technology. Traditionally, the company that invests in music and film also directed their distribution - EMI, for example, owned recording studios, pressing plants, and delivered the infrastructure, the CDs in stores.

I read this and all I see is that EMI, the buggy manufacturer that is invested in wooden wheels and buggy whips like the car was around. Look, when you invest in the parts of the business that became obsolete in the digital age, you deserve to die somehow. I 'd hate to be in Levine' live 's world, where should stop the buggy manufacturers in the position to the car manufacturer. We had our red flag laws that are necessary to get people in front of cars waving red flags to go, and all they got were stupid.

But Levine thinks red flag laws are the answer to save his incompetent pals in the entertainment industry. You see, he throws is one of the few good rules, which he hopes will be taken:

The Internet changed everything, not because it allows the rapid transmission of digital data, but because the rules established technology companies to take responsibility for their business models to avoid a broken market have created. Many Web sites that offer music, while hundreds of other news summary. Part of the problem is rampant piracy - unauthorized disclosure that doesn 't benefit the creators or companies that invest in them. It exerts pressure to accept media company focused on online sales offers that don 't to cover their costs.

Who change that the market didn 't, because the ability to efficiently distribute data makes a joke holds. But, go let 's on. Levine is again misrepresenting reality. The laws, which he 's talk - especially the DMCA,' - do s safe harbor not tech companies, to allow escape responsibility. Levine is back intellectually dishonest. The safe harbor simply means that the liability applied correctly the Actors are actually doing the injury . Apparently Levine prefers to blame Ford for any car accident.

Such as "accept pressure on the media companies to online sales offers that don 't to cover their costs," that' for the last line of \ sa howler monkeys. Take a look at the "good", that Pandora has to stream music, which has set up Pandora, never be profitable. And what "cost" The record companies have to have these offers? It 'sa sunk costs. They recorded the album and they only have the digital files to Pandora hand. No border at all costs.

But the underlying problem is that developers and retailers now have conflicting interests. Companies like Google and Apple don 't care that much about the sale of media because they make their money in other ways - for advertising in the first case, and gadgets in the second. Google just wants to help consumers, the song or show they 're looking for, whether it'. Sat legally downloaded or not, have an interest in Apple, pushes the price of music to its products as useful and these dynamics doesn 't only hurt media companies - it creates problems for independent artists and companies of all sizes.

Another favorite of the entertainment industry. It sounds good if you do not 't really think this through. But there 'sa weasel phrase is that Levine say something that he can insist, can be true, while it' s totally misleading. He says they don 't care about "sell media." But the assume that Sale of media is the only way for the entertainment industry to make money . Google and Apple care much about ensuring that content creators pay because they need content creators to earn money so that the production functions (which, incidentally, is happening, how we record numbers of new music, movies, news, and have other products come out every year - a fact that Levine seems to ignore completely). But they know that there are better ways to keep them "sell media." As \ In fact, if you (should the industry Levine know best), just look at the music industry alone, he must know that the real artists now are paid makes a lot more than they did in the past, thanks to the industry moving away from the "sell media" on other business models.

Then he jumps into the luddite 's favorite line about how anyone who disagrees with him throwing out "Information wants to be free." Of course, as Cory Doctorow reported last year, the only people to throw the seem to support this line of entertainment industry execs are doing, as if 's what people who say to agree with them.

The crux Levine 's argument (and the title of his book) is that all this shows the problem of "free riders." This is another popular entertainment industry trope that sounds good ... except the fact it 's economically clueless. Yes, there are certain areas of the economy, where free riders can be a problem. But there are also such things as positive externalities and economic growth created becauseof free riders. It 'sa serious book written on the subject, but it' s not this.

Of course, copyright in the digital age will be updated. Many reformers say they are for protection, but look at any attempt to force it to be unacceptable. This doesn 't mind: a market can' t based on voluntary payments, and the laws don 't work, if they' t be enforced. There must be some punishment for illegal downloads, although a slowdown in access speed of a law-breaker makes more sense than completely cutting her account. For the same reason why Internet users are allowed to sites that are accessible uniquely - and the last word is important - to British law? When the British simply refuses to enforce its laws online, it will leave many vulnerable areas of their business, such as the Internet becomes increasingly important for trade in the coming years.

Note the implicit - but mistaken - assumption in there. Without copyright, the only business model "voluntary payments." The \ is 's funny, I didn' t realize that I had ever 'forced' for all to pay for the CDs, concerts and movies .. . A market is always based on "voluntary" transactions between willing buyers and sellers. That's the definition of a market. How can he say otherwise?

I 'm guessing he really means "optional" in the idea of ??"tips" or "donate" presupposes that again (totally incorrectly) that the only way to make money from is the direct sale of media. It 's not. And he should know, dass

Frankly, for all the trouble I 've given Levine in the past, I always thought he was pretty sharp on the bigger problems. But this column (and I suppose the book advertises it) seems to have simply taken all the tropics, ignored all the data, misrepresented, wherever possible, all packaged in a silly, ignorant, economically title. I 'm sure it' ll sell just great. Fortunately, however, if you by the comments to his article, almost every one of his ridiculous statements will be dismantled piece by piece to read. Ah, crowdsourcing to the rescue.

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