Music industry watch

RIAA repeats Edison's mistakes

We all have been saying that the RIAA is repeating mistakes from history: The betamax case, recordable audio cassettes and their fight against radio broadcasting to name a few. What I didn't realize was that Thomas Edison made all of these mistakes with the emerging movie industry. George Ziemann outlines Edison's mistakes:

Step 1 -- Acquire the rights. All of them.
Step 2 -- Define the standards
Step 3 -- Dominate the market
Step 4 -- Assume the creative community is expendable
Step 5 -- Eliminate independent competition
Step 6 -- Alienate the public
Step 7 -- Government intervention

. . .

Eric Haight of Record World in Petoskey, Michigan, notes that a new Sting album before the price drop cost the store $12.69, with a suggested retail price of $18.98. Now it costs them $10.79, with a retail price of $12.98 - the profit margin has been slashed by almost two-thirds, and Universal will no longer help them out with advertising costs.

Small record stores are getting squeezed by this -- not surprising, really. I knew the small record stores would be having a hard time, but I never figured that the record companies would hasten their demise.

In any case, Ziemann's piece is quite enlightening if you want to examine the RIAA's blindness to the past.

Posted by Mayhem at October 21, 2003 02:09 PM