PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Blame the f(*&$*&@#ing RIAA!

Yes, the old label paradigm has finally died.

Good riddance...

Greg

consumers decide nothing. they just consume.
deciders decide and consumers follow after many interesting articles and other mind controls.

garyb wrote:consumers decide nothing. they just consume.
deciders decide and consumers follow after many interesting articles and other mind controls.

than Apple does something wrong.

As my Idol Keith Emerson once said about his song " Lucky Man ",................" Having a hit record is a sin. "

thanks for your concern, this fanboy has not much to complain indeed

In general I'm always interested in those processes where the 'rules' do not work unexpectedly.
The dynamics of history, like the surprising 'NO' against Europe in France and the Netherlands two years ago, unless powerplay of gouvernmental circuits.
Or Apple not being able to get a bigger market share despite a well selfconscious marketing strategy for a great product.

Gary, are those Apple vs. pc adds which you can see on the Apple home site generally known in the States?
It's not the type of humor I like so much, but apart from that they don't seem to be very effective, looking at Apple's market share, don't they?
Do 'normal' people talk about them?
What's their impact on the talks of the day?

sure, but no company would invest so much in adds without wanting to appeal also to new customers, in the first place even.

if everybody purchased apple, they wouldn't be the exclusive brand anymore would they?

it's called "branding".

read the works of the "father of public relations" Edward L. Bernays some time...

stardust wrote:apple users prefer a brand identification over a differentiation among various PC technology suppliers and concepts.

That's partly right.
The term 'brand identification' however is about 'perception' on the consumer side, it refers to a psychological state of mind in relation to a product.
Your counterpart, the differentiation, is a direct description of your preference to build your own pc.

Eighter you should say 'apple users prefer a ready made quality computer (of a brand), or you should mention the real counterpart of brand differentiation, namely (something like) 'freedom', independency, selfcontroll about the motherboard (and there's the price aspect, but that's a side thing and probably not part of any attitude in this context).

So the discussion should be about the rationalities of both approaches.
Are apple users dumb followers of fashion or do they just make a choice for simplicity and sureness?
Are (principal) pc users actually typical consumers only concerned about their consumer freedom of choice (from tooth-brush to harddisks), or are they fighters for intellectual freedom and independency?

I'm sure in a good arguement there won't be left much more than the conclusion that there's no reason why a principal pc user shouldn't have his hobby, and a mac user shouldn't decide for a ready made system.

Both parties should just accept the consequences.

An apple user had to accept not to have acces to Windows on his home computer (think of kids, certain compatibilities), and has to have to stop the music if he needs a pee. The new Intell machines took away those old 'disadvantages' of the mac, so hm, what's left actually?

A principal pc user has to accept some time to invest in hardware and operating system/BIOS, and to have to maintain the system with every smaller or bigger change.
This is what he wants, so this isn't a problem.
The problem is more with the guys who aren't able to solve serious problems on their own, or don't have the mony to experiment with supplies and motherboards etc.
They sometimes sound mad or desperate, but you never hear them say, 'I can now see why some folks choose for a mac'.
It's like they never realize there is an alternative.
Not for SC cards tho...

well, that's funny, I only saw this after writing the post above

stardust wrote:yep the frustrated that happily pay for a system integration and the control of degrees of freedom

we already discussed the 'freedom aspect' before, your freedom was nothing more than a free choice in some hardware of your computer.
Who would want to call this a matter of principe?
Every other product in society is a ready made product, to be supposed to work out of the box.
The rest is hobby, in fact the mac should be the world dominating pc, and it would have been that if Jobs had done what IBM did with dealing with (MS) office applications.
A self built pc would then be what train model building is: a hobby for enthousiasts and or price fighters.

yes, the gadges department, but does that make a mac as not brand trustworthy?
The Rolling Stones earn more mony by selling T-shirts and gadges than by their music products.
Does that make their 'brand' less valuable?
Apple still invests in the mac as a top computer, I don't see Apple loosing grip by the succes of the gadges.
I still admire the incredible fast and smooth way they made the change to Intell btw, that's also 'brand'

I agree with stardust fully about draining the revenue of the distribution channels, but first let me arrange my ranting in a sensible order.

The demise of the album as a format came because most albums have 2-3 good songs and 4 or more 'filler' songs that often seem to have been written, recorded and mixed in what was left of the act's ~2-3 week studio allotment. It wasn't until Thriller (from M. Jackson) that albums became the sole focus of the music industry's financial model anyway, and the shrinking of the singles market was simply due to them realizing that selling a single yielded less profit than did an album at 2-3x the price of the single yet with largely the same manufacturing costs (which is the real cost that the labels front, whether they call it debt to the act in question or not they're still having to front the cash to make the product).

Then look at the 90's as a consumer, when your only options are either to purchase the full CD or download the single that you actually care about from a p2p app... And the music industry's response was to announce the 'final' end to the single in most American & Eu markets (not like the dance & punk/indie rock labels paid any attention anyway). And then to rail against downloads and encumber them with drm and limited selection so that they would of course fail against their preferred model, the one they'd spent years tuning already. All they really needed to do was offer consistant quality and repeatable ease of access (the 2 major variables with p2p) and things would have been ok. This is what Jobs/Apple were able to accomplish (imo), and still iTunes didn't come along until MANY years later, and even a few years later after the napster debacle made p2p a mainstream act and an ingrained habit for many out of sheer lack for an alternative.

The business model that Apple adopted in no way hurt the profitability of the major labels btw, the cut that the iTunes storefront brings home itself is somewhere on the order of 7-9% (from what I've read at least, there's no hard figures released to verify it of course as these are closed door deals). This is just enough to have earned a small profit after ~4 years given the overhead of the store coding and bandwidth/hosting costs. I also suspect that the coding of the actual iTunes application was never factored into this, it's an Apple product and bundled with their Macs for free for a long time so I bet development costs are still under the Apple umbrella.

Now, what did iTunes do as a distribution model for music? It undercut the storefronts online and in the real world by setting its parent company's profitability on the sales of ipods. This means that the record labels still get the majority of the financial cut (and still want more!) and iTunes itself operates at a barely profitable level. Apple is quite profitable by propping up its hardware sales, but other storefronts online are either forced to focus on a niche (beatport/bleep/juno etc) or offer music downloads only as a minor portion of an overall business model (yahoo/amazon).

It's good that there is a commercially successful avenue for music to be sold online so that all digital music forms aren't automatically 'illegal', but it's bad that the only way to operate as a music storefront online is either to stick to a tiny market or as a sideline to your 'real' business model. And hence my agreement with stardust's post above.

Now think of LastFM and the great way of 'surfing' the music that's out there that it offered, and Oink.cd also had a great way to 'discover' new music from the p2p angle, but neither are/were directly connected to a sales model that benefits artists directly so for legitimate purchases you're again back to the impenetrable databases of iTunes/beatport/bleep/Amazon/etc (which lastFM will usually link to btw).

So imo the problem with Apple's business model is that it does nothing to undercut the Major labels, and in many ways it again reinforces the need of the PR that a major label plays for you as it lacks advanced ways of 'discovering' new music aside from streaming audio which is avaiable elsewhere in plenty of quantity (shoutcast). 'People who like this also bought...' type recommendations aren't what I'm talking about here either. When you visit Amazon, iTunes and yahoo music (as well as other mainstream online outlets) there's little to differentiate between one product and another, so even though independant artists and labels might have a presence you're still just another item lost amid the virtual shelves. The only benefit is that these storefronts are immediately accessible to someone who might have become aware of your music elsewhere, let's hope that you manage to get a presense on them quickly enough! (there are independant companies who offer 'packaging' your music for online storefronts btw, sort of a different middleman than a record label in that they only prepare and tag your music and help negotiate you into the pricing models of the online stores, they don't offer the PR, management and other resources that a true record label would but they do offer a good service to someone who doesn't want to figure out all the myriad requirements of the online shops).

Anyway pardon my rambling and if I rehashed something already brought it up was only due to my stream of conciousness outpouring on this subject.

Ho-ho-horrible: album sales plunge 20 percent this Christmas
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... stmas.html

Perhaps we're all just burned out at hearing music (good/bad/ugly) EVERYWHERE, all the freakin' time. On TV, in elevators, etc.
So MUCH music to digest through - a lot of it is just bad anyways - that perhaps people are just TIRED of music (???).

The implosion of the old business models is proof that a possible revolution is about to occur.

Greg