krankshaft format solution found

Mon Apr 4 08:16:25 EDT 2011

On 03 Apr 2011, at 19:13 , Jonathan Smith wrote:
> Companies like Apple are very obstructive. They have cornered a market by
> clever marketing and stealing of ideas from elsewhere (ironically one of the
> iPods included controls stolen from a Asian company). They have sold the
> idea of the MP3 player being their's and manage to make people buy from
> iTunes at ridiculous prices. Their computers, whilst better than PCs, don't
> even support Blu-Ray discs because they want to sell HD video from iTunes.

While Apple are no angels (who is?), I don't think they are doing anything much different than anyone else would do if they could do.  Regardless of where the ideas came from, they have produced popular products that no one else produced first; no one forces people to buy iPods or downloads from the iTMS.  People who don't want an iPod don't have to buy one. (I have one.)  People who don't want to pay for (IMO, overpriced) lossy downloads from iTMS don-t have to buy one.  And let's not forget: most of the planet's population couldn't buy from iTMS even if they wanted to because they don't have a credit/debit card from a bank in the countries where iTMS is available.

With regards to Blu-Ray, I can see why Apple held out while the format war was still going on -- but that's over now.  Not building BD into new Macs seems silly -- rather like Steve Job's dislike of Flash video. (OK, yes, I also dislike Flash video, and it is too often used in really annoying ways, but still ....)  I can't imagine BD drives on Macs would impact iTunes video sales that much: People buy from iTMS for _convenience_; people buy from iTMS because, very often in the first world, the time it would take to rip CDs is more valuable than the price of buying the tracks from iTMS separately.  (Or, as noted, they buy from iTMS because they don-t care about having the CD and just want to hear the new song from Artist Flavour of the Month).

Ultimately, it won't matter, because I can't imagine a scenario in which physical disks (or similar) remain the primary means of delivering A/V entertainment.  The music industry missed the boat on this one, but video and game content developers/vendors will at the very least not make all of the same mistakes.  

Meanwhile, if a Mac user wants, they could just buy a Blu-Ray player .... well, maybe I wouldn't be able to do so with much ease locally!  I might have to go to the States.  But it could be done.

> I think that the next innovations will probably come from China. They are
> already rolling out a 4G phone network of their own. Their main search
> engine, Baidu, actually contains an MP3 search on its home page, so selling
> MP3s is hard and genuine copies of CDs/DVDs/BDs are hard to buy or tell from
> copies. They will have to work out a way of selling entertainment, but doing
> that for sake of American and Japanese companies would be pointless for
> them.

China has worked out a way of selling entertainment, but it revolves around live appearances (often at shopping malls, etc.) and product placement by artists.  Humans are social creatures, and celebrity remains vendable even when recorded music is not! ;)  One of the tricks with the Chinese market is, however, that it mirrors one of the tricks of the whole rest of the planet: you have a relatively small number of people with a relatively large amount of money and a relatively large number of people with a relatively small amount of money, and all of these people want access to more or less the same stuff; meanwhile, high-speeed digital communication is connecting all of these people very, very quickly indeed.  You really, really want to tap into that big developing market of as yet relatively poor people, but traditional structures do let you do it very well.

As usual, you need to figure out what different groups of people will be willing to pay in order not to pirate your stuff, and deliver that.  Having done this, whoever does it will then get very rich! ;)

Cheers,
Carl

> 
> On 4 April 2011 07:08, mike c <insect.brain at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 4/3/11, Carl Edlund Anderson <cea at carlaz.com> wrote:
>>> In the scheme of things, no probably not a big deal ... ;)  I mean, I'm
>> not
>>> stuck in the middle of a civil war, nor have tsunamis or earthquakes
>> leveled
>>> my house, nor I am I (to my knowledge) being wickedly irradiated.  So if
>> I
>>> can't get a vinyl record, then (especially considering I have no means of
>>> playing such a thing), I will probably survive ....
>>> 
>>> Still, all the other jazz aside, I do think the "brave new world" of
>> online
>>> communication and distribution contain considerable opportunities for
>>> artists -- "opportunities", though, which are not at all the same thing
>> as
>>> out-and-out "advantages"!  It is, after all, probably easier to make
>> decent
>>> sounding music (regardless of how good that music may be" than ever
>> before.
>>> It is easier to find people who might like your music (regardless of what
>>> kind of music it is) in the farthest-flung corners of the world,
>> communicate
>>> with those people, and make one's music accessible to them in some way.
>> And
>>> even if international travel, however easier now than it may have once
>> been,
>>> is still not easy enough to play gigs around the world, it is at the very
>>> least easier than ever to let your local fans know when and where you'll
>> be
>>> performing, and to help get them spread the word.
>>> 
>>> What may be _harder_ than ever before is catching and holding people's
>>> attention -- at least long enough to get them to part with their money
>> for a
>>> ticket, a download, a CD, a T-shirt, or whatever it is that you might be
>>> vending directly or indirectly.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Carl
>> 
>> Absolutely agreed
>> before I try my best to stop making a whetever it may be that I always
>> may be making of myself, I just want to share that for me, ending up
>> still alive and living (for various reasons), totally alone about 360
>> days a year, relcaiming things on vinyl that I lost has been my
>> passion since 2007. I am not even a "vinyl person" really, just a
>> 46-year old retracing the child part of me that wanted my "stuff"
>> back. I have done so well, and also had a lot of struggle, that I am
>> toning down "mining operations" and I expect to have more money for
>> things over on that side of the POND. pretty soon.
>> I cal tell I have "randomly" received some contact with radiation
>> it's freaky
>> like the "background strych-ie feeling" for anyone familiar with "that
>> stuff"
>> night
>> May we all have access to our preferred "music pill" of choice, and
>> not have the red or blue colour affect the other ones!!!
>> 
> 

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/