Dumbest Business Move Ever
I’m of the firm opinion that the music industry’s response to the original Napster should go down in history as the single dumbest business move of all time.
That’s saying something.
That means worse than…
- Coca-Cola bottling rights being sold for $1
- New Coke
- Mercedes-Benz/Chrysler merger
- Worldcom/HealthSouth/Enron/name-your-own-scandal-du-jour
- Time Warner/AOL merger
- The license to print money IBM gave Bill Gates
But here’s the reality of the situation.
Napster was INSANELY successful. A runaway success. Napster’s adoption rates back then make Facebook’s numbers look like the MySpace page view numbers for an avowed pen-and-paper RPG gamer from Kankakee, IL who calls himself Orion the Dragonmaster.
And the best part was…people could understand the interface. It totally made sense. It was easy. People told their friends about it.
Was content properly licensed? No.
But the base framework, just a short step away from commerce, was already there. Developed and put in place by someone else. Tested, proven…done.
Can anyone name another popular framework for commerce developed in the last 10 or so years?
Plus, the audience was already there. Napster had already proven the concept and gathered the user base. And perhaps even most importantly of all…
Napster was the ONLY game in town!
So all these big brain music publishers and companies, instead of smelling the opportunities, like…
- Wresting even more power from artists by pushing singles over albums, perhaps even killing the concept of albums altogether
- Milking back catalogs without incurring physical production costs
- Charging even more exorbitantly higher prices for “Ultimate Collector Edition” collections of actual discs
- And on and on and on…
Instead…they start suing! And they get Napster shut down, finally. So all those users scatter, rushing pell-mell to some other peer-sharing service. Bearshare, Limewire, whatever. There have been so many of them.
And the RIAA has been after them all.
Heck, they’re now suing the end-users, their best potential customers! What utter insanity.
Does anyone really think that the RIAA suing a grandmother on a fixed income for stuff her granddaughter did on her computer while visiting makes sense? In any way, shape or form?
Besides creating an absolute PR nightmare, what did the RIAA really do?
They opened the casket of Apple, and wept blood onto the moldy corpse of Steve Jobs, the ultimate corporate vampire, bringing that old bastard of a company back to life.
And now they’ve all got Apple’s fangs sinking into their jugular.
All because they refused to see the most obvious writing on the wall.
People want a convenient way to listen and play their music. Period. End of story.
And once the digital genie was out of the bottle, anything other than giving your customers what they had aptly demonstrated over and over that they wanted…
All the while retooling your industry to reap the maximum benefits of that change…
Was stupid. Plain and simple.
Just imagine this What If equation…
RIAA + Napster = !iPod/iTunes/iPhone
Quite an alternate reality, huh?
|| posted by chris under biz, clueless, thumbs down || || ||
Excellent post, and I couldn’t agree more. The music industry is STILL reporting on the decline in cd sales, failing to realize that the same thing that happened to cassette tapes is happening again. An old media format is being replaced by a new one. They have to find a way to monetize it, and so far, they have annointed Apple as the only way to download music, and are at Mr. Job’s mercy now.
comment by Jarrod — July 31, 2007 @ 10:54 am