THIS IS WHY HAVING DIFFERENT INTERNATIONAL RELEASE DATES IS COMPLETELY F*CKTARDED IN THE YEAR 2011

Dear record labels,

Please read this. All of it. Then kindly quit complaining about sagging revenues and scapegoating music piracy. You’re leaving money on the table.

Love,
Vince Neilstein

From AVC via The Guardian, written by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who spends upwards of $60 per month – and by his estimate around $2,000 annually – on music and music subscriptions:

I like to buy music. I buy it from emusic (where I pay $23/month for use it or lose it credits for music downloads), Amazon, and when in a pinch, iTunes. I also have two Rhapsody music subscriptions that cost an additional $20/month. My kids also regularly spend money on iTunes for music (often for tracks we already own somewhere else in the house). I suspect between all of this, our family spends well over $1000/year on mp3s, probably closer to $2000/year.

And yet, today I find myself pirating an album on the Internet. I thought I’d outline how this happened to showcase what a fucked up system we have for content sales on the web.

Last week, I saw a tweet from my friend Anthony:

I’m a huge fan of Mike Skinner/The Streets so that was an instant click. It turns out The Streets had uploaded their new record, Computers and Blues, to Soundcloud and the Hype Machine was featuring it. I gave it a listen and was smitten. I tweeted it out myself.

Then I searched the Internet for the record. It was not even listed in iTunes or emusic. It was listed on Amazon US as an import that would be available on Feb 15th, but only in CD form. I’m not buying plastic just to rip the files and throw it out. Seeing as it was an import, I searched Amazon UK. And there I found the record in mp3 form for 4 pounds. It was going to be released on Feb 4th. I made a mental note to come back and get it when it was released.

I got around to doing that today. I clicked on “buy with one click” and was greeted with this nonsense (click on the image if you want to read it).

So then I went to find a VPN or proxy service that would let me grab a UK IP address so I could buy the record. That was an exercise in frustration. All I could find was monthly or daily services that were 2-3x the cost of the record. I could not find a free service that would let me change my IP address for a few minutes so I could download the file. As much as I wanted to pay the 4 pounds and pay for the record, I wasn’t going to lay out $10 or more to do that.

So reluctantly, I went to a bit torrent search. I found plenty of torrents for the record and quickly had the record in mp3 form. That took less than a minute compared to the 20+ minutes I wasted trying pretty hard to buy the record legally.

This is fucked up. I want to pay for music. I value the content. But selling it to some people in some countries and not selling it to others is messed up. And selling it in CD only format is messed up. And posting the entire record on the web for streaming without making the content available for purchase is messed up.

I don’t know whose idea this is of the way to market a record but I’m hoping they read this and never do this to a fan again. Fans love music. They want to support the musicians and they want to pay for music. But if you put enough hurdles in front of them, they will become pirates. As I did this morning.

When The Streets and their record label choose to make the Computer and Blues mp3s available for purchase in the US, I will go buy the record legally. Until then, I’m a pirate.

Look; I get it. I get that the idea of different labels — or different arms of the same label — promoting a record in their home territory as opposed to the entire world is advantageous because everyone is best connected and best suited to market a record in the country in which they live. I get it; this makes sense. What does not make sense is staggering release dates by weeks, months or more. This tactic no longer makes sense when the Internet allows people to discover new music from other countries with the click of a mouse, and CERTAINLY doesn’t make sense when folks will just resort to piracy if a paid option isn’t available or easily discoverable.

A huge amount of money is being left on the table by record labels’ insistence of sticking to marketing tactics of the 1990s. Come on, people…. take the time to get it together by coordinating release dates. Especially for bigger labels like Century, Metal Blade, Roadrunner etc that have offices in multiple territories throughout the world, there is absolutely no excuse. Even the smaller labels; any dumb schmuck with a debit card can sign up for a TuneCore account and have an album for sale digitally on dozens of platforms throughout the entire world in a matter of days, and any asshole off the street can hire a publicist capable of sending emails to people in other countries. The Internet is international; remember?

So kindly stop complaining about sagging profits and scapegoating music piracy when one very low-hanging piece of fruit is right there for the picking.

-VN

Thanks: Frank Godla