Posts by Simon Grigg
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That wiki link is about the tech development, not the peripheral politics and other stuff which were involved. It hardly mentions the people who agreed to make the CD the format of the future.
I'll try and remember that book on the recording industry's business history..it's a fascinating, if dry, read. There is also a great book on the rise of Warners which has quite some detail on the CD adoption too.. the author was a Warners exec
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I have to admit your story is definitely a much more exciting way of looking at it
Flawed idea or not Rob, it's the truth. Its hardly a controversial argument to make over the past two decades..until now it seems when you seem to be trying to re-write what is widely and little disputed and widely accepted recording industry history.
We seem to be going around in circles here again, best leave it.
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and nothing to do with the advancement in technology? which is what you're saying.
No both but it was a dead duck until the idea that catalogues would be replaced was added to the mix. That was it's key selling point to the record industry and without them it was a non-event.
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I'd go as far as to speak for Trevor Reekie, and Roger Sheherd on that as well. Those guys were all thinking about the next new record they could make, never the old one they could re release.
You are confusing indies and majors again but I'd be suprised if either of those two would disgree that replacement was a key driving force behind the CD's development and acceptance by the record industry.
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No Rob, it was a key driving factor in the development of the CD. It helped justify the huge costs involved and it worked a treat. It's been the subject of so much discussion over the years, I'm surprised you feel able to argue it.
This is backed up by the fact that no one got prosecuted for dubbing their vinyl onto cd when that all became possible in the mid 90's. surely if the labels were hell bent on getting 2 x the revenue out of one product they'd have plugged and policed that a little.
Are you serious? Do you think the odd fan digitising their vinyl really comes within a squillionth of the vast profits made by re-selling punters their albums on CD. It was a complete non-issue. But as you may recall home taping, which was so very much bigger, was a huge issue, as was the resistance of record companies to the cheap availability of CD-Rs.
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Of course it's a better delivery medium but the simple fact is that one of the main driving forces behind the CD was the fact that vast amounts of money was to be made getting folks to replace items they already owned.
Taking your last argument even further, there would have had to have been a weird grand conspiracy amongst all the music industry media, all major label heads and a whole lot more, to talk about this for years prior to, and after the CD release. I was in a CD briefing held by the labels before NZ CD launch and this was touted then as one of it's key benefits..and retailers were told to pitch it that way. It was no great secret and was a cornerstone of the CD's evolution.
It's an inarguable fact and to be honest, I've never heard it questioned before. It's not ominous or secret, it was an established open philosophy.
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its common sense, regardless of what picture some academic wishes to paint over the top of the events of history.
Hardly an academic wish, Rob...go and track down just about any issue of Music Week, Billboard or Cashbox from the era (I subscribed to the last of those) the replacement philosophy was widely discussed in all of those. It was a business decision and openly advanced as a primary benefit of a move to a new format.
Whether copy protection will ever be implemented successfully we will have to wait and see, but I suggest that regardless of that, the hamfisted way it's been implemented, and the record industries other responses to file sharing to date will be regarded as key factors in the collapse of the recording industry in the 2000s.
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That's all very dramatic and exciting but it's at the very least an overstatement of the importance of this 'plan' in the big scheme of things. surely there's some leaked secret memo to prove the existence of this conspiracy to trick the public into buying that which they already owned?
Why would Sony and Philips put so much money into replacing what was still a viable format selling in the millions? After all Philips owned one of the world's biggest record companies.
There is a fantastic book the name of which escapes me, which is definitive on this, and indeed on the machinations of the record industry over the last century, which goes into it in some detail. But it wasn't a top secret 'memo' sort of thing..it was much discussed at the time and goes far far beyond a few Elvis albums and reissues..you work out what percentage of Dark Side of The Moon, Abbey Rd, Led Zep etc's total sales were made on CD in the late 80s / early 90s, as people upgraded their albums..it's very high and it was a clear planned marketing strategy. As was the planned move to digital. The irony is that most people can't tell the difference between a vinyl copy and a CD copy soundwise but we were all told about the audio quality such. It was hugely successful over almost two decades, beyond the label's wildest dreams, even before CD players arrived in cars in any numbers, but that gave it another boost.
There was some discussion amongst the majors about moving the format to a DVD version but it was quickly realised that the public would likely not fall for it as a CD and a DVD look the same.
I'm suprised you are questioning any of this, it's not really obscure information
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simon has a legitimate reason under the consumer guarantees act to return his purchase for a fully functioning one, or seek a refund. there are perfectly good laws already in effect to back him up on that one. no conspiracy or hatin' necessary.
Just checking to find out where I should return the CD I bought in HMV in Singapore after I tried to play it in Indonesia?
The problem with all your arguments Rob are that long ago most consumers would have said fuck this and moved on. You don't make people respect the copyright and the producer by making them feel ripped off. And they do. DRM and all it implies is a part of that. It's helping to kill the sales of music by adding to a perception, rightly or wrongly, that there is a nasty con going on.
That's weird you should voice that opinion from your perspective cos I've always seen you as an example of a decent bloke who most definitely is the industry, you were hanging with all those major label people, reading books and admiring the whole game of it all, yet you're not evil in the slightest
thanks for that Rob. However, there is a fairly clear delineation between many indies and the majors, and it's a delineation that does not make any party 'evil' as such.
Like many independent labels I primarily started releasing records because of what was contained on them...the music. That was the main driving force behind the, often insane, desire to make records in any formats.
The large record companies, call them what they will do not, and have never, existed because of that driving force. They exist to sell units and maximise profits for whoever are their shareholders. The major record companies are all heirs to the companies set up by Emile Berliner, Jack Warner and Thomas Edison to ruthlessly make as much money as possible by selling as many units of their product as they could. It's simply about units.
Is that evil? No more so than Heinz selling Baked Beans. That is what they do and they have done it well. Part of that evolved in new format launches...the LP in 1948 and the 45 in the fifties and the CD in the early 80s. In each case they were often able to resell the same item to the same people several times for roughly the same purpose, but research in the 1970s indicated that there was a huge audience, post war, baby boomers and the like who were likley to want to upgrade their youthful memories to a new format. It was a massive market waiting to happen and huge sums were spent by a variety of companies before Philips and Sony worked out the compact disc. And much political wrangling too as the potential profits were enormous. EMI was the last on board as they had a tie in with Toshiba who were looking at an alternative. The plan was to kill the vinyl market overnight and then use the new players as a lever to resell all that pre-CD stuff to the same folks that had already bought it. And it largely worked.
Do I think that was evil...not at all. It was just the big companies maximising their return to shareholders. But it was a conscious business decision as is digial right now. It just ain't working out quite as well. Album sales down another 11% this year on last I see....the perception of DRM plays a role in that decline.
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whoops: copyright protection, should read= copy protection