The Legal Janitor

In another insipid and one-sided article, the CNA highlighted the terrible woes of record companies in Singapore. Here.

Key quotes:

But the influx of parallel imports has taken a toll on the music industry.

According to a study conducted by the Recording Industry Association of Singapore (Rias), there has been a staggering 25-per-cent fall in CD sales in the past two years.

…

In the long haul, the music industry suffers.

As record companies see the parallel imports eat into their profits, they become more unwilling to further develop the music industry, experts say.

Said Mr Mohan Mahapatra, managing director of EMI Singapore and India: “Companies simply cannot develop local talents without a profit.”

Ok, first things first. Record companies != music industry [not equal]. As much as in their wildest wet dreams they would like to think so.

Second, the article falls for the Rias line that CD sales are “lost” due to such factors as “parallel imports”. It is a simple fact that the truly scarce resource that people have to manage, is time. And when it comes to allocating time and attention, it is not as though we reserve a special place in our hearts for the products of the Rias content cartel.

The simple fact is that as more and more things fight for our attention in our everyday lives, we have simply chose to spend less of it on CD music. It could be on the internet, on TV, on movies, on video games, on new media such as blogs, YouTube/Googlevideo, blogging, podcasting, etc etc etc.

There are millions of myriad reasons why people would choose to spend less time on CD music, and hence buying less CDs, and of all reasons, Rias chose to highlight the one reason which is presently still legal, but they would dearly love to get rid of. Parallel imports.

Even the term itself is misleading. Parallel imports are just like any other imports. They are imports of legal material. The only issue is that they are not sold at a price that the Rias content cartels would like to sell at.

This brings to the fore two anti-trust issues. The first is resale price maintenance. Even though prohibiting “parallel” imports does not directly create resale price maintenance, allowing the content cartel to prohibit legal imports just because they feel they haven’t got enough moolah, effectively allows the cartel to set prices after the first sale.

The second anti-trust issue is price discrimination by region. We’ve seen that with DVDs, we’ve seen that with the Playstations (which is why I never bought one), and guess what, consumers hate it. There seems something fundamentally moronic about someone telling us that we can’t use the thing we just bought because it comes from somewhere else.

Finally, back to the point that the Music Industry != Record Companies. Simple fact, you guys are dead. D-E-A-D. It’s only a matter of time. In economic terms, the only function you guys perform is distribution, and that has been effectively dealt with by the Internet. It’s either iTunes music store, or Bittorrent and the rest of the P2P posse.

Add to the fact that once musicians and artists realise that they are being ripped off because not only do you, the incredibly greedy content cartel, not pay them enough off CD sales, but also not pay them AT ALL on iTunes downloads, why should they let you, the content cartel, distribute their works for them?

They could just list themselves directly on iTunes and let iTunes collect the cash for them, while they make their music AND retain all rights to their own music.

Sucks to you Rias. Your death knell is sounding, and its only a matter of time.

Channelnewsasia.com - Cheaper CD blues in Singapore