P2P Tech Time

The Big 4 record labels, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG, and the Hollywood studios, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, have jointly announced major realignments of their marketing, sales, promotion and distribution models.

“It’s the season of goodwill,” said Dan Glickman (left), head of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), at a press conference in Los Angles, late yesterday evening.

“Starting December 1, movies released by the members of the MPAA on accredited sites will priced at $1.99 per download for older releases, and $3.99 for new ones,” he said.

And Mitch Bainwol (right), chairman and president of RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), told reporters, “The music industry plans to give music fans the present they’ll never forget.

“As of December 1, our members are opening their catalogues to the limit and reducing wholesale prices to 15 cents for each digital music track for releases prior to 1990, and 20 cents after that.

“This will enable existing and new re-sellers to open the online music market to the hundreds of millions of fans who are currently using the P2P networks for their music fixes.”

Both groups also say all forms of DRM will be permanently abolished, also effective as of December 1.

Consumers who from 2005 onwards bought CDs or DVDs imprinted with DRM technologies will be able to exchange them for unrestricted copies, provided they have proof of purchase, say the groups.

Fresh capital generated by the moves will be funnelled into new forms of product development, and the creation of P2P-based online distribution technologies, they say.

The motion picture and recording companies will also immediately halt all lawsuits aimed at file sharers and will be similarly dropping prosecutions involving indexing sites, they promise.

“This will enable us to focus our financial and legal resources wholly on combating losses linked to illicit sales by organised criminals,” noted Glickman.

“Organized crime gangs – ‘pirates’ – depend largely on physical product to ply their illicit trades. They’ll find much harder to operate when consumers are buying music and movies from adequately stocked download sites operated by entrepreneurs licensed to sell industry product.

“It’s the start to a new beginning.”

More and more people are logging on every day and eventually, “the balance will shift and anything that can be digitized will be digitized and sold online, not as physical product,” says Bainwol.

“This will eventually result in a significant reduction of existing overheads, such as the money tied up in storage, print costs, enforcement, PR campaigns, etc. These costs will be drastically lowered or cut altogether. This, in turn, will mean more and more people will be buying more and more reasonably priced product via the Net.”

Consumers will themselves be working indirectly with the industries, they say.

“Viral marketing will truly come into its own,” says Glickman. “New movie and music releases will be heralded and discussed in blogs, via emails, messaging, IM, and so on.”

Revitalising the movie and music industries

The RIAA and MPAA, and similar trade groups around the world, will be re-configured as information resources.

Retailers and wholesalers will be encouraged to contact them for information relating to all aspects of production and delivery.

Separate units will be created to deal with consumer concerns.

“This is only Part I of our plans to revitalise the movie and music industries,” says the statement.

“We’ll also be approaching independent developers of compression and distribution technologies to form alliances aimed at creating a broad and balanced approach to the online sale and of delivery online music and movies.”

“”We were perhaps a little tardy in taking this approach,” says Bainwol, “but we intend to make up for lost time.”

It’ll be, “Ho Ho Ho all around,” says Glickman.

“This will help restore Napster to its rightful position as the premier music download service,” says Chris Gorog, chief of the ailing Napter II.

“Excellent news,” says RealNetworks boss Rob Glaser. “We’ll now be able to compete with the indies, P2P networks and iTunes on a level playing field.”

“iTunes is already by far the single most popular independent and corporate music download service with over 11 billion download sales to date,” says Apple’s Steve Jobs. “Our cutting edge copyright protection technologies keep us in front, which is where we plan to stay.”

A ways and means white paper is to be publicly released on January 29, 2009.

Source