Whats the quickest and easiest way to turn thousands of fans off of purchasing your music?

First came The Metallica Corporation.  Now the Beasties.

Musicians and the RIAA need to realize they will never be able to stop the trading of music online, they will simply cause the fans to begin hating the band and its music and hinder sales.  It would be interesting to see if the drop in downloads of Metallica's music was due to them threating theose 12 year olds that were stealing it, or if it was due to the fact that all of their new music sucked ass and that they lost the fan devotion because of those petty lawsuits.

I've said it before, and I will say it again.  What they need to do is simply produce higher quality content (more than one track that is worth listening too per album), with more “add-ins“ (inserts/dvd extras and such), at a significantly lower price.

In Canada the average price for a decent CD these days is still well over $20 in most retail locations; and on those releases they typically only have from 9 to 15 tracks.  Drop the price way down and make it worth my time and money to go out and purchase it.

ps. Is it just me, or should the Beasties be renamed to “The Beastie Old Men”? 

huhu

3 Comments

• Ben said Tuesday, June 22, 2004 3:10:00 PM

  Ummm ... I couldn't get to the linked article (stupid firewall)
  
  But, this was mentioned on Slashdot the other day and the copy protection is EMI's policy - the Beastie Boys had no say in it.
  
  But I do agree with you that most CDs these days are mostly cr*p :(

• Aaron Junod said Wednesday, June 23, 2004 6:38:00 AM

  Velvet underground has some protection too, and its really kind of frsutrating. I own the CD and can't bring it to work without going through hoops (I listen to mp3 at work). Seems like a gross violation of my license by the record company.
  
  And yes, the new beasties album is pretty crappy imo. In fact I'm listening to Ill Communication now to remember why I always loved the beasties. I doubt the new album will get much more play over here. It's a shame, I had high hopes.

• Rick David said Wednesday, June 23, 2004 11:50:00 AM

  To disable the copy protection, all you have to do is disable the autorun feature of the CD ROM. This is done by holding down the shift key while you put a CD in, or set HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CDRom\AutoRun to 0. Now you can rip and share on Kazaa so I can hear the new CD ;)