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[DMCA-Activists] How to fail in e-business with a record effort
From: |
IBSHQ |
Subject: |
[DMCA-Activists] How to fail in e-business with a record effort |
Date: |
Tue, 15 Oct 2002 23:12:35 EDT |
interesting article at:
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/GAMArticleHTMLTemplate?tf=globetechnolo
gy/TGAM/NewsFullStory.html&cf=globetechnology/tech-config-neutral&slug=TWKAPI&
date=20021010
How to fail in e-business with a record effort
JACK KAPICA
Thursday, October 10, 2002
It's easy to fail in e-business; what's hard is failing magnificently.
The Big Five music recording companies have been transcendent in this respect.
Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses
and are close to destroying an entire industry.
The following are 10 rules of e-business failure, a list inspired by
the recording industry's imaginative approach:
1. Refuse to change:
Computers are just tools, and useful only in
making your existing marketing model more efficient. Give word
processors to your secretaries and install computerized
stock-tracking systems so you can lay off staff. Declare the future
to have arrived. Collect your performance bonus.
2. Ignore the Internet:
If you can't imagine any way of making money
on-line, then no one else can, either. Act surprised when the
Internet starts to carry multimedia. Cry, "Who knew?" and insist the
whole multimedia thing was invented only to ruin your business.
3. Be sanctimonious:
Claim to be more concerned about the artists
than about your profit. You are selfless; your only interest is
paying the musicians, without whom you would be nothing. Pray that
nobody remembers the countless rockers who signed away their souls on
recording contracts and were dumped the moment their sales slipped.
4. Misunderstand your market:
When you count the songs being swapped
on peer-to-peer networks, do not notice that most are moldy oldies.
It's still theft, you argue, even if you stopped paying royalties for
those songs in 1961. Blame piracy, not taste, for your inability to
sell new songs that no radio station will play.
5. Lie:
Go on Kazaa, count the MP3 versions of songs you produced,
old and new, and multiply that number by the current retail price of
a CD; howl that you are losing a fortune. Forget that a Buddy Holly
album sold for $2.95 in 1958; you sell records for much more now, and
that's the price you use when calculating your losses -- it's more
impressive.
6. Kill it:
Hollywood failed to make VCRs illegal, but you're going
to succeed with peer-to-peer technology. Spend millions on lawyers to
sue Napster and Scour into oblivion. Sure, paying lawyers has
suddenly become more important than paying your artists, but so what?
Hedge your bets by setting up your own Web site, offering songs that
aren't selling well in stores. When your e-business proves to be less
than a thundering success, blame it on the pirates -- meaning all
your customers.
7. Pray it will all go away:
Your noble efforts to shut down Napster
and Scour will so terrify pirates that they will decamp immediately
and other industries will lose all interest in P2P. Act as though
U.S. Court rulings in your favor apply to all other countries,
regardless of their different legal principles. Do not make
contingency plans.
8. Insult your market:
After calling your customers "pirates,"
antagonize them further by threatening to release a flood of "empty"
MP3 files to frustrate swapping. Do not understand the technical
reasons why this won't work. Threaten to hack into the P2P networks
like real criminals. Forget that some of these networks are based in
foreign countries, which (for reasons you also cannot understand) do
not subscribe to your system of justice. Then say you will launch
denial-of-service attacks on pimply faced file swappers, even if they
live in those other countries.
9. Make government your accomplice:
Demand exemptions from criminal
prosecution by the U.S. Government for your hacking and
denial-of-service attacks. You're doing this for a Higher Cause,
after all, which is paying royalties to your artists (remember
them?). Drag Verizon Communications, an Internet provider, into court
and demand it surrender the name of one of its subscribers allegedly
sharing 600 music files, so your expensive lawyers can crush this
kid's skull. Then get the Canadian government to impose a levy on all
recordable media sold here, whether it's used for burning pirated
music or archiving corporate data. Make mortal enemies of Apple and
Sony because the levy adds something like 20 per cent to the retail
price of their portable jukeboxes, pricing them out of the market.
Collect more than $30-million without disbursing a single cent to
your artists -- after all, you're Fighting the Good Fight, and you're
going to have to tighten the artists' belts for them if you hope to
win.
10. Go back to giving it away:
Organize British record companies for
a Digital Download Day. Charge £5 ($12.50) and claim it's "free."
Reason that people would rather pay for music than get it for nothing
on Morpheus. The "free" fee entitles people to listen to 500 streamed
songs, to download 50 songs or to get five songs that can be burned
on a CD. Ignore the math, which shows your £1 price for every
burnable song is higher than the retail price per song on a British
CD. Pretend you haven't noticed that your "day" is actually a week
(Oct. 3 to 9), further proof that you can't count. Act surprised when
your music servers can't handle the traffic and grind to a halt;
blame the technology that put you on this terrible road in the first
place. Angrily dismiss anyone who says that what you're doing is
something you once told a judge is sheer piracy.
Got it?
Now get out there and fail. Oblivion awaits.
Visit the e-Insider page at globetechnology.com for Report On
Business Television video, exclusive case studies and more.
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