| “Break down doors, buy up stolen goods” was the title of my article dedicated to the visit of the Morcheeba group to our country. The title is a generalized quote; During a press conference, the band members “allowed” Russians to buy “left-handed” Morcheeba discs, because they believe: “We are not represented here by any record company.” At the same time, the musicians “recommended” to their Moscow listeners, in order not to pay for a ticket (the concert took place in a small hall of the Gogol Theater, so the prices were respectable), to break the doors and go for free. Well, many wealthy Western pop musicians are known for their “leftist” pseudo-socialist ideas. But that's not what this is about.
Please note that for the Englishmen from the Morcheeba trio, buying pirated discs and breaking doors are the same concepts. Russians, in an incomprehensible way, separate “violation of public order” and “bought the disc cheaper.” The other day, our government banned the street trade in audio and video media, thus creating another obstacle for pirates, since “leftist” and only “leftist” are sold on the streets, which the police cannot seize, since seizure requires an examination. I would like to believe that this ban is not just a beautiful gesture, but a thoughtful step in the fight against the illegal replication of phonograms under the romantic name “piracy.”
It seemed that the harm of piracy had long been recognized. But no, a day after the decision, furious cries in defense of pirates began to be heard in the central media (and not at all in shopping malls!), in particular on one well-known radio station and in an equally well-known liberal newspaper. They are supposedly fighting against the super-profits of record companies, while at the same time bringing art to the people. The logic is simple: pirates will go away - and that’s it, all discs will cost twenty bucks apiece, therefore grandmothers, students, military men and single mothers will no longer be able to buy them and will never hear their favorite music. This would be a terrible nuisance if it weren't a terrible lie.
First, I’ll talk about the “excess profits” of record companies. Your two dollars paid for a counterfeit CD (versus $15 for a real one) is not called “bought cheaper”. This is - he gave the money to someone who does not have any rights to this disk, that is, he sold stolen property. What do pirates steal? Copyright. There is little value in a compact disc (cassette, videotape, DVD, super-audio CD, etc.) on its own—if you subtract the costs of producing the music itself. And production is expensive, be healthy. Studio rental, session musicians, royalties, mixing, mastering plus indirect costs - direct advertising, indirect advertising, PR... There is not enough space to list all this, those who want to get the necessary information can go to www.ifpi.org.
With such investments, the record business is not at all “extremely profitable”. On the contrary, this is a risk zone. According to statistics from the International Phonographic Industry Association (IFPI), only one project out of ten makes a profit. Pirates risk absolutely nothing - everything has already been done for them. At the same time, it is precisely the pirate business that is extremely profitable (you should have seen the people who “rose” in the early 90s from counterfeit goods!). Legal business pays taxes (this is about the question of a robbed grandmother), creates jobs, and invests profits in the development of culture, and not necessarily mass culture.
Now about “what will happen when there are no cheap disks.” One could, of course, promise the whole “your music addiction is crap,” but I don’t want to blame it on a healthy one. I will give an example from personal experience. For more than half of my adult life, I hung around in the “humpback” ranks, trading and exchanging. I saw who buys CDs, what these people buy and why . So, with rare exceptions, more than half of the “left” discs are purchased for one-time listening, and then lie in a dusty corner. They buy them haphazardly, in heaps, “for fun” - this is a common sin among music lovers. I personally have never observed the notorious grandmothers, single mothers and other low-income segments of the population buying twenty-five “scorched” compacts at a time. I could be wrong, but, in my opinion, they just buy only what they need, and in the store, and do not rush around in the shady park near the Bagrationovskaya metro station.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and even less so the market. If in our country there is weak demand for CDs at normal European prices (we live poorly, there are thieves all around), no one will force them to sell to us. Prices will still fall - not to two bucks, of course, but no one promised that it would be easy to live in a civilized market and enjoy such benefits as high-quality music in a wide range. With the current income of the record business, there is absolutely nowhere for it to come from.
In addition, we should not forget that most CDs, both with domestic and foreign repertoire, have a legal “doublet” in the form of a cheap (about $3) version of the disc (the so-called “Cyrillic”). So all record companies understand what can be sold here, to whom and how much .
But let’s return to the high cost of “native” compacts. For more than a year now, the author of these lines has been serving at Gala Records, which represents the international label EMI in our country. All we seem to do is lower prices. There is, for example, such a thing as a “mid-price campaign” - this is when an impressive part of the catalog from the Full category ($13) is transferred to the Mid category ($10), or even Budget ($8). That is, the company simply gives discs to stores cheaper (this has its own economic benefits, but that’s not what we’re talking about). The campaign lasts for several months, but during this time prices in Moscow stores do not always go down. Because a store, even reducing the price by a couple of dollars, cannot expect a multiple increase in purchases, as happens in the West. So far, CDs are classified as “goods of inelastic demand”, i.e. with a slight increase in prices, demand drops sharply; with a slight decrease, demand does not increase. Because now our legal CD market is very small. With the revived demand for legal products, these mechanisms will work.
Personally, I feel neither warm nor cold from pirates - I receive a fixed salary that does not depend on sales. You might, of course, think that since I work for a record company, I have the opportunity to listen to music for free. (Also, the cashier at the savings bank is apparently very rich - that’s a lot of money to count every day!) But in reality, I, like you, will go to a “legal” store to buy new albums from my favorite bands that are not on our label: Suede (released on Sony), Morcheeba (they are released here by Warner, which the musicians themselves for some reason did not know about, see above) or some folklore Marie Boyne Persen, which is released at all, I don’t understand where it comes out, and I’m five hundred rubles for it last disk paid! So I’m not worried about my record company, I’m upset about the country. Alexander BELYAEV
|
