The Biggest Industry Mistakes Of The Digital Age

From Hypebot.

The Biggest Industry Mistakes Of The Digital Age

Audioholics has composed a list of its favorite corporate and industry-specific "disasters" and the music industry proudly made the list in two places.

The Largest Music Retailer Is A Computer Company - Why did the music labels and an entire industry sit on its laurels and allow a computer company to innovate and develop the largest resource for online music? Perhaps because, like a lumbering shipping vessel, the labels, used to bullying around an entire industry of artists, distributors and broadcasters, were simply too slow to recognize that the world was passing them by...From behind this massive Titanic-bound juggernaut came Apple Computer, who, known for their innovation and market-savvy, decided to work their own back-door deal and invent the world's first (and over 7 years later still the most popular) mass-market digital music player that was quickly followed by a robust, fully-loaded online music store.

Music Industry Hails Solution to "CD Problem" - Embraces DVD, DVD-Audio and SACD Discs - Really? No... no... not really. Instead they continued to sue teenagers and little old ladies for thousands of dollars and resist all attempts to give consumers what they wanted - online streaming content. But they also did one other very important thing: they failed to innovate in the area of the physical disc...

The music industry dropped the ball. The real question is will they continue to drop it. With the dawn of Blu-ray and its support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, music can once again be lifted up to a new level. The throw-down challenge is whether the RIAA will raise the bar and push its artists to use the new medium, charging only a modest premium over CDs in an effort to switch the dominant format. Blu-ray is a harder nut to crack since it has not yet penetrated the market as fully as DVD (which has near total penetration) but they could certainly steer the music in this direction and drive the market.

Our bet, however, is they will continue to lull themselves to sleep, only to be awoken suddenly when their largest artists have moved onto independent labels of their own and new artists are figuring out that their bests interests lie not in losing 90% of their revenues to large men in suits.