Who handled the emergence of the Internet worse - the newspaper industry or the music industry?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I smack my forehead for not thinking of that. If it’s a problem to have people making donations to for-profit companies, then “sell” them “premium content” that they can buy for a dollar whether or not they really care for the extra product.

The difficulty with all that of course is that there’s the psychological barrier to get over with having to register or go through your paypal account, etc, etc. They might not get much, but have any of them tried?

I’m reminded of the suggestion that the SDMB sell classified ads so that people could donate to the site. I think a lot of the ads would have just been “Thank you.”

22

Do you have a story to share? I generally think of Craigslist or The Recycler (actual papery version of CL-ish ads around these here parts) as more trustworthy. You met the person, you gave money, you drove away with the real product and not some tenuous email connection or someone hiding behind a big phone bank in a service center. Usually you’ve driven to their house, which makes it less likely that they’re selling you a problem. Would you knowingly rip off someone when they know exactly where you live?

Also, why would jobs on CL be fake? I guess anything could be, but wouldn’t you discover that pretty quickly?

23

Micropayments - I’d pay a nickel or a quarter for some content…

24

I’m curious about how much musicians are losing via their songs being illegally downloaded. How much of a successful act’s profit comes from album sales? Isn’t most of their revenue generated by touring and radio airplay?*

*I’m not asking rhetorically; I genuinely don’t know.

25

The thing is, the vast majority of content in a typical newspaper is recycled. Almost all national or international news comes from the AP wire, except for the national papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So why should a user pay the newspaper for content the newspaper didn’t generate? They can get the same news from literally any newspaper in the country. So the value added by the local paper is zero. Other services like classifieds have no logical tie to the news. Same with comic strips, crossword puzzles, TV listings (which you can get on the TV), editorials, and so on. The only product that newspapers provide that no one else provides is local news.

So the notion of a newspaper with all these different products bundled together is dead. No one will pay for them when they can get them free elsewhere. And if it turns out that you have to pay to get, say, good crossword puzzles, people will pay to get them from a crossword puzzle website not a newspaper.

So how valuable is local news? How much would people pay? Not much. The other newspaper functions that subsidized local news no longer do so.

But very small specialized local papers have been doing OK, because they really do provide content that you can’t get anywhere else. As long as these papers aren’t attached to some massively overleveraged parent media company, like, oh I don’t know, the Chicago Reader and Creative Loafing. But these products might have to be paid for by advertising rather than subscriptions.

This may be a dark time for newspapers, but it’s a great time for the people who consume the products that used to be bundled into newspapers.

26

This seems bizarre to my capitalistically-ignorant mind.

27

I think it’s at least partly because the hard-copy newspaper had very little competition as a place for advertising. Sure, magazines have ads too, but they don’t appear every day, and in the realm of classified (as opposed to display) advertising, the newspaper had virtually no competition at all. I remember a friend placing a classified ad in a newspaper in the late 1980s, and a few lines of text cost about $20 or $30, if my memory is correct. Anyway, it was pretty expensive, and every edition of the newspaper, especially the huge weekend edition, had hundreds or thousands of these ads.

Now, there are hundreds of thousands of websites that carry advertising of some sort of other, whether banner ads or pop-ups or large flashy things or simple text links. This huge number of outlets means that advertisers have lots of choice, and the competition for advertising dollars has driven down the price. Also, services like Craigslist have put a huge dent in newspaper classified advertising. Newspapers can’t charge what they used to charge for classified ads (whether in the hard copy or online), because the same level of exposure can be had cheaply or for free elsewhere. Even a paid site like eBay charges less to list an item than an old=-fashioned classified ad in a newspaper, and reaches millions more people.

There’s an Australian TV show i really like called Mediawatch. It’s only 15 minutes long, and i watch it each week online. Most episodes deal with issues such as poor journalistic ethics, conflicts of interest, and similar things. But last year they had a special episode on the future of journalism, where they dealt with the difficulties that newspapers are having in making a profit in the new economic model. It deals with some of the issues we’ve been talking about, including the incredible decline in ad revenue and the consequences for journalism. It’s worth watching, if you’ve got 15 minutes to spare.

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/watch/default.htm?program=mediawatch&pres=20080505_2120&story=1

If you don’t want to watch the video, you can read the transcript here:

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2235826.htm

28

Exactly. Most papers, except for a bit of local news, existed because only they could afford the teletypes to get content from the AP or UPI, and the comics and features from the syndicates. Now everyone can. If local papers started to cover local new in more depth, and provided ways of locals to get together on-line, they may have something.

As for the national papers, consider TV. In the '30s and most of the '40s a private person couldn’t afford the delivery mechanism for video, and thus went to movies. TV allowed this, but the response was a limited number of private networks sponsored by advertising. I would suspect that a limited number of national papers could survive on line in this way. The advantage is that there is a reason for the eyeballs to come back to the site, and copying isn’t a problem since yesterday’s news is not worth much. But there will be shakeout, and they need to force any sites linking to them to get the ads also.

To answer the OP’s question, the music business screwed up more. Music can be copied with value, so the advertising model won’t work. There is some measurable difference between a quality news site and a junk one, with the newspaper adding value, but musical quality is in the ear of the listener, and the label usually doesn’t add much value besides selection and promotion. These are now both cheap.

Someone I heard on the radio talking about this topic noted that record companies have given away content for years, on the radio, but only a limited amount in a way that was difficult to record nicely. I think record companies might kind of survive as sites that package and collect content in a way that makes it worth listeners to use, but they’ll have to be a lot smaller. They don’t seem to get it.

29

From the stuff I read, album sales are now just marketing for the tours that are where the bands make most of their money - that and t-shirts, etc. The cost of a song has basically gone down, the cost of a seat at a concert has gone up.

30

I can believe this. We stopped paying for the local paper, thinking they’d stop delivering it. Silly us. When they complained, we negotiated a deal where we didn’t have to pay the back charges and they delivered it to us at a price a bit below what we usually saved from the coupons Sunday and the supermarket circulars on Tuesday. We also get the Times, which costs a bundle but is well worth it, for us at least.

31

You probably wouldn’t. There are lots of studies (and a recent book) about how free is different from really cheap. The micropayments model has been talked about for years, but doesn’t seem to have ever taken off.

32

Despite the gigantic public relations disaster that accompanied their ill-advised policies, the music industry handled the emergence of the Internet better by over-reacting. They, quite rightly, saw the new digital world as a threat and while that doesn’t excuse some really stupid mistakes, I think they’ve been adapting better to the economic realities they’re facing.

Conversely, the newspapers underreacted, creating an online alternative but not really thinking out a proper, viable long-term business model and taking their importance for granted. You are going to see more brick-&-mortar newspapers dying out, while record labels, while taking a huge hit, are still going to be around (and potentially even grow as the landscape continues to change).

33

I’m just suspicious that way. But then I probably wouldn’t respond to a printed ad either.

34

Newspapers need to get back to the basics of covering the new IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES, where nobody else is covering that news.

The “Internet” is not going to tell me what happened at my town’s Board of Health or Zoning Board meetings this week, because the “Internet” did not pay a reporter to go to Town Hall and cover the meeting.

If you are finding everything you need to know immediately on the Internet, then you probably don’t need to know about whether the used car lot around the block from you got permission from the Planning Board to pave another acre with blacktop or that Wal-Mart filed an application at Town Hall to put a store on the old Jenkins Farm or that the School Board is considering cuts to the middle school instrumental music program.

Local stories are the news that newspapers can cover very well, if they put their minds to it. And local stories are things that readers and advertisers will pay for, because they can’t get that news or reach that target audience as well anywhere else.

35

The “Internet” did not pay anyone, but the message board dedicated to my town/community always seems to have relevant information on what’s going on at board meetings–along with lots of other threads that would be covered as community news, all free from people just posting what they know.

36

The message boards dedicated to my town, operated by the regional daily newspaper/website, are a horrendous mess of rumor, misinformation and name calling. They’re about as far from journalism as one can get.

People just posting “what they know” without the byline of a trusted reporter or news source is questionable in any media.

One benefit of a local newspaper or television station is that it has a physical presence and identifiable staff members who are in the community. There is an element of professionalism and trust.

Some purely Internet news sources are recognizable “brands” that the public is learning to trust (or not), but many of the most trustworthy new sources, at least initially, were already established names in print or traditional broadcast media.

37

And newspapers are more absorbent than laptops for coffee spills at the local donut shop. . .

38

I no longer read the local paper for the same reason others have mentioned: It’s all stuff off the wire that I read two days ago online for free.

But to address this part:

I was doing web development back in the early days of the internet. News companies at the time wanted to adopt micro-payment schemes but there were a lot of technical issues with it. Credit card companies at the time didn’t like processing nickel & dime stuff so they charged more for that. The public hated feeling nickle & dimed in return. Some sites tried to make you buy a membership or buy in $5 or $10 chunks to appease the credit card companies - nobody fell for it. Who’s going to pay $5 now to see one article? It was easier and cheaper just to go to the library and xerox it.

Also, people at the time were a lot more reluctant to buy things online. There was no paypal so you needed a credit card, which were not as ubiquitous even in the early ninties. There were ATM cards, not debit cards, and you couldn’t use them interchangeably with credit cards.

Early browsers at the time were significantly less secure than today’s browsers. They were also significantly lower. Many people were paying by the hour for internet charges, plus phone line charges. Search engines were less efficient. Downloading and reading the news was an effort compared to what we have today.

At the time BKReporter talks about when newspapers were first coming online, the online website didn’t offer a compelling news product over subscribing or going to the library. It was just not a product that people would pay for - but it was an alternative source of revenue from web ads.

In retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything newspapers could have done. They’re dying because they’re an outmoded means of communication - just like telegrams and pony express. It was relying on wire stories that is the biggest problem, imo, not the web. It’s lack of original content which makes newspapers redundant - they need to offer something different and that means local and community efforts.

IMO, newspapers should embrace their websites as local community organizing spots and try to develop compelling local event coverage and messageboards for locals to meet up. They should be holding weekly events were the message board people can meet up at certain spots and highlighting the reporting of local writers. Turning the websites into a useful place for locals to be active would help boost the advertising rates immensely.

39

Music Industry by far.

Newspapers just got smacked by changing technology leaving them behind, much like the Train Industry got hit by the Automobile.

The Music Industry is it’s own worst enemy. Fighting new distribution channels, fighting the wrong battles, etc. One of the last things I heard was that they wanted to have a limited life on purchased/downloaded content, so that it expired after 10 years. Hey folks, if that’s your grand plan, then you haven’t learned a damn thing.

40

The music industry went through many changes in the mid to late 90s and has yet to come to terms with them. First was the end of the rock era. This was a huge blow that most people still refuse to accept though popular music has been replaced with R&B and Rap and rock music is in the back seat now, much as the change over TO Rock in 1955.

This meant a lot of mainstream people were put off and stop buying.

Second was the end of cassette tapes and the change over to CDs. People were busy replacing tapes and vinyl with CDs and this inflated sales. When people replaced their CDs they stopped. The mp3s came out and people fearing another change over of formats, stopped buying again.

When the sales dropped the music industry blamed piracy instead of recognizing a shift out of Rock Music and the fact that now that CDs could be ripped, music was competing with itself. There simply is no need to come up with new groups because people can go buy the Beatles and get the original. Groups like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac are still touring and selling their old stuff.

Hence the market for new stuff is limited, simply because there is so much of the old stuff to buy.

MySpace has over one million profiles for bands and solo artists alone. That is one MILLION people pretty much giving away their stuff for free.

The market is oversaturated. Singers like actors and writers have outpriced themselves and are being replaced by ametuers.

The final fact is that most peope will download music they’d never buy. The music industry sees each download as a missed sale. But if it wasn’t free it wouldn’t be downloaded.

Also the Internet has allowed people to basically choose their own music and in a sense be their own radio station. This means acts that got by, though riding on other acts via the radio, the “one good song, three bad songs, one good song” bridge used by radio, provided royalties, however minimal to marginal artists.

This is fading quickly.

So easily the music industry still hasn’t learned to cope with the Internet, 'cause they are ignoring everything about it. You can’t force a business model on people, yet this is what they are trying to do.

But they’ll learn. Movies killed Vaudeville, TV killed Movies, TV killed Radio, FM killed AM etc etc. But none of them died they all came back in different forms with different business models. Vaudeville is back via reality TV and YouTube.