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Loading ...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 Jack Kapica’s 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 mouldy 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 favour 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 $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. [Comment on this Post]
