Cheap Trick: More Afraid Of Being Ignored Than Ripped Off

from the indeed dept

Last week on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert did a gag about the new Cheap Trick album coming out on 8-track. I assumed it was just a joke, but apparently it’s real. The band, as a little marketing gimmick is actually releasing the album as an 8-track (for you kids out there, the 8-track was a briefly popular form of cassette music, though it lived on at radio stations for years after it disappeared from public use). But, much more interesting is a quote at the end of the article about plans to offer the digital tracks at a steep discount from the typical iTunes price:

“We’re kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off.”

Indeed. This is just another way of saying that “obscurity is a bigger fear than piracy.” And while such things are usually applied to new, up-and-coming artists, it’s nice to see that more well known artists recognize the same formula applies to them, as well.

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Comments on “Cheap Trick: More Afraid Of Being Ignored Than Ripped Off”

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12 Comments
Greg Hardison (profile) says:

8-tracks

“…it lived on at radio stations for years after it disappeared from public use…” Huh?? Radio stations used a standard 2-track cart format (warning: 6 tracks are missing!), mostly for :30 and :60-second long produced spots, known to the Great Unwashed as “Commercials”. Tell me, who would for a minute think that 8-track carts (as in “cartridges”, not “cassettes”) could ever be practical for broadcast use?
Try having someone older than 17 do your research.

Hephaestus (profile) says:

Wonder what they think of the RIAA?

This band seems like it would do well if all its albums were available for sale in one place.

This place is so full of great ideas … Thanks Mike!!

219 note/entry) Find old bands with independent labels and approach them for the site / system.

220) Allow Private and public Groups all based on user login name but linked to the persons email address as this is a unique identifier.

221) Allow Parental controls with, but not limited to, groups, Individuals, Access level based on group and individual (we want to keep the kiddies safe from porn now dont we)

222) Incoporate Collaboration into the tool set.

223) have groups for collaboration, accounting, marketing, access, groups, email, etc

224) visual/graphic representaion of collaboration groups.
need to come up with some designs for this

225) set standards for group naming conventions and user lists.

And that does it for todays additions to the Chaordic new music tool set / system

I really hope no one from the record labels ever checks this place out….big … ole … GRIN ….

What is funny is…

The basic design and methodology to create a system to redo/replace the music and video distribution industry is simple. Find the flaws, customer complaints, musician complaints, song writer complaints, accounting problems (cooking the books), RIAA, IP Law flaws, in the current system. Fix them via contracts, User feedback, and an open source and open standards distributed system.

Its all pretty simple from a legal and large scale distibuted system architecture perspective. The problem lies in the fact that the record industry could never implement it, it would errode their profits in an extreme way. It wouldnt mean a loss of revenue just a re-distribution of the profits to the artists, promoters, remixers, song writers, etc.

Personally I think this is something that give the industry execs nightmares and bolt uprights…

On that note ….

Thanks Mike!!! I love this place…

Derek Kerton (profile) says:

Hypocrisy

This goes directly against one of Cheap Trick’s main tenets. I think this band made it perfectly clear that they are AGAINST all forms of “free” when they exclaimed:

“Surrender. Surrender. But don’t give yourself away.”

And if that wasn’t clear enough, they emphasized:

“Aaaay. Aaay. Aaaaaaay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay.”

It seems they’ve changed their tune…

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