Make Candizz™, not War! A Good Advice to the Music Industry

Everyone knows that the music industry woke up one day to realize that the internet changed the way people consume music. Their first response was “STOP! Thieves!”. Their second response was lawsuits against Napster, against people who downloaded music, and then against companies who developed technologies that could be (and actually were) used to violate copyright laws (and to cause loss of income to the music industry).

Do you know what is the biggest problem of music companies when they try to compete with MP3 files?
Here are a few options:

1. MP3 Files are free while CDs cost money
2. It may take at least an hour to go to the music store, look for a CD, buy it, and go back home to listen to it. It takes less than 5 minutes to download your favorite song, and you can do it in the middle of the night and in your shorts.
3. If you want to listen to songs from several albums, you need to change CDs every few minutes. With MP3 you can keep only the songs you want.

While all these problems do exist, the biggest problem is simpler: The quality of the product is practically the same, and at the end of the day, you don’t get much more when buying the legal copy over downloading an MP3 file.

But maybe people who buy legal music should get more? Aside from a nice jewel case with a CD cover, all sorts of bonuses are sometimes offered to music customers: from books to posters, very few titles include a multimedia track while others offer access to a password protected web site. The problem is that this is raising the CD price, and it’s not really available for most CDs.

Here comes the “Candizz” part. Candizz are little multimedia elements that can be added to a music CD when it’s played with the CDizz Player™. Animations, lyrics, chords, karaoke, images, reviews, trivia pops, games, artists news etc. This gives new life to old CDs and adds an internet based visual “envelope” to the music experience.

If record companies won’t go there, the music fans may do that by themselves. Adding Candizz is easy. Some fans like creating images based on music you hear, why not share these creations with other fans who own the same CD? Other fans can review a new CD release and other fans take pictures of themselves when they attend a concert. All this material will be accessible once you pop-in the right CD.

Music companies don’t have to be portrayed as the bad guys, they can easily become the good guys simply by rewarding loyal customers who actually went to the store and bought a CD. Even if the last CD they bought is 10 years old, it will certainly be profitable for them to be able to offer these customers fun and games along with a coupon for a concert or even just news about upcoming releases.The CD is not dead. How many CDs do you have at home? More than a few, probably. How many CDs are you willing to throw away because you ripped them to your computer? I’m guessing not many, and rightfully so. It’s too early for the CDs to go to waste.

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CDizz Player is Freeware, and can be downloaded here. Tags: CDizz, Candizz, Music, CD, Software, Lyrics, Karaoke, Chords, Animation, Audio, RIAA, Multimedia.