What Just Happened?
An interesting way of fighting movie piracy: movie distributor Tuck decided not to run film “What Just Happened” in Belgrade cinemas because the copy of the movie is already freely available on the internet but it’s also possible to buy it at black market stands in the city (in the underground passage at Terazije, for example).
I’m not sure how this will stop the organized illegal movie and music market on the streets. It’s probably a way to put extra pressure on the government to fight black DVD market by creating a story media will pick up (like I did just now).
Pirated movies and music are big business in Serbia as well as in all (Eastern?) European countries where copyright infringement and authorship rights are not being respected at all. Not one single Serbian band is making money from the CD sales, nor is any movie producer or director making any money from cinema ticket sales. If there are any making money, that’s all thanks to deals, sponsorships and connections with various political parties, state officials and other shady characters. Which obviously affects their creativity and image afterwards.
Piracy has always been strong here since the nineties but now thanks to the internet it became virtually unstoppable. The big question is – how to use the power of file sharing to boost up the sales of an album or a movie? Some studies show that the sales of CDs and DVDs are growing in the US despite the file sharing, or maybe even thanks to file sharing. This is surely not the case in Serbia, because the market size is to small compared to the US. It would be interesting to see if a local band can do what Radiohead did some time ago – to offer it’s music for free download and let fans choose if and how much they want to pay for the music.
By the way, the movie from the title of this post is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year, and I’ve seen many movies this year. Don’t see it, don’t even download it.
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Why Serbs do not buy CDs?
They are too expensive for them. I started listening to music intensively in my youth, early nineties, buying casettes in front of SKC. They were not original, a bit expensive for my teenage allowance, but thank God for friends, so you could swap tapes, record songs from the radio.
Then we all switched to CDs. Bought at the same place. Still you could not buy everything that interested you, but since you paid a portion of what was the price of the original, you could afford more. Not to mention, there were no originals to buy them. Economic sanctions.
At the same time, everywhere else, recording industry was reveling in cash, probably thinking that what they have is so good, that it will never stop.
Until the emergence of recordable devices, like CD-roms, which kind of equalized us all – people from the developed West (who used to buy CDs) and us (who had to settle for the Bulgarian ones, as you know we called them).
My generation, people in the mid-twenties, not to mention younger people, does not have a culture of buying original CDs. We consume music the other way. On Ipods or similar devices, where you can stash enough music to last you a whole year of listening non-stop. The time when a record was a coveted object, something you looked at, wanted for a while, then bought and listened, is long gone. For better or for worse.
I do feel bad for young bands in Serbia, though. But, everywhere in the world musicians are saying “we are not making money from records, but live shows”. And they get paid when their song is played on the radio, which is not the case in our country, where you could use a song in an advertisement and get away without paying.
But here is the thing – without culture of Bulgarian CDs, would there ever be Exit? A festival that shows that there is enormous interest for popular culture in our country, not to mention something that our country (Government) is terribly proud of. Today I learnt that favorite band of Serbs is Coldplay. The same polling result would occur in any other western European country. Without piracy in the nineties, we would all have drowned in a large pool of turbo folk crap. For me, pop cultural references mean that I haven’t really lived in isolation.
Regarding Serbian films. The lack of interest for them can be explained with the bad scripts, bad acting, bad directing. Bad ideas in general. They are financed by the Government, where one bunch of artists give money to another, who do the same next time they are elected in the same money-dividing commission. They don’t consider audiences’ interest for a second.
Cinemas are supposedly shutting down because of piracy. How about – tenders on which major cinema chains were sold to casinos or similar businesses. Distributors are playing it safe, importing silly films, which have no audience. So many good films were not shown in the last few years, due to the lack of cinemas, which is why distributors only showed commercial bullshit.
PopKitchen, thanks for this great analysis, I believe it deserves to be a separate blog post, so I’m honored that you posted it here.
I don’t know about that thing with the foreign bands not being interested in CD sales. I think the English-speaking market is so huge that they have to care. Concerts are also big money but I believe it’s on the same scale as the CD sales. Also because of the purchasing power, people in the west are actually still buying CDs after they download an album. That’s something we don’t have in Serbia and never had. When it comes to foreign artists, that doesn’t matter all that much because they will make enough money on some other market to go on. But when it comes to local ones, selling couple of thousand CDs is considered a success. Combine that miserable money with not receiving any radio play royalties and all you get are musicians making music out of love and passion. Which is not so bad in theory, mind you. Only if they could make enough money to buy food
Thanx.
Let me just clarify – it is not that they don’t care, but they are less motivated. They need a CD, so they can go on tour where they can earn more money.
It takes 2 dollars to produce a CD, which is then sold for 15, out of which only authors get royalties (people who just play, but do not write songs are screwed). Last year, Madonna signed with Live Nation, the biggest concert promoter, where she combined all aspects – making of the album, promotion and live performance. Radiohead released album asking people to offer money for it (most people did not pay anything), but this is because they make money on tour.
Serbian case is much sadder. No money for albums, little money for the gigs. Films made with subsidies from the budget or sponsorships.