Slashdot Mirror

Continue offering just the CD for those that don't want the extra's and price it in the $7 - $11 dollar range.

Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl

I too pulled out out of thin air:

Legacy Of Brutality by the misfits

here is the Cheap CD price. ($15.41 with shipping 12.99 without)

Pretty steep for an album put out in 1985

Amazon Price is $13.99 and 16.97 with shipping.

So the difference isn't that much.

As great as this CD is...(I listen to it regularly) I still think that even $10 is too much for it. Afterall it was produced almost 20 years ago. Surely it has lost some value?

Hmm. I pulled a CD out of the air (Live at Carnegie Hall by Renaissance) and compared the Cheap CD price with Amazon and Amazon came out cheaper by almost a buck. Maybe they're not as near wholesale as you think (plus no handling charge and free shipping (over $25) at Amazon). FYI.

They don't get $12.98, the stores do. They get a little less than that. I wonder what the new CDs will cost at Cheap-CDs, which sells CDs at near wholesale prices. That should give you a better idea of how much profit the record companies are making.

Wow, using Mozilla 1.4, sure enough all I get is a flat out IE required message. The URL that I get redirected to is even called http://www.buymusic.com/ierequired.htm

It's not even a .html file, it's .htm so I guess they're hosting the site on a DOS machine.

Oh well, cheap-cds.com

How the fuck am I supposed to support indie music WHEN I CAN'T BUY THIER CDS because no store can carry them? When radio cannot play them for fear of RIAA retailation? Break the cartel and these guys won't be indie music, they'll be mainstream.

Ummm...try an independent music store. Screw the big record store chains while you're at it. Or buy directly from the record label. Most smaller indie labels sell direct for less than you'd pay in a store, and some don't even charge shipping. There are also online stores (Cheap CDs comes to mind) that have a very good selection of indie music.

And radio? How many non-independent radio stations aren't owned by a huge media conglomerate anyway? Stick to college radio....

I for one have no problem with this, other than my wanting to side with the little guy and not "The Man." It's illegal, as far as I know, to distribute content that you don't have the right to distribute. Better the RIAA go after actual lawbreakers than they go after services which are used for legitimate purposes as well.

Oh, and for those of you who got freaked out after reading that the RIAA's cracking down, there's always EMusic and the Apple Store. I did notice that it is frequently cheaper to just buy the CD at Cheap CDs.com than it is to pay $9.99 for the AAC-encoded album. Check there first! Just a public service announcement so you don't get screwed like I did. :)

Most are closer to $15.

d00d, you need to check out www.cheap-cds.com.

And $12? Where are you getting CDs so cheap?

try cheap cds. Also, if you're into independent music, cheap out the record labels sites. First, you may be able to find a reasonable number of free songs to download, and their online stores (like jade tree) sell cds for low prices with no shipping charges.

No really good-quality audio recordings of his best work exist, he was born too soon. But we do have digital recordings: piano rolls he cut for player piano while he was at his prime. Five years ago or so, some smart people found some of those original piano rolls, scanned them into the computer, and converted them to MIDI files. Any adulterated roll-holes that the publisher might have added were removed -- at the time, player-piano publishers often took a razor blade and cut extra holes to make it sound like their artists had more hands. And subtle dynamic variations were added by hand to each note, since a player-piano roll has only one note attack volume (which at the time was often crudely modulated on playback anyway). As the liner notes say: "Converting Morton's old 78 recordings to computer data, we were able to study them from myriad standpoints of tempo, melodic shaping, accentuation, swung rhythms, chord voicing, and pedaling."

Then they played the files on a Disklavier in a concert hall.

It's eerie to listen to. It's this guy who was born in 1885, actual recordings he made in 1920, and it sounds... brilliant. You're not used to hearing jazz pianists from that era in CD quality on a great piano. Suddenly you realize that the 1920s did not sound like the 1920s to the 1920s. It's like seeing photographs a hundred years ago in color -- your mind knows better, but your senses go: whoa.

you have a good point, but the reality is that at $1 a song, the average album falls in the $10-$20 range. That's what CDs cost now, but with this service you'd be getting lower quality audio. On one hand, I could pay $1 per track for some lossy formatted music, or I could go to Cheap-CDs and pay about the same price for the pristine digital recording.

They cost too much, especially thinking of how much cd media costs, and all this copy protection talk is pretty tiresome. I always go to Cheap CD's to find the track listing and some sound samples, then go to Audiogalaxy if it sounds interesting, so I can listen to all the songs before I decide if I want to purchase it. I hate paying for filler material. I want songs that were made because the artist wanted to make it and put some heart into it, not something they had to cook up to finish the album. I'm threw with fattening up record execs just by doing(IMHO) the right thing and purchasing cd's.

I think the folks at Fairtunes have the right idea. Check out this link I got from their faq to see how much artists actually get from these cd sales.

actually, he said he got it at Cheap CDs in a previous post. the sad thing is that i remembered that.

I was just amused that Cheap CDs seems to slashdotted right now... guess everybody else's boycott is over as well :)

Except mp3.com already tried that, and got slapped. I bought some discs from Cheap-cds.com on the premise that I would be able to listen to them immediately on my.mp3.com, even before they arrived. And I could, for a couple of weeks; it was neat. And of course I'd already payed for the music. Of course, the RIAA paid no mind to this really neat, non-money-losing idea when they had all the major-label content shut off.

Recently I've been using Amazon to find music I want to buy, then hitting Cheap-CDs to make the purchase. Cheap-CDs usually beats Amazon by a buck per disc or so at least, and ships via US Mail, which I need - Amazon doesn't let you specify mail (they'll ship by mail if they want to, but you can't reliably tell them to use it). There are plenty of alternatives out there.

-Begin Evan's Dumb Signature.....