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Still More RIAA News
We just did an article about the RIAA's mendacity with statistics, and here come some more: first, someone has gone to the trouble to deconstruct their income figures over the past few years, showing that the RIAA's lack of investment in new releases is in itself sufficient to explain any dropping sales, and second, this website concerning the music industry settling a price-fixing lawsuit, which I believe is this one, filed two years ago.
That's so untrue. The most expensive CD's from amazon.co.uk are £15-£20, usually rare imports. But generally CD's are £10 - £15 www.cd-wow.com do cd's for a flat £8.99 INCLUDING P&P - and that includes all the top75 albums plus loads more.
The total amount alotted for disbursement (sp?) is 75 millon and if the total per claim is less than $5, they don't have to send out cash, just product. So if more than 15 millon claims are filed (likely) then some non-profit is just going to get a bunch of left over Moby cd's, I doubt that any cash will every even change hands.
Read the settlement, its a hoot.
Something that peopler keep missing is they charge things twice. They talk about royalties, and then about the recording and marketing costs.
.... The record industry. They can employ themselves to do the marketing. The record publisher doesn't even need to make a profit if it can cause other parts of the group to make a profit.
What they don't mention is that part of the recording and merketing costs are charged to the band (Source: courtney Love in Salon article)
Secondly, a large chunk of the money paid by the record industry is paid to
Disproving the theory that "You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" (P.T. Barnum ??), U.S. buyers have apparently come to the realization that $3.50 to $5.50 is too damn much to pay for one song.
I believe the quote is "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." from H.L. Mencken, the noted satirist.
P.T. Barnum's quote is "There's a sucker born every minute."
WinMX and AudioGalaxy both had chat rooms to discuss anything, including new music. WinMX also has a instant messaging system, and I've come across many great artists through talking to people on it. But, I prefer AllMusic for looking up new music, their "related artists" feature is pretty good.
I don't know why everyone prefers Kazza, or places it at the forefront of any p2p discussion. WinMX is much more configurable and you get great results if you know how to use it. It's like comparing Notepad with vi, sure notpad may be easier to figure out, but it's pretty limited.
Kazza is also full of spyware. I'm constantly pointing this out to friends that run it and are completely unaware of this.
Actually, CDs were cheaper to produce than vinyl then as well as now. Of course nowadays, there is no correlation with the cost to produce a CD and its price--the cost of manufacturing is so low that if marketing et. al. was left out of the mix money could be made selling CDs at $2/pop.
As for quality, early CDs provided far lower quality than vinyl initially. Yeah, we got rid of the ticks, pops, scratches, and rumbles, but great violence was done to the music by the early digital recording and mastering technology which often couldn't muster more than 13 or 14-bits of resolution at best (and often far worse). To this day, many prefer vinyl and only the recent SACD and DVD-A technologies can give well produced vinyl a run for its money on sound quality. I'm not a luddite and most of my music is now on CD, but I'm not happy about it.
Better for convenience, yes. Better for sound, decidedly not.
--Len
Fair? Yes. Accurate? No. The RIAA is a cartel.
(Oversimlification follows Back in the day, trusts (e.g. the bourbon trust, the railroad trust) were organizations of the major companies in an industry. The trust's members would all play by the trust's rules, and the trust's rules often included ways to prevent non-trust companies from surviving. In the case of the railroad trust, for example, they would charge exhorbitant fees to connect local lines to trust-owned main lines; or about once a year they would design and patent new car-connectors, again charging exhorbitant licensing fees to use them. In other words, they would drive their competitors into ruin, then buy them out for a pittance.
Doubtless, the RIAA and its members have worked very carefully to avoid appearing to be a trust in any legal sense, but as the lawsuit referenced in this article claimed, the RIAA has been used as a way to improperly fix prices among its members.
This is not my sandwich.
The CD's themselves cost right around $0.08 each at relatively low volumes. This is for 5 color glass mastered cd's. Then, add a cover and 4 color jacket and you are around $0.80 tops. This is shrunk-wrapped, glass mastered cd's ready to go! This cost also includes the glass mastering fees and the film fees ~$750.00. Now, keep in mind these are prices paid to a third company...I hope the recording industry owns their own replication plants. I WILL NOT pay over $10.00 for a music CD! I also have not purchased a music CD since the RIAA started crying two years ago.