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The Future of the CD
Murdock037 writes "Nice read at the New York Times (free reg. req.) on the CD, and how it's getting crowded out of the marketplace by gaming and DVDs-- the basic conclusion is that music executives aren't rewarded for rocking the boat, and they wouldn't know how to do it if they were. (And included is a flabbergasting claim from RIAA head Hillary Rosen that only 3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high-- of course, you can come up with a statistic for anything, as 72.5% of all people know.)"
93% of all statistics are made up.
Why would the RIAA want to cite such a statistic even if it's true? It demonstates that price-driven piracy is not the thing killing thier profits.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
Numers are like people. Torture them enough and they will tell you everything.
There are lies, damm lies, and statistics.
I guess that the RIAA has aquired all three.
Brought to you by the Artificial Idea Factory.
As long as people have a portable CD player, a CD player at home, and one in the car, CDs will keep selling.
The extra quality benefit of DVD-A and SACD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable MP3 players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say iPod?
The restrictive SACD format will not be a lure to the majority of people. DVD-A on the other hand may get a foothold because of its association with DVD-Video.
People want convenience. And until the companies spearheading these formats realise that, their proposed new super-mega-hyper-ultra-quality formats will be dead before day one.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
don't like the results of a poll, rephrase the questions.
I wonder how many times the RIAA did that to get the answers they wanted.
There's no wonder why people dony feel any compassion towards the RIAA, look how they attack everything they feel which threatens them! I dont have a single ounce of regret for the "loses" the RIAA thinks they have sustained, most of these "loses" are purely projections of what they feel they should have earned. I dont blame CD writers for the decline of music sales, I blame horrible artists and poor music for the reasons I dont buy music (along with the ridiculus price tag... $25 for a cd? Get real...)
As for Sony "losing" $132 Million last year, they didnt lose anything, they just didnt make what they promised the board of directors. They probably only pulled in $1.5 Billion and "lost" their 9% of that to people feeling like they finally have a way to get back at the bastards who runied rock-and-roll with boy-bands and Mariah Carrey (no offense to whomever loves Mariah, but you understand my point).
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
On some ages and places artists were respected for what they did, giving away art for free. that respect was earning them living. everyone knew in ancient Athens that actors were not paid but respected. everyone was alowed to go to the theater for free (not a zip) because rich people were responsible of artists and poor people because they _respected_ art and the need of poor people for it.
In other countries there were the "bards", that would play music for free to anyone and they were respected, paid and fed by people who had wealth.
So, this immorality of our age that only rich people can buy art should make us outrageous, not making us people feeling shame and guilt of not paying them!
They should feel ashamed of putting artists, good artists into this system for the sake of making themeselves more money.
People, wake up, we don't need to pay more the ones that are already rich.
Yes, I can see your argument. Let's transpose it to the 80's marketplace:
:->
As long as people have a portable cassette deck, a cassette deck at home, and one in the car, tapes will keep selling.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable tape players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say Sony Walkman?
People want convenience. And until the companies spearheading these formats realise that, their proposed new super-mega-hyper-ultra-quality formats will be dead before day one.
Yes, I see what you mean
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
People just don't like change! The DVD was obsolete by the time it became main-stream - it doesn't use the best compression methods nor does it have the highest capacity out of all the Compact Discs, but it is mainstream now and it'll take a while for it to budge.
:P
Do you know how much it costs to replace something? Getting rid of something to replace it with something else just isn't within human nature, no matter how much it would help in the long run! What would happen anyway if they did get rid of CDs? They would just put the same amount of songs on a DVD and sell them at a higher price
We're probably better off with them - or is that my human nature talking?
Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future.
When did this happen? Industry executives actually acknowledging the obvious? Now where'd those pigs go...
The only domain left where cds are of value is recording information for consumers. Backups, archives and kind-of-floppy disks for people who can't yet afford writeable dvds. Sales are on the down, fast, and for good reason.
For software distribution, dvd just makes more sense. More and more software requires more than one cd. A dvd is similar in price to a cd, but can hold more information. Why not switch? It's happening all the time.
For music the case is less clear. The cd is still the "best" way to distribute it. The problem is that the heaviest music consumers, the teens and college students, know all about mp3s. Among the artsy college crowd that I hang out with, there are two camps. One says that mp3s are just as good as cds, and easier to get, so they use them. The other camp says that mp3s have low quality sound (either all mp3s, or to some people just the low bitrate ones they can usually find on the internet) so they buy cds instead. Interesting this cross cuts the whole other spectrums: into music or not, rich or poor, death metal or country&western, big names or indy artists, etc..
In fact, more people among the intellectual elite download mp3s then burn them to cd to listen to than buy cds. That's a bit surprising since most mp3s stay on hard disks and flash memory. As I said, cds are dead.
The only place I see cd use increasing is for personal data storage. They are the new floppy disk, and they are back with a vengeance. Comparatively this works also. Back in 1987 my xt had a twenty meg hard disk and floppies one sixtieth that size. Now many people have a forty gig hard disk and use cds one sixtieth that size. For casual storage and backup and archives for people who are too poor to get industrial quality solutions, the cd will stick around in a while in its writeable form.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics.
There are even books on the topic "How to lie with statistics". (Uses as course literature for to-be journalists).
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Now, in 5 years, when everyone's done spending to get their 1000" HDTV plasma set with 15.3 dolby surround to watch DVDs perfectly, then a switch to a new music format may not be a big deal. But timing any forced media switch right now, with DVDs still fresh in most people's minds, is not the way to go.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
If you want to listen to a CD, you just pop it into the CD player. If you wish, you can skip to a favourite track by pressing a single button. You can randomize the track sequence if you get bored with the default one. Remember that when the CD was introduced, all this was new. LPs had some of these features, but jumping to a specific track required some concentration and precision, and random play was out of the question. Cassettes were just hopeless.
The supposed quality improvements in SACD and DVD-A are likely not audible by the vast majority of people. In double-blind tests, very few people can tell the difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3s and the original source CD. And the difference between SACD/DVD-A and CD is even less than that. The point being that CD is already overkill -- you can throw out 80% of the information and almost nobody will notice.
And the things they're "better" at aren't really necessary. CDs already have ~44 KHz sample rates, enough to accurately reproduce frequencies up to ~22 KHz. Since most humans drop off hearing around 18-20 KHz, with 21-22 KHz being the absolute max, going to 96 KHz sample rate is certainly not needed (and the added frequency resolution isn't noticeable to anyone either). And as for bits per sample, 16-bit audio already provides enough dynamic range to in good quality represent far more than the vast majority of equipment can reproduce.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And then when you find an interesting CD in the store, there is always the suspicion that is it a CD after all. Last week I was at a store, found an interesting title (well the new best of Led Zeppelin or something). I tried to find any indication of any copy protection method used on the CD and did not find any. But I also could not find any indication that it is NOT copy protected. And the shopgirls were too busy handling other customes, so I wasn't going to stand in queue for five minutes just to ask "I this CD?"
That day the music industry did not get that CD sold just because the potential customer was so suspicious about their product. I hope that in the future the customer can rely on getting a quality product, but it is up to the music industry to stop this madness.
only 3% have stopped buying CDs because prices are too high...
So, what? The other 97% also think prices are too high, but continue to buy CDs? The other 97% think prices are OK, but only patronize the used CD store? The other 97% think CDs are too low? Such a trite, convenient little statistic... what was the N?
100% of people surveyed (12 music industury executives in a quick boardroom poll), thought CDs were the bomb!
bah.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
"""
a seekable audio medium you don't have to turn over to finish listening to.
"""
I believe those cunning Japanese are working on an auto-reverse tape player as we speak!
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high.
8 percent are not buying less music.
2 percent are buying less music because they would rather just steal it.
87 percent are buying less music because they already bought everything they want, and all the new stuff is garbage.
Seriously, I would guess the numbers to be about 50,5,10, and 35, respectively. Keep in mind that those citing high prices are doing so in a worsening economy (thanks Clinton!).
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Well look, I'm not going to go out and buy A Flock of Seagulls' CD just because I heard it on the GTA commercial and now its stuck in my head, am I? Before mp3's, my only option would be to buy one of those awful compilations off of TV. If I could buy *just that song* for something approaching a reasonable price I might, just to keep A Flock of Seagulls in hair spray for the forseeable future. This is the bit that the RIAA doesn't want to understand, and I think it's interesting that this is exactly the same kind of all-or-nothing bundling of a product that we've seen (and complained about) from PC manufacturers and a certain software company that shall remain nameless.
I think the entire problem boils down to this: Compact Discs are just too expensive in terms of bang for the buck for today's consumers.
Let's face it: consumers will balk at shelling out US$18 per album-length audio CD; at these prices there is just too much economic incentive to pirate music, to say the least. Even at US$20 per disc, DVD's are usually a better deal because not only do you get a full-length movie, but often you get lots of background material on the production of the movie, deleted scenes, commentary tracks by the director/actors, and so on.
Take for example the four-disc Extended Edition DVD set of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which you can get for around US$30 at most discount retailers. You not only get superior picture quality, but two different top-quality audio tracks (Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES), FOUR audio commentary tracks, and two Supplementary discs with so much information it would take days to view them all even quickly. This is something no audio CD can hope to match, that's to be sure.
Now, if album-length CD's were priced at US$11 per disc, then the incentive for consumers for buy the disc goes way up and the incentive to pirate music goes way down.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
Actually, back in the 1980's there were a LOT of people looking forward to getting Compact Discs. You have to remember compared to LP turntables, CD's offered the following advantages:
1. It didn't require lots of finicky setup to get it working correctly.
2. Cared for properly, CD's way, way, outlasted LP discs.
3. CD's didn't suffer from wow and flutter, background hiss and low frequency turntable rumble.
4. The storage requirements for CD's was much smaller than LP's.
Sure, the early CD's did sound a bit harsh in the treble frequencies but careful mastering by recording engineers more or less overcame that issue.
It is that convenient size factor that has allowed DVD's to take off in popularity; the MCA/Philips Laserdisc and RCA Selectavision disc formats didn't become widely popular due to fairly stiff storage requirements, while in contrast DVD's same size factor as CD's made them very popular even though most DVD packaging is about 25% larger than CD's.
Not everything out there is a boy band.
Matthew Good makes his videos and singles available as a free non-DRM download from his website. Since free is good, you can take a look at his website.
Canadian artists really need more exposure in the states. Artists who embrace the internet also need our support. I suggest you check Kazaa for Matthew Good Band and check out the Beautiful Midnight album. You won't be disappointed, I promise.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I have said it before, and I will say it again...
I love Metalica. I have all their MP3s.
The RIAA has sucessfully made their own customers hate them, similar to Microsoft. When your customers think you are a schmuck, they don't feel too bad stealing from you. Of course, half the rappers ARE convicts. Don't be shocked if people break the law getting a copy of their latest songs. Its almost poetic justice.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Apple's R&D often notes that the optical drive is the number one bottleneck in data storage speed, reliability, and size reduction. (Not just for laptops, but desktops too) DVD burners, as Apple now includes in most every model of its computers, produce a lot of heat and add about $250 to the consumer cost of the computer.
I wish manufacturers could just agree on another new standard, such as some sort of Flash based storage. With the quality of Mp4 video and audio you could have relatively small capacity "compact flash cards" - the slot should be a combo drive as already seen in the majority of industry with DVD/CDRW combo drives. Be a flash memory reader and a videoFlash reader.
Now as for cost, if manufacturers would do this, Flash RAM (or SRAM) would start to plummet. These manufacturers would make money based on volume. I could see 128MB cards $1 + 512MB $5 1 GB $9 - these may be unrealistic at first, but WOULD come. It would reduce memory of all types for all the different uses there are.
It would also reduce R&D and reduce heat and weight concerns many Video Player/Laptop/music player manufacturers have at this moment. The XD picture card is promising 3 gigs by the end of this year. If they can put that amount of memory in the size of a postage stamp; imagine what they could do with a compact flash card size?
Of course, reasons are clear why music CDs are expensive right now - RIAA litigation costs MONEY - lots of it. Litigation expenses were nearly 33 million dollars last year. The music industry was caught for overcharging. Third, they don't understand that the cost of online distribution at a reasonable price would dramitically reduce print/ink/plastic/distribution (truck/air) costs.
My question is, are blank CD media pressing companies really making a lot of money?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Cmon!
You can buy an old movie on DVD for under $10 dollars at WallyWorld, which blows away their cost argument. Which is cheaper to produce, a CD or a DVD? Then again theres the price fixing settlement that the major record labels are paying out on now. Their greed will be thier undoing. They should price CD's at $5 a pop, then they become impulse buys. It really galls me that if I go out and buy a CD that's been out for years or a compilation disk they charge through the eyes. As for piracy, only %20 percent of homes have high speed connections, so are the rest of us dial up users spending the hours to download some older stuff? I think not. Janis Ian pointed out that her sales went up over %300 after she posted some stuff and made it available for free!
Admittedly the only CDs I've bought recently have been 'Complete works of $ARTIST' boxed sets, but they tend to be quite good value. The CD goes into my computer, ogg files go onto my hard disk and the CD goes back into its box. The only time I take it out again is if my hard disk breaks (Yes, this has happened). To me, the CD is a back-up, nothing more.
I recently asked a non-geek (yes, they do exist!) if he would pay 10p for an audio track and legally own it if he could, rather than getting it from p2p networks. He thought for a while, then said no. This same individual regularly spends £40 or more on concert tickets. When the music industry realises that recorded music is marketing tool, not a product then they will start having a sustainable buisness model. How many people pay to listen to the radio? None. Many people simply view Kazaa and friends as radio-on-demand.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This all sounds very nice, though to be honest I doubt its veracity. To be fair, some of history's most famous and beautiful works of visual art were produced at the behest of a patron. Of course, when the rich were the patrons of the arts, they also called the shots. That bard couldn't sing the song he wrote about how the feudal system sucked (except maybe in private) for fear of losing his meal ticket. Also, for a lot of art, access was restricted. The most beautiful paintings and sculptures resided in the homes of the wealthy and powerful, not in public galleries. To suggest a relevant comparison, imagine if a rich person paid your favorite musician to record a new album - but then kept all copies of the recording for their own personal listening pleasure?
Freedom: "I won't!"
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I totally disagree.
Downloading an entire CD worth of music takes time. While it's quite easy finding the hits, it's a little harder to get the less known songs.
You also have to find quality versions of each song. I'm generally forced to download about three versions of each song in order to find one really good copy. You have to mess with them to make sure they're the same volume and don't have too much space at the end. And if you're lucky enough to get the complete CD in one MP3 file, you have to spend time converting it and slicing it up.
Plus you have to create and print a label for them. Once again, that takes time.
I'd MUCH MUCH MUCH rather spend ten dollars (US) to get a CD. A local Harmony House went out of business in my town about 6 months ago. They were selling CDs for less than 10 bucks on average. I bought about 300 dollars worth!!! In the 7 years before that day, I probably bought a total of 9 CDs.
I could get water from my sink for free (as we have a well). But I still only drink bottle water because it's of better quality. I could drink RC or Fago soda because it's much cheaper. But I pay more for Coke because it taste better.
Cost is NOT the only criteria. My time is VERY valuable and I'd rather pay than waste it. Furthermore, quality is important to me too, and is worth paying for at the right price.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Case in point is the outcry over the survey that indicated that only 3% of consumers thinks the price is too high. First, if a survey is reported and technical details of the survey is not, then the survey is mostly a marketing ploy and must be taken with a grain of salt. We all know this. The interesting thing is that the number, in some sense, is probably not unreasonable. As the article mentions the value of music recorded on a CD is some small number approaching zero. Additionally the article states that some people will buy a CD, make copies, and sell the copies to their friends. I totally believe this. When I was in school, people would do this with computer software. There are clearly many people who still buy CDs, but we can assume that most of these are older people who traditionally have bought music, or younger people who will recoup the investment through piracy. From this we can postulate three groups of people: those that currently buy CDs, those that buy copy music, and those that do without because they cannot afford it. The last group is very small as the vast majority of people will copy or buy music they want. The second group is irreverent because to them the value of music on CD is near zero, and the labels would have to give music away. So, we are only left with people in the first group. Furthermore, we probably are only left with people in the first group that buy at full retail rather than value shop. This is conceivable quite a small percentage.
The article brings up several other good points. Consumers want to procure music online. It is not known if consumers will pay for music online, but the labels have done very little to effectively deal with this demand. The article states that the labels have dropped the ball on this, retailers are trying to figure out how to meet demand, but without label support it is difficult. In general, one would expect manufacturers that ignore entire areas of demand to fail.
There are other good points. Consumers are also disenchanted with hidden copy protection schemes that cause CDs to fail on standard consumer equipment. Labels are doing nothing to enhance the product to make it more appealing and increase the value to consumers. When they do increase the value of the product to consumers, they jack up the price far beyond what an average consumer can pay, and then complain that no one is buying the new technology.
Probably the only big issue the article missed was that most download services, even if they had the music, are too complicated, the download formats too confusing. Furthermore, they tend to target people who currently get music for free rather than cosumers who pay for music.
Again, the article clearly lays the decline of CD sales on the labels front door, The article is balanced in the sense that it acknowledges that music executives have limited ability to make sweeping changes to business plan and product models. For instance, it would make a lot of sense to ship music on DVDs with additional content, but how can one justify the capital expenditure in a declining market?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
To make people pay for something you must first have a product that is as available, as good quality and as useful as the free alternative, right?
CD's used to qualify to two of these, their allot better quality than mp3's, it's as useful as mp3's in the meaning that you could play it in any CD player, on your computer, or on portable mp3 player.
Now what does the music industry do to make people pay for music. They release copy protected CD's that wont play in all CD players, wont play on a computer, can't be ripped to a portable mp3 player. What a great idea.
I believe people are willing to pay for music, but not a useless piece of plastic that they can't do what they want with.
There is an interesting book called 200% of Nothing: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy.
I believe it is out of print, but it is available from Alibris.
(The parallelism between 'illiteracy' and 'innumeracy' is interesting.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"As long as people have a portable cassette deck, a cassette deck at home, and one in the car, tapes will keep selling. The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment."
The difference between a cassette player and a CD is not only a (significant) improvement in sound quality, but also a leap in convenience: track skipping vs winding tape, a forgiving medium when it comes to handling vs scratched, wrinkled and broken tape, a maintenance-free laser vs tape heads that need cleaning and degaussing. The same leap in performance and ease of use is what convinced the public to switch from video tape to DVD despite lack of a means to even record your own.
From tape and VHS to CD and DVD was a huge leap in performance and ease of use. Now that we have CD and DVD, what improvement can we expect in future media? 100-channel sound? It'll be hard to improve on convenience and ease of use, the only thing I can think of is reducing the size. A new format that offers easy and affordable recording capability might be interesting. But the last 5% of possible improvement in sound and picture quality will be lost upon most people. People see the difference between VHS and DVD, and hear the difference between a good tape recording and a CD. But there's no way people will want higher picture resolution or better sound, especially considering the dinky equipment they play it on.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is a weird thread. CDs have only gone up slightly in price over the last decade, and yet there are people moaning about how expensive they are. You don't see the same people moaning about video game prices, though, or a dozen other "overpriced" things. I don't think that there's much of a real movement in the "real world" about the price of CDs, just that there is now a precedent for complaining about the price of them, most of this complaining is coming from students or recent graduates, and not coincidentally, students get "free" high-bandwidth internet access.
I've also been seeing the argument that MP3s are easier to obtain and manage than CDs. That's only true if you have high bandwidth internet access and lots of free time.
If you look at the majority of songs on P2P networks, and even the way they're organized - it's clear to see it's much easier to download individual songs rather than whole albums. Trying to download an entire an album, while it can be done, is rather difficult. Varying bitrates/encoder quality can ruin the continuity of the album. If the album has no silence between tracks, reassembling the album from MP3s usually results in audio dropouts between tracks.
If anything, P2P is an excellent promotional tool for the sales of albums, or at least you would think it would be. On the other hand, it can be used to reveal turkey albums that are mostly filler, while allowing you to get the hit songs that you just wanted. In a way, what the recording industry is discovering is that their cream of the crop songs that they pick for promotional use are what are most sought-after on P2P networks. It's a lot like having a sporting event that people just want to watch for the commercials. Except in this case, the sporting event is what the recording industry is trying to get you to buy.
The recording industry has no one to blame but their own short-sightedness for their lack of sales. If they had realized that their most valuable product is actually their distillation of songs from various artists, they'd allow you to build your own compilation CDs from a comprehensive catalog of artists for a per-track fee, rather than trying to milk an outdated distribution method for all it's worth.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
And you think Flash storage will improve data storange speed? Give me a break. Space usage might decrease slightly, but not much. A couple PCMCIA slots will use up almost as much space as a CD drive, and those cards put off plenty of heat when in heavy use.
Uhhh, you mean CompactFlash?
With the complex electronics required for Flash memory, there is no way they could ever get near the price of CDs/DVDs.
I was hoping I could replace my MiniDiscs with CompactFlash cards and Ogg. With "-q0" 64kbps VBR Ogg files (which sound good, but 128kbps would sound perfect, so would be preferable) I could stick an album on 32MB. So, I looked around and didn't find 32MB cards (let alone 64MB cards) for less than $15, compared to $1 MiniDiscs which would hold more, are editable, can be recorded onto in realtime, and have FAR better sound quality, less power usage, have caddies so they are more durable than CompactFlsah cards, and can be erased and re-recorded more times than CompactFlash... The point is that a small piece of electronics cannot out-price a hunk of plastic and tin.
The bare material costs alone wouldn't allow the prices to go that low. Meanwhile, 700MB CDs (which can hold MP3s, or whatever your preference is) are now only $0.25, and will no doubt cost even less by the time your plan could near fruition.
It would NOT reduce the heat output by too much, and CD drives don't weigh very much anyhow. Besides, the R&D cost would not be gone or reduced, they would be shifted to CompactFlash developers, which means the on-going costs would be high, rather than the one-time machine costs being slightly higher, and media costs being lower.
Don't get me wrong, CompactFlash is a very good media for a great many things, and I'd like to see desktops available with PCMCIA slots so that CF can finally replace floppies (CDs still aren't natively BIOS writable, so they're no good for holding an OS, or ANYTHING that needs to change frequently, which is why USB hard drives are popular). However, for bulk, hi-capacity storage such as movies, music, and system backups, nothing can beat optical discs for the price and capacity.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
.40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs). The only real limit to my spending at this price is the availability of good music - better go find some talented new artists fast!
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which is blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no nastalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto appartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s resession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my mid 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $250 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
1. Save me time - downloading stuff on Kazaa is work: sifting through the crappy files, figuring out which songs I am missing from a given CD, and organizing the 40+gigs of it all - this stuff takes time and my time is worth money to me. Figure out ways to save me time and I will pay a price for it.
2. Selection - I am limited to what the masses are trading. I like obscure shit and am willing to experiment, but not at $15-17 (notice how this trended higher?) a pop - no fricking way!
3. Ease my concious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
So, how can the labels meet these needs? Again, simple:
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
This would keep me off Kazaa - I promise. I might give some of this to my friends for free, but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
For physical media, I would pay 5-7 bucks for a CD if it came with a bandwidth rebate, and an access code to a spiffy band website with news, lyrics, tablature, special monthly download songs and a $10/year subscription to have access to every live show.
And labels, before you complain that your promotion budgets wouldn't be covered at these rates, you should know that I don't listen to ClearChannel, I don't watch MTV, I don't hang out in record stores and that wallpapering of downtown areas with posters just pisses me off.
So, in conclusion, my case is a clear illustration that the RIAA statistic is correct - I don't spend less on CDs - I couldn't buy less than none. Win me back - it's not that hard and it's not too late. I am the consumer and you are supposed to be serving me - make me a happy, full, fed and fat sheep and I'll open up my wallet for you, but treat me like your enemy, and I will be a wolf poaching your chickens with impunity - the choice is yours.
What I won't pay is a new format that can only be played in one particular program, can't be copied or burned to CD etc etc etc. If I pay for a song, I want to listen to it in iTunes, burn it to a CD, or download it to an iPod. Period.
If the music companies did this, would some people then immediiately upload that song to Kazaa? Sure, but they will anyway. At least this way, the companies would make some money from the initial download. That's a risk they need to take.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
There's many precedents, most notably CDs. CDs are 10x 'better' than vinyl (sound quality, production cost, resistance to scratching, size, etc) and easily replaced vinyl once the price of recorders came down. DVDs are 10 times better than pre-recorded video cassettes (production costs, quality, access time, size, etc).
Personally, I think Minidiscs are 10x better than tape (which they were intended to replace), but they haven't taken off so well.
However, are DVD-A/SACD 10 times 'better' than CDs? Audiophiles might think so, but I doubt regular joes will consider it worth the investment. Does it sound significantly better than CD? Does it offer many new features over CD? Then regular people won't buy SACD/DVD-A players.
What will happen is that the cost of add SACD/DVD-A to a regular CD player will come down, and it won't be such a big deal to buy a SACD/DVD-A equipped CD player. It may take a long time, but eventually CD will be phased out, and it'll be there in backwards compatibility mode only.
MP3 could have (and should have), revolutionized the way the record industry did business.
Music stores should have had burning kiosks with 80+GB drives running by now, with software that allowed you to pick and choose what went on your CD.
Think about it: you'd have both near-infinite variety and infinite resellability. No 2 customer-selected CDs would be the same, and I bet you many customers would end up buying some songs 2, 3, 4, or more times to put on various mix albums.
It would be dirt cheap to burn CDs. You wouldn't have to pay for shelf space for each CD. Packaging would be cheaper, as you'd only have to pay for blank jewel cases and paper to print on.
Had the RIAA jumped on the mp3 bandwagon and truly utilized the format for the good of consumers, I'd probably still be paying for music. Had the RIAA immediately embraced online sales of high-quality mp3s, I'd gladly have subscribed to the service.
Instead, they shun the idea of these kiosks, chastize anyone who chooses to keep their music in mp3 format, and proclaims every customer a theif. By all rights, this industry should be dead by now.
No business should be able to survive the criminalization of its customer base.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Similarly with music. How can a store possibly compete on variety with ebay, amazon...?
Even tho the audiophile are gonna scream when I say this...
They could compete using the kiosk model, with several hard drives with very high quality mp3s, 256k or better, and an internet connection to their main office. If you want to HEAR a sample not in the current local library, it streams a 64k mp3 for listening. If you choose to burn that song, it downloads the 256k version to be converted to Red Book on your custom disk. It should cache songs, so if someone else wants that song in the next few days, there will be a copy in the cache. If you can actually fill up a cd with 74 minutes of music (instead of the typical 30 to 40 minutes) and choose the songs, then it would be worth a premium. I can EASILY see people paying 20 bucks for that, maybe more. They can still sell regular CD's like they do now, side by side with this new technology. Some will want the full CD with fancy jacket and information about that artist. Some wont.
The problem is: This model is not as profitable as the current business model USED TO BE. Thus, they are not likely to embrace it, insisting on staying with the current business model, which is losing them money ($132 million last year for Sony alone).
This is going down with the ship instead of jumping in a lifeboat, just because the ship is bigger.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!