Slashdot Mirror
Diamonds & the RIAA
eaglebtc writes "After reading the previously-posted article on cdfreaks.com about the rapid erosion of cheap CDR's, I found another equally scintillating write-up about the economics of music CDs written by Richard Menta, founder of MP3 Newswire. Sure, we've all heard the whining about how CDs are so expensive, but Mr. Menta takes a unique perspective on the issue by comparing the RIAA to DeBeers. He argues that both companies control distribution of products in their respective markets with an iron fist, and by so doing can artificially raise prices. Coincidentally, the bubble is beginning to burst in both markets: the RIAA is fighting against the uprisings of P2P software, and the diamond cartel's lawyers are losing sleep over the $5 diamonds produced in a lab."
If that doesn't work, I predict that your fiance will be expecting a new 'Mars rock' ring, and NASA will finally be able to finance that trip to the moon they've been faking^W talking about.
The latest Metallica wrapped in a box of of lab fabricated diamonds. Total cost? $100 Having your headbanging girlfriend love you forever? Priceless
If guys start wedding gals using cheap diamonds, then chicks will just find a new tool with which to implement Expensive Labor of Love strategy.
...are 'too' perfect, and still (sort-of) detectable when looking at earth-mined stones..
De Beers has been trying to 'educate' the diamond masses about these 'heretic' stones, but eventually, this will bankrupt them
Now, as for the RIAA, CD-Rs and file-sharing won't kill the music industry. I wouldn't even expect a drop in sale-price, just more and more bureaucratic nonsense.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I knew I should have waited two more years before getting engaged!
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
However, unlike the RIAA, DeBeers never promised that the prices of their diamonds would come down when market forces and economies of scale entered. Remember when CD's first became available? I can remember saving my change so I could afford some of the first CD's that came onto the market at what.....$15-20? Did the price on those ever come down? No.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Dogbert: So you're telling me that if I give you thousands of dollars, you'll give me a pebble you found on the ground?
Store Owner: These are not just ordinary rocks! They're precious and virtually priceless diamonds!
Dogbert: That's only because you chose to restrict the supply.
Store Owner: Ok Ok you figured us out. I'll give you a bag of diamonds if you'll keep quiet.
(Dogbert walking away with a bag of diamonds)
Dogbert: Well now I'm a party to this dirty little secret...
the problem i've had with riaa for a while now is the discrepency between cost and sell. if a cd costs several times less to produce than a cassette, why does a recorded cd cost up to twice as much. perceived value. incidentally i used to be the IT manager for a jewelry wholesaler and it opperates much the same way there.....and they are getting boned over these lab diamonds
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
Also note that no DeBeers executives have set foot on American soil in several years -- there afraid they will be arrested for their monopolistic practices! So why don't we treat RIAA the same way? Oh, they're headquartered in the US and contribute a lot more to political campaigns...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Among non-living things, the best carbon based object is considered to be diamond. Among living things (which are mostly carbon based) women are considered best. (It seems that's the reason women like diamonds so much.)
Artificial diamonds are here. When are artificial women coming up?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
About a year ago as I recall
Antoher reason I am glad I have ducked the marriage bullet to this point.
(honestly it wasnt that hard, I am a geek after all)
Cheers
Wax on, wax off baby!
They are similar becuase of artificially created scarcity. We are moving into an age of plenty. We can already print real objects using a modofied inkjet. It shouldn't be too long (compared to the time between the printing press and the computer) until our computers can produce most anything we want from a pile of atoms.
The better question is, what becomes scarce? Knowledge? Art? Service technicians for replication devices? I've yet to hear a good answer. The elimination of scarcity throws our entire economic model out the window. What's the new model? Do we go Star Trek and only care about improving ourselves?
Diamonds are a rotten analogy because it suggests that, up to now and the magic golden age of P2P, the publishing industry posessed all of the real music. The only thing that really distinguishes their product is that it is so obvious. If you never want to buy a major label release again but want new music all the time it really is not hard at all to do. It just involves a little more work.
There are two ways in which the internet may create a revolution for independent musicians. One is by offering a viable replacement for radio. The second is by exposing music to the distributed filtering techniques of mass exposure and moderation that the internet essentially gave rise to the invention of. File sharing as such strikes me as something that will be much of an adjunct to the real 21st century revolution of music - assuming it really happens because it sure hasn't yet.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Not sure if you noticed, but that article in The Atlantic was written in 1982. (At least, that's the copyright date on the article. The fact that it doesn't mention any events that occurred after 1981 is telling, as well.)
I don't know whether those $1.5 billion worth of diamonds are still sitting in Israeli banks, but I wouldn't bet on it.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Did you know that there is a 2% surcharge on all CD recorders sold that goes directly to the RIAA, and a 2% hidden tax associated with the AHRA that is collected by the RIAA to give to artists, yet only roughly 36% of that 2% goes to the artist. www.boycott-riaa.com
You aren't paying attention. Previous artificial diamonds are too small for gems, they are used as abrasives in drill bits and so on.
These new companies are not making diamond dust, they are making gem size diamonds, and plan to use the income from that, as they destroy deBeers, to finance making diamonds for semiconductors, as in huge wafers.
Maybe you could come up with some definition for "industrial" diamonds, whatever that is, and then update it for the new artificial diamonds, and realize it has no more meaning.
Infuriate left and right
"You should spend about a month's salary on the next Britney Spears album."
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
The fact is that De Beers is playing the sentimental trump. They are doing all they can to separate the "natural" diamonds from the "articifial" ones. They spent millions over the year to make every wife in every occudental country dream about a clear stone on her finger. They very wisely chose their sloga nas "a diamond last foreever" and are turning it around by saying the for a proof of forever love, you should give a gem that took forever to mature. Those people are very smart and very skilled at protecting their monopoly. Moreover, they are not over a bit of illegality and extortion if it can help them. They will hammer into our heads that the only good diamand are the "real" ones. Will it work? Time will tell... Anyway, diamond semiconductor might be a better outlet for thos artificial diamonds anyway...
So, lets say you have to buy a ring*, but you don't want to give DeBeers money. I suggest you buy Moissanite ring. Myself, when faced with that decision, I bought a Tanzanite ring because my honey likes Tanzanite, and I hate DeBeers.
;)
True, Diamonds won't be expensive for long, and Moissanite is cheaper now, and may eventually cost more than diamond. But, Moissanite is harder than Ruby, and has a greater luster than diamond, and it also costs about 1/10 of what diamond does today.
* One day, you will find a nice little woman who wants a ring, and generally it is best to get her one!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
CDs aren't forever, but the force of copyright means that if you cut a Big Hit(tm), you and your heirs can have a recurring revenue stream for a long time, along with all the fat, balding, over-40 WASPs who are the bulk of the middlemen pushing your work. So RIAA wants to hawk as many "legit" jewels as they can without someone undercutting them. That you can buy some DRM'd songs and can't transfer them to a new system. Hard to find anyone against the concept of playing a "used" MP3 on their system, right?
Here's a great article written by Steve Albini on problems with the music industry...very revealing.
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
PS: Steve Albini for those that don't know was in many bands very influential to the Nirvana/Pearl Jam type bands of the day. Bands like Big Black and Shellac...then he turned to producing bands like Nirvana and Bush and others...
Wowzers, if that subject line doesn't get me mod'd down, I don't know what will.
;)
So, the RIAA's issue is they haven't yet found a way to make money off of file sharing. If there was money in it, they'd be fostering it, not trying to kill it.
So, they're pursuing two directions right now. Fight tooth and nail to protect their current bread and butter (CD sales). They're not doing this for the artists... lord no, they're doing this for the labels. THe other direction they're going is trying to find new sources of revenue. NOTE: This new source must be as large if not larger than the existing stream (from a margin perspective).
Once they find a way to make money on filesharing, I bet two things happen. a) they stop harrassing folks and b) CD prices drop b/c they're no longer a one trick pony.
Sooooo... in an effort to stop the lawsuits and help get CD prices down, we, the buying public, need to find a way for the RIAA/labels to make billions off of online file sharing... hopefully without some terrible DRM integrated into the solution.
There have been many attempts... the $0.99 downloads are the most recent and most successful... but they're still not much compared to the brick and mortor sales that are occuring.
Put your heads together! Come up with a feasible way for the RIAA to migrate to a new business model and make all our lives easier.
I dare you.. find a hole in this logic
I'm down with that, as it were
Here on slashdot we read the article before making a coomm.. oh uh.. no thats right.
They're worried about the yellow diamonds that are now capable of being reproduced, in extremely large sizes, in extremely good quality. These are not 'just' industrial diamonds - these are extremely high quality, extremely pure, large diamonds which can be grown by two different independent research groups right now, using extremely high pressure systems that have been in development for years.
The yellows are at the very top end of the scale, and are something DeBeers has been cultivating as a market for years - now they're reproducable, and lab-made yellows are higher quality than anything DeBeers can muster.
DeBeers deserves to go down. There is no better example of corporate evil.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
They don't need it. They control more of the diamond market than OPEC does oil, but look what OPEC is able to do. To control a market, you need three things:
1. You are the largest player in the market, with a high total market share,
2. You have a large oversupply of the product,
3. You have the ability to crash prices by releasing your oversupply.
So what happens if someone mining diamonds were to challenge de Beers? de Beers would make sure that their network of retailers don't do business with that producer. They'd also release some of their capacity to temporarily drop prices. That would put that producer out of business.
The artificial boys are different, because they can make stuff cheaper even than de Beers can get it out if they dropped their prices as much as possible, probably.
What will probably happen is that lab-grown diamonds will still be very scarce. The people making them are being very secretive about their processes and even their identities. They could sell their diamonds for $6 or $6,000, what do you think they'll do?
That's true. Both have a vested interest in keeping prices high. What *should* happen is they should get a deal together where they divide the pie, with neither side stepping over it. Kind of like OPEC. If they did it in the US, it would be collusion, but they don't have to do that. We'll see.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The RIAA's "xxx's is killing music" (substitute cassettes, P2P, MP3, whatever comes next) is somewhat undermined by all of this.
Menta makes the point that CDs are priced by the big five at the point that maximises profit. No surprise then to hear that whilst UK CD sales were up by 3%, profit was down by 2%.
The only problem I have with that logic is that you cannot sell a diamond for (anywhere near) what you paid for it. Ignoring the setting and assuming you spent all the money on the stone, your $1000 ring will most likely bring you $150-$200. When I went to sell a diamond I found about three dealers in the entire US that specialize in non-estate used diamonds. I was lucky enough to get almost 60% of what I paid for my ring, but it was a lot of work.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
Does your Cartel seem destined to fail in future markets. It's time you learned how to succeed. The Very Successful Drug Cartels will be having a convention this fall. Don't let your Cartel go the way of the Railroad Express!
... Extortion
... Bribery
... Price Fixing
... Secret Pricing
... Lobbying
... Obtaining cheap 3rd World Labor
... Becoming a government monopoly
... Murder, Mayhem and Intimidation
... Finding the trouble makers
... Going Multi-National
... End Competition for Good!
Choose any of these great topics...
and for the truly abitious
Sign up now for priority seating. Check our some of our current well known registered participants.
Music - RIAA
Video - MPAA
Diamonds - DeBeers
Oil - OPEC
Don't start a Cartel without checking out this conference. Only one Cartel per Industry please.
...because copyrights are forever!
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
You, sir, look like the man who would emjoy the benefits of the new Stepford 9000! She's more customizable than the 7000 or 8000 series - all aspects of appearance can be modified to a wide variety of configurations. From tall and buxum to short and muscular and everything in between! With new patented No-Sass circuitry she won't ever cop an "attitude", unless you want her to. New to the Stepford 9000 series: she's compatible with your entertainment center's universal remote control!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
"If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone"
Now... I have never, ever used the "If you loved me you'd sleep with me|suck my dick|swallow|let me fuck your sister|whatever else" bullshit.
I've always thought that sort of attitude was eminently disrespectful to anyone with whom you could possibly have any kind of relationship what so ever. It's something only the completely immoral assholes use on mindless, pathetic simulacra. And I say "immoral", not "amoral", since the statement entails a subversion of a pretense of emotional values.
But, De Beers clearly seems to think it works. It seems to think that this is a perfectly acceptable way to communicate with their clients, in their relationship with us. So, we have that same immoral to simulacrum relationship.
It's nice to be called a "worthless cunt" to your face, isn't it folks?
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Just in case anyone is interested, here's a link to the patent Linares received for their vapor process.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
"Fuck off, loser" doesn't mean they are ready and willing to accept your seed(ling).
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Not sure how things have changed in the last 20 years since this article came out, but here's an interesting piece on how dimaond engagement rings are an invented tradition that only started 60 years ago. (It's comes in three parts b/c it's pretty long.)
part 1
part 2
part 3
DeBeers is an even bigger fraud than the RIAA. Diamonds (even natural ones) are not really scarce. Also, the new lab methods do not all rely on the mettalic solvents to create diamonds. One is deposited as plasma, with no extra gunk in the process. They are white diamonds, of unusual perfection.
BTW, Plastic had this a few weeks ago.
Dean G.
I saw the title and immediately thought: If you shoved the overpriced CD's up the RIAA's asses, in a week you'd get diamonds.
The party's over
the people who run De Beers never enter the USA because they will be arrested for running an illegal cartel. Europe has a few De Beers shops now (not sure why we think they are legal). I think it was a judgement 10 or 20 years ago that the diamond cartel was illegal, dont remember the exact details, but it comes up quite often, becasue it is difficult to run a large multinational without ever going to the USA
I'm a chemist, I know what they are, but "fake" is four letters and "synthetic" is 9. I give the average slashdotter credit for the intelligence to discern the difference, though perhaps that's overstating things.
On the day when 'authentic' diamond merchants are frantically shipping their stones with a crappy little scrap of paper with a hologram on it, like an Franklin Mint ripoff item, life will be better for common sense people.
They already laser-inscribe the more valuable ones with a serial number. The easy bit for the manufacturers of fake diamonds is going for the small-diamond market. As the article says, anything under 1/5 carat isn't worth verifying. And you can make a $10,000 diamond-encrusted bracelet with a bunch of diamonds that are, individually, not worth enough to check. And that will be a nightmare for de Beers to control.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I refuse to eat food, because the agricultural subsidies that prop up the US food market keep the rest of the world in abject poverty.
paintball
Wow, it isn't like all us Slashdot posters are judgemental, or anything... As a GIRL who is a GEEK and relatively socially conscious, but also a DIAMOND owner, I guess I really represent the minority here (-: Let's see here: 1) Some smart women like diamonds. I swear. In fact, I know quite a few of them personally. 2) If you are really planning to meet girls based on their gem preferences, you are a LOSER. 3) Canadian diamonds are a very cool alternative - they come with a lasered serial number and logo on the girdle of the diamond - perfect for us tech-geek girls 4) I personally had no desire to have a diamond when we first started ring shopping, but it was my husband-to-be who felt it was a good idea - so don't give me all that bullshit that the guys can see through the marketing stuff, while the girls dreamily suck it all in. 5) I would take an artificial diamond over a real one in a second - a symbol of technological acheivement and science - that sparkles? It's perfect!
don't mess with those geekgrrls