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Universal Music To Cut CD Prices
phlack writes "CNN Money has an article about Universal Music Group's plans to slash their CD prices to $12.98 SRP, in an effort to combat piracy and bring consumers back into stores. It makes me hope the other giants will follow suit, and wonder if the music industry is finally listening to some of the consumer's complaints."
It's about time - CDs have been overpriced for years.
But when a large segment of the public is going to be comparing $12.98 with the $0.00 filesharing price, I have to wonder if it will have any effect at all.
I wonder what the artists think of this? This price reduction has to impact their bottom line...
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
If you ask me, I think the right price for a CD is about $5. $12.98 is a bit much (and why 98? do they think consumers have gotten wise to the whole $n+.99 thing?) It'll eventualy happen.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...now the next step would be to start recording new bands that sound good... if there even exists such a thing anymore.
You probably can't convince me that the move by Universal -- a unit of hard-luck French water utility Vivendi -- doesn't have anything to do with Universal's pending aquisition by GE's NBC unit.
I figure it's one of two things:
* Vivendi is looking to spoil the deal with a profit-killing "poison pill". This would be the strategy of former Vivendi chairman Jean-Marie Messier -- but it's also part of why he's the former chairman.
* GE has already given Universal marching orders -- this was planned months ago. According to this morning's NPR report, Vivendi has been shopping for a buyer for its entertainment units for months, but all previous deals have fallen through. They're likely to do whatever GE says at this point (unless we're back to the first option).
General Electric isn't in the business of filing baseless lawsuits -- they're in the business of making money. Maybe they'll be the ones to blow the lid off the CD price scam once and for all.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Explain why Cassette is still going to be cheaper. No, really. I want to hear it.
Could it possibly be that CDs are way, way overpriced, even at $13?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Dude, there are a zillion bands that sound good, with CDs and everything. The problem is not getting new bands, the problem is getting their stuff on the airwaves for people to experience. Check out your local independent radio stations. There's a _fantastic_ morning show here in Seattle on KEXP (kexp.org - check out the online stream & playlist). The show is "John in the Morning". Flat out fantastic stuff that you won't hear anywhere else on the airwaves in Seattle. Listen and then buy their CDs from their own websites, whatever you have to do to support them, if you want good music.
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.
that cds are too expensive, don't come with any incentives to carry on buying cd's, and don't contain enough 'freebies'. there should be a discount token in every cd you buy to give you money off buying another, and there should be track and band information with the CD, competitions etc too, at the moment it's too easy to think of reasons not to buy CDs.
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
Until CDs are around $5.
You are right they are robbing both consumers and musicians, so lets fight them back. Stop buying their music.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Explain why Cassette is still going to be cheaper.
Less demand among consumers for cassettes.
Some CDs have bonus tracks not available on cassette, and the songwriter and recording artist get paid only for the CDs.
A CD case typically has more space for liner notes than a cassette case does, and the graphic artist gets paid only for the copies included with CDs.
Some newer CDs come with promotional items such as DVDs containing music videos and glimpses into production.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The best solution is a build-to-order (BTO) CD. Specifically, the major music companies band together and set up a BTO booth at Target or Walmart. The consumer selects the songs that he or she wants, and the BTO booth burns the songs into the CD at the time of purchase. Each song would be individually priced. The neat thing about this approach is that it is essentially a just-in-time (JIT) system. Neither Target nor Walmart needs to maintain a huge floor space just to hold pre-recorded CDs. The store sells exactly what the consumer wants to buy, and the store manager never needs to worry about returning unsold CDs to the manufacturer. The financial savings to the store can be passed to the consumer in the form of even lower CD prices.
Furthermore, the songs themselves would be stored in a central database at the headquarters of Walmart or Target. They would be downloaded by a high-speed intranet to the computer burning the CDs in the BTO booth in each individual store.
An alternative to the BTO booth is a BTO web site. The consumer selects the songs that she wants. They are then burned into the CD, and the CD is shipped to the consumer.
Entire concept of how music is licensed is broken at this point anyway. CDs being more than $8.00 for most people is too high.
How many artists see much of anything in the form of royalties? The problem is that we have not just middlemen, but corporate middlemen, companies that have to pay staffs that are not particularly small, as well as satisfy shareholders, pay corporate executive bonuses, and maintain voluminous legal departments, all to distribute this small piece of plastic. How does this work?
It should not cost so incredibly much that even a full dollar per CD should come to be even $12 to sell it. Distribution should not be nearly that expensive.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Now's the time. Go out and purchase these. If you don't then you are a thief and the RIAA should be able to prosecute you.
I myself pretty much only download music. Without that "I buy the CD!" lie attached. But now I will, because without this all of our "they're too much!" arguments are gone
And just so you know, major labels don't see profit on an album priced like this until they sell > 700k or so, so yes, they are taking a gambit.
When I worked for a car dealership (doing computer stuff, not sales) Subaru decided that the prices on accessories were too high. To correct this they lowered the list price.
Not the cost mind you, but MSRP.
Now the dealers were force to take a paycut while Subaru kept the same profit margin.
I would not be suprised to find out that the cut in list price on the cds was much greater than the cost the stores pay.
I don't really mind double posts on
Mind you that the 12.98 is a "suggested" retail price. It is likely that the retailers will keep their $17 pricing scam and just pocket the rest as an increase in profits. Also that $0.98... round up folks, it is actually $13. Those 2 pennies don't mean jack.
If they really want to get people to come back in droves then the reduction has to be quite significant. Drop the price to $5 per CD or let people purchase per the song either online or to have the music stores burn in the songs people want.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
It is ironic that the top echelon of recording artists could not exist without an industry to support them. Strip away the managers and agents, stylists and coaches, from someone like Justin Timberlake and ask is it possible that he could still make a living from music? Probably not. Ani di Franco, on the other hand, has been making a comfortable income for years without the support of the business she's supposed to be in.
As Douglas Adams pointed out, many companies aren't in the business you think they're in. Fox News is, despite a million conspiracy theories to the contrary, simply in the business of delivering an audience to its advertisers. The ethics and actions of the "Big 5" corporations who control 90% of record sales make rather more sense if they are viewed, not as separate companies, but as one distributed bank.
As anyone with any experience of dealing with banks will know, they are monolithically slow to react to changes in the environment, and are populated with highly intelligent, but narrow-minded, solipsists. They're doing now what every one of us was warning them that they should be doing the instant MP3 was rolled out.
By way of related tangent, here is an article by Steve Albini about his experiences with one of the majors, and his advice to anyone thinking of getting involved. At the bottom of the page is a detailed breakdown of a typical deal in which the "industry" made $973,000 and each of the four band members made $4,031.25.
When the entire system is that fucked, the price of a CD is moot.
Best Buy can suck it.
Sometime during the late 90's I purchased a copy of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" album for around $20.
Over the weekend, I was in Best Buy hell (waiting with a friend while he attempted to buy a 50" DLP HDTV without being forced into buying a $400 power strip...) and wandered over to the CD racks, having since lost the copy of The Wall which I'd bought half a decade ago.
They wanted... $33.
Fuck that -- if it were $15, I'd have considered just caving and buying the damned thing again (it's a double album, and a bloody good one at that).
If CDs were $3-$5 apiece (especially older ones), I'd have a huge legal collection. As it is, I'd rather download the MP3s for songs I bought the right to listen to years ago than to spend $33 for physical media which was doubtlessly produced for less than $3 and which cost me $20 when I legally bought it before.
This is a start, but come on, folks -- tapes used to be cheaper than this, and they cost much more to produce. I'll cheer when they're under $5 per album, and there are talks of shortening the length of copyright protection.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
> I wonder what the artists think of this? This price reduction has to impact their bottom line...
Artists probably won't care, as it has pretty much been the case for years that album prices do not have much of an impact on the income of an artist or group. The huge majority of profit (something like 90%, if I'm remembering correctly) from a CD goes to the recording company. Most artists will tend to make most of their profit from concert performances.
I used to think "fsck the record companies!" until I read an interesting interview with Ben Harper (sorry, no links, it was in print a few years back). He argued that record companies should continue to take in most of the profits from good record sales, because it is the record company that takes the risk to record, mix, produce, distribute, and market an album, and if that album sucks, who's gonna pay them back for their investment? Answer: nobody. Ben Harper's point was that record companies are constantly doing this, again and again, with band after band, so when the small minority of productions is actually "good" and people actually pay money for it, it makes sense for the record company to get most of the profit on that production. Sure, for the isolated incident it might seem unfair, but in the grand scheme the record company isn't raping and pillaging as much as everyone plays them to be.
I know there are a handful of artists here and there who do their own productions (Fugazi, Ani DiFranco) because record companies are "evil", but they don't get to do so for free. Replacing the role of a record company with your own label requires you to take on all of the responsibilities of making an album that were once done by other people.
I've never bought a music CD in my entire life! Thats right. I have about 2 CDs that came off magazine covers and thats it. (I dont give a shit what you think about stealing). I like to have all my music easily availiable - ie a click away, not a shuffle of disks away. The CD as a medium is going to die once everyone gets hooked on mass-storage mp3 players etc... And while im totally pro raw high quaility uncompressed audio, mp3 is going to win the battle like VHS over Beta & Laser Disk. There are only afew things i would like to listen to uncompressed that i would either copy or maybe buy if i really really wanted to, some music has very noticable compression artifacts and if your gonna be editing or sampling it in any way or using it in a video etc then you want uncompressed but otherwise im starting to live with compression aslong as its good. The record companies have figured this out and some CDs are starting to come with compressed files aswell i think? but this seems to be always windows media format?
Something i would like to see in shops (they already have similar things) is the ability to very cheaply make your own CD compilation but to be able to choose the format and compression setting (or have it raw). To dumb it down you could have pre-set options with an "advanced" screen on the terminal, and instead of just CD's you could make DVD's aswell. Once you had selected all the songs you wanted you could have them burnt and the (powerful) computer would compress them right then and there (or if thats too much it could just store the mp3s and forget compression options). If they did this right, they could make it worth-while for even people with fast net connections - it can be a hassle choosing the right file on kazaa and checking the quaility etc. with this system you would be guarenteed instant cheap music either raw or compressed at high quality. The question is, should they charge by the MB or per song?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I like how Universal cites artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Reba McIntyre, U2 and Nirvana as "examples" of their artists.
Unfortunately, half of those bands are dead and the other half aren't representative of Universal's normally dismal and talentless array of crap music by artists with names like: Boo & Gotti (with their hit single "Ain't In Man"), Big Tymers, Baby Bash "The Smokin' Nephew", Lil' Wayne, Playa, Thug City, Ric-a-che, and Mac 10.
I think it might be a better PR move if Universal announced they were going to start selling Courvoisier or enrolling their artists in a few English classes.
Screw Universal and the rest of the RIAA members: unless they're indie buy used CDs and send the artist $2, go to a concert. Musicians don't make dick from CD sales - all production, promotion, legal, administrative, and other costs are charged against the artist. Once *all* of that is cleared, then they get paid a sliver of what's left over after their producer, manager, and entertainment lawyer snack. As an added injury, only in the music industry do artists not retain copyright to their works. Many musicians are now discovering piece-for-hire, you don't retain the copyright to your works. Concerts: this is where artists make their money, their bread and butter - it's certainly not from CD sales. They go on tour, license t-shirts, ball caps, posters, whatever. Make a chunk of concessions, etc. And now the music industry wants a piece of concerts too. Screw 'em. Screw them in both ears - buy indie. If there's non-indie tunes you dig on, visit your local CD Warehouse or hit eBay and buy albums used - then send the artist a couple of bucks.
1) I absolutely love every song on the album and I want to support the musician any way I can , or
2) I can buy directly from the musician.
What would be really cool is if these musicians would just put a paypal icon-link on their website and I would gladly donate what I believe is a fair price for the music I yanked from NGs or BT.
-Ladd
Don't Panic.
The value of a typical CD to me is somewhere between $5 and $10. It is simply too easy to download and burn a CD filled with good songs rather than drive to the store and buy the a CD with maybe 1 or 2 good songs. I feel no remorse about doing this because I know most of the money doesn't go to the artist, who I support directly by buying concert tickets. The rest (most) of the money goes to the record company who I do not think is involved in the creation of the art which is copied onto the CD which I think is where the true value lies...not in the medium, but in the content.