Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Sales Compared to Download Statistics
OneInEveryCrowd writes "According to an article at SFGate, although the recent crackdown and lawsuits have caused a 22% drop in downloading, the drop in CD sales actually accelerated during the same period. My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs, and swear off CD purchases for life. If this was mainstream behavior CD sales would have dropped to zero. I was still pleased to see that many people responded in a similar fashion though." An EMI executive has a piece giving the standard industry view, but this piece about Universal slashing CD prices may be more telling.
What? They've got a product? Who knew?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
CD sales in Britain are up and most of the credit is going to price cuts.
Who'd have thought it: a depressed economy leads to changes in price elasticity. I demand the Nobel Prize for Economics
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
...don't start suing the crap out of your largest group of customers (college / high school students) and then expect sales to go up.
Netflix is a DVD rental site and thus has more to due with the MPAA than the RIAA. OneInEveryCrowd seems to have their *AA's confused.
[despite a] 22% drop in downloading, the drop in CD sales actually accelerated during the same period
Yes! So it wasn't the downloading that caused poor sales afterall. It was the
crappy music + high prices + strongarming.
Also, congratulations to all who have not purchased CD's in protest. Keep up the good work.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
They can drop the price to near give away but if the talent and quality of the artist\cd isn't there its still not worth the price. Case in point Metallica's St. Anger CD.
My single biggest gripe is that $12 is still too much to take a chance on. The radio plays the same 15 songs over and over, day in and day out. Since I'm not interested in those 15 songs, sometimes I feel the need to take a chance. But aat $12 a pop, I still won't.
Does anyone remember when the RIAA claimed that they were suffering a 15% drop in profits for their artists, after they dropped production by 20%???? Sounds kinda familiar. I wonder if they're going to claim a loss of income/profits for their artists after this price drop, and then blame it on music file sharing?
because people have already downloaded everything they really wanted?
- cnb
Most people these days are used to the idea of "try before you buy". Take away that ability, and sales will drop.
The people who download without buying would naver have contributed to a sale anyhow. Those that would have bought are being alienated.
Wow, Universal must be doing really bad... That's the second time they've cut prices this week!. Like, WOW! =P
Since most classical CD's are already $10, will their prices go down as well?
I know I can download it, but I really like having the actual product and I want to support the orchestras and what-not that produce the music.
The Riaa has been blaming sluggish sales on people downloading music, but they have been ignoring another reason for the poor sales: The music isn't that good.
I love alternative music, but lately everything has sounded like Creed, or some crappy form of pop-punk.
I haven't bought any music lately, but I haven't downloaded any either.
Once they quit trying to make everyone sound the same, I will probably start buying music again, as long as the price is resonable
Now I have to listen to the CD in 2 song chunks as I drive back and forth to work (and from what I've read - it sounds like I'm lucky to have it work on an in-car player...)
Not going to buy another music CD for quite some time...
Platform independent bug tracking software
At the globe and mail : http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20 030904.ucd0904/BNStory/Front/
they have the Canadian angle on the story, but:
Cassettes are going to be priced at about $9US, compared to $13US for a CD, yet tapes cost a lot more to manufacture;
In Canada, there is the infamous CD copyright levy which allows all Canadians to copy CDs for their own use without breaking the law. Because we pay the levy wether, like myself, you backup the software and programs I write for a living, or copy your friends' CDs, it would make it your duty as a Canadian to copy CDs because you're paying for that right. Contrast this with the quote that:
"Mr. Lennox said that all of his company's CDs featuring Canadian artists will soon have copy-protection technology built in."
On one hand, it's perfectly legal to copy a CD for our own use, wether it be our own, or a friends, and in return the music industry collects a copyright levy, and on the other, they're still charging us the levy, but stopping us copying a CD by technological measures. This is obviously wrong. Due to the CD levy, it's also a very grey area as to wether file sharing is also illegal in Canada, especially if you burn your downloads onto CD!
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
... are the reasons they aren't selling much. If they keep suing people, more and more people will realize the RIAA is evil, and boycott like a lot of us have been doing for years. I have purchased one CD this year, and the only reason I did it is because I love the group 311, and I wanted to support their latest offering, not to mention I enjoy their music and wanted to have it. But, there have been about 20 other discs I normally would have purchased this year, but didn't for 2 reasons:
1) money is extremely tight, and I certainly don't need to be spending it on crap music that I may or may not like.
2) I hate the RIAA.
Record exec: We'll cut our wholesale price by 25% (16% for big name new releases) if you'll cut your markup in half.
Store owner: Ummm...
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I think lower prices (like what Univeral is trying) is the only thing that's going to bring ppl back. They're now used to listening to songs before they buy a CD - I know I always do now, and that in turn generates a more knowledgeable consumer. They're not going to buy crap, so it's up to the rekerd companies to release better music (not likely) or just lower the price enough to hook the ppl back in. Of course, the best music is still put out by indie bands, but most of the $ won't come from them, so lowering the prices on all the Britney's and such will help the bottom line.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
yet somehow I manage - p2p is dragging these guys kicking and screaming to what the customers want and already get (free).
Price cuts are a natural result of market forces. It's just a really big deal when it happens to these folks. If the price continues to come down there will be no reason at all to download music. But the speed of the net will increase and at some point there is no price you would pay in a store when you can download it easier and less costly. Perhaps there is already a program that will download a cd label and jewel case ready to print waiting in hiding somewhere also making buying less likely.
How many whacks with a Clue Stick does it take to penetrate the thick skulls at the RIAA? Evidently it takes a lot.
How long have people been complaining that CD prices are too high? A decade? Fifteen years? And they are just now starting to get it? I buy, at most, five or six (if I'm feeling frisky) CDs a year and at that I don't buy anything that costs more than $12.00 (unless it's an import or other non-standard, hard to find item).
Price has always been the problem with CDs. Always.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
$12.00 a pop for a CD is *STILL* too expensive.
The recent price cuts are just like the last ditch effort from Wile Coyote brandishing a lace umbrella to ward-off the falling boulder.
So long, CDs, I'll forever cherish the few ones I've been able to afford...
If they Offered a online music store compatible with Linux in europe, they would have my money!
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
Nah, music is like porn. You can play the old stuff over and over again, but the new stuff is more exciting.
Zodiac Survey
I do have to wonder (as I'm sure many already have) how this bottom line's going to affect the already-meagre artist intake. Loss leader sales are one thing--I believe the loss there is incurred by the store, and not by the artist/label--but special promotions tend to come right out of the performer's pocket.
Ahh well.
This period of stagnation doesn't show any signs of slowing down, in all honesty; a "culture of fear" (as supported by the RIAA) doesn't do much to engender fan support.
Point of wonderment: how were the ratings of the recent advertised-till-you-drop-Video Music Awards? Was there a drop-off?
I didn't think I'd get into fansubs, but they're quite addicting. I find myself checking AnimeSuki daily to see what new programs fans have subtitled, and then running BitTorrent to grab them.
Fansubbers have an interesting ethical code: the stop distributing and delete their works when the program is licensed for distribution in the U.S. The benefit to English-speaking fans is that they get to see works that would never get licensed outside of Japan. The benefit to Japanese producers is that their works get an English-viewing audience for free, and can then move forward on licensing those vehicles that have a more International (or at least generally American) appeal. Win-win, for the most part.
Uhh last time i checked i cant just go and buy a 50 pack of brittney spears for $19.99 USD. so hmmm, if everyone spent the same ammount they would have on ONE cd for 50 blanks, they would out sell CD's by 50:1.
When the RIAA went after Napster, folks here and elsewhere predicted that RIAA was shooting itself in the foot. Instead of embracing the new medium, they tried to destroy it, despite warnings that something even "worse" would take Napster's place.
Looks like we've found "worse":
Meanwhile, he noted record stores report that blank recordable CDs are outselling recorded CDs, a trend that shows computer users are not only downloading songs, but copying and burning CDs.
Instead of an online, somewhat trackable, moderately controllable service, the RIAA is now faced with millions of teens (and pre-teens) with computers and CD burners. No single point of control, just my daughter's friend borrowing her CD so she can rip a copy.
The RIAA played the role of Darth Vader in their own little cyberspace opera. "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine..."
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The suits that run the labels and the RIAA are not ever going to change. They are too steeped in their business culture. History is full of examples of people clinging to outdated business models struggling to succeed while the rest of the world just moves on.
Sooner or later the artists will figure out that the world is changing and begin to find creative ways to distribute their material that does not involve poor contracts, giving away their money, signing away their creativity or suing people.
That day can't come soon enough.
The RIAA constantly blames illegal filesharing for a large part of the drop in cd sales. They then try to make the general public feel bad by saying that piracy hurts artists ability to make a living. While we all know this is crapola, I'd like to point out perhaps another reason their point is flawed.
Most of the music I like is old school rock and roll - stuff from the late sixties and early seventies. Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, and Led Zeppelin just to name a few. Now, if I were to purchase a Jimmy Hendrix CD, how much of that money would go to Jimi? What about Morrison or Paige?
...and I very well might be but..
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs
How does renting movies mess up the RIAA's plans?
This lowering of CD prices by the big boys might have an interesting effect on used CD stores. You'd think twice about buying used at $9 if the new one is $13 (yes, some used go for $9 or even $10 around me). This won't hurt the chains, but the mom-n-pop places usually in college towns might suffer.
Universal, Sony, and Warner are members of both the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. (This could change if Vivendi sells Universal Pictures to GE's NBC division while retaining Universal Music Group.) Through which motion picture distributor do BMG and EMI, the two other major U.S. record labels, distribute their music videos?
Will I retire or break 10K?
But I think I'm going to continue the plan i've been following for awhile of buying almost exclusively from independent/foreign labels anyway, just becuase I like the music better. My friends have been telling me the new albums by the Rapture and the Postal Service are really good..
Okay, maybe I'll get that evanescence album eventually. But by and large my RIAA purchases have fallen to nearly nil over the last couple years. And I'm not even trying. If I felt like it I could move into active boycott mode without feeling I'm missing anything from my life. I'm not quite there yet, but either way, I for one am not going to be buying any more Universal albums than before just because in general they don't have the stuff I'm interested in anymore..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
All lost CD sales are caused by the consumer getting the music elsewhere.
This is pure bullshit. How did they initially combat filesharing? They raised prices. I have never illegally downloaded a single file--instead I've simply gone without.
I went into Borders to pick up a Linkin Park CD. They wanted $20. I walked back out. I did not go back to my computer to download the songs. I've simply lived without them. I'd like to own the CD, but give me a fucking break. $20? Universal's price drop is a good sign. Maybe they'll be able to earn me back as a customer.
This is long overdue, and hopefully will start a trend amongst the other companies. I nearly gag every time I walk into a mainstream music store and see a $18.99 price tag. Saving $6 will help some, but the real test would be for these guys to keep back issues of cds at this price. I am betting once the initial few weeks are over the cds will go back to $18.99. If this happens people have no reason to stop downloading.
How much of this accelerated decline in CD sales could be due to the launch of iTunes?
So, could this be it? The tip of the iceberg peeking out of the water, leering at the RIAA?
Let's hope so. Let's also hope that the record companies represented by the RIAA realize that it has become the albatross around the music industry's neck forcing the value of their product down.
The price cuts are great - but don't let up folks! We'll know we're winning when the RIAA begins doing layoffs. Until that day - continue the boycott! Don't buy even the cheap CD's. The profits still go towards curtailing your rights.
Remember, the RIAA will do anything to push their agenda, but only so long as the record companies can continue to line their pockets. Cut off the cash flow, and the RIAA goes away.
Continue the boycott!
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So, wait, your answer is to watch more movies? How does that have anything to do with music?
Once again, we have a false analogy that keeps cropping up in these discussions: that a movie and an album of music have anything in common other than general size and shape. I keep seeing arguments on /. that given $20, people would rather buy a DVD than a CD. Sorry, that's ridiculous! I don't remember the last time I bought a DVD and watched it twice a day for 2 weeks, like I have with some of my more favourite recent albums.
Going further, I can't rip a DVD and watch it on my iPod on the subway or while I'm working, movies take up far more of my attention to enjoy them.
The argument is rather dumb as far as I'm concerned.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Meanwhile, he noted record stores report that blank recordable CDs are outselling recorded CDs, a trend that shows computer users are not only downloading songs, but copying and burning CDs.
That's a gem, using the same logic, if guns outsold waterpistols, that would show that more people are commiting murder. This may come as a shock but CD-Rs can also be used to record data (gasp) or am I the only person in the free world who uses them for this purpose? Also, what if people are creating mix CDs of music they legally purchased? Nah, impossible.
Also, we need to do a little lesson in math:
50 CD-Rs == $10
50 CDs == $750
Does anybody want to bet that even if music CDs were $0.20 each, CD-Rs would STILL outsell CDs.
Nice job distorting the data to fit their pitch though.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Later, through an RIAA spokeswoman, Sherman said the "issue is not the decline in CDs; it's the decline in people paying for the music that they acquire. We need to get people back into the habit of paying for music, whether it's from record stores or a legal online service."
While I may be somewhat divided on the whole RIAA/Filesharing issues, this statement just gripes me. Why is the attitude always about changing what "everyone else" is doing? Why didn't Sherman say "We need to make a product that people are more willing to pay for with their hard-earned money. We need to create value in the eyes of our customers and address their needs more directly?"
I think it's time, now that they are showing a soft spot, to really kick it into gear. If the Slashdot community stopped buying (the few) CDs, we could really bring them to their knees. I like the record company on their knees. It makes it easier for me to piss all over them. (Metaphorically speaking of course)
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
Don't swear off CD purchases for life OneInEveryCrowd! You should check the affiliated record labels out at www.riaa.com, and only boycott those CDs associated with the RIAA. If you refuse to purchase any CDs, maybe some of the ones you would have otherwise gotten have nothing to do with the RIAA. In that case you're hurting the artist who has chosen their label wisely, or a smaller record label that is trying to break free from the RIAA!
Would the sales of the CD picked up anyways? I mean, summer concerts, new albums out and pushed sales, so is it just a spurious correlation that sales went up? Are they hyping something they created to justify the attack on the P2P community?
I wonder if they're related... But seeing as how I don't get to hear any new/interesting bands, I don't know what I'm missing, and I don't care.
To be honest, I don't know as much about music as perhaps I should. But then again, I can enjoy the other parts of my life - writing code, playing computer games, etc... without the worry that the RIAA is going to sue me.
With all this suing going on, I've decided it's just not worth the risk to experience commercial music. It's not all that great, anyway, and it comes with tremendous risk; if I accidentally share a folder with MP3s, I could get sued by the RIAA; if I share a copy of the CD with a friend, I'll be (apparently) breaking the law. Why bother? The risk of commercial music is just too great.
i was actually talking to a friend about this while we wandered around a best buy the other day: if cds were priced more reasonably, i know i would buy more cds, and i'm sure other people think the same. i own about 300 cds, and i can only imagine how many more i'd have if they were in the $9-12 range instead of $16-18.
and holy crap, i buy cds of bands i like that i found thru kazaa! what is the world coming to!?
I haven't bought a CD since Dark Tranquillity - Damage Done which I think was late 2002.
My next buy is going to be the forthcoming album of Machinae Supremacy. They're recording new tracks (Advocacy FAQ) for it, if you were wondering.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Hilary : (Hands Jack Valenti the CLUE_STICK) Here ya go, Jack!
Rapid Nirvana
I buy any number of CDs because I hear about some group, download some of their music, and if I enjoy it, buy their CD.
For me, filesharing has the same effect as radio. It's damn good advertising for musical groups. I don't claim that everyone out there is like me. But I would like to know how many there are. Filesharing might by a net profit gain for record companies.
I personally Feel that the music industry need people to buy CD's. I am not saying that I don't download music, I do. I don't buy a CD if I only like a one song on it. If the music companies want me to buy music, then they should tell their artists' to create better music.
The new Steely Dan CD was $22 USD. That's right. Ok, they added another disk to it - a 20 minute DVD of Becker and Fagan taking a cab ride around Las Vegas - but $22?
Yes I know I picked the absolute worst place on the earth to get a decent deal on a CD, and I did pick one that forced me to pay for an additional 20 min. DVD that I didn't want/need, but $22 still seems a bit on the outrageous side, even still.
I used to work in a large record store back in the day. I know how much it costs to press a CD. Even if they were $5 - $10 USD, profits would still be made by all that need to and I bet people would be more opt to buy and not be worried about being burned once they hear the entire CD.
BTW - the new Steely Dan was not too bad. The first 2 songs are throw aways, but the rest of them are pretty decent (with the exception of the one where Becker sings) and will grow on you, if you're a fan ...
"Another executive noted that larger retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Best Buy and Circuit City already sell CDs at around $13 anyway to get people into the stores to buy bigger ticket items." If I could find a $13 CD that I wanted to buy I would be amazed. I don't listen to top 40 rubbish and over produce drivel so what good does that do me?
I think the major problem with the RIAA's slump in sales is the de-commoditization of the "album". We've had several years as consumers of being able to download just the songs we want. Most major record labels will put together an album with one or two singles that are actually decent. Consumer interest in these songs is what drives sales of the album; you have to buy the album to get the song you want. p2p and iTunes have eliminated the middleman. Now you can get the song without the crap.
I forsee the music industry switching to marketing and sales of individual tracks, rather than entire albums, once it's proven that the public is not interested in plucking down $15 for 14 mediocre tracks and that one song that ClearChannel/RadioOne is shoving down our throats.
What would be even better would be if sales/downloads of those tracks were reported to SoundScan. Then labels would know how popular x song was, and have an idea of where to go with the next single. Keep it at the $0.99 price point set by iTunes, and you're in business.
El riesgo vive siempre!
May be. I stopped downloading in a big way about two years ago, and in the intervening time have downloaded *maybe* an additional 2 cds worth of mp3s. Reason - I have damn near everything I really wanted to get.
Plus I'm just not OCD enough to sit around downloading crap I don't care about just for the sake of downloading it.
Over a decade ago I thought it would be awesome to have a music library of everything I ever wanted. That was essentially unachievable except for the very rich. Now I actually have it, and my music downloads (and honestly my music buys) are pretty damn minimal.
I love alternative music, but lately everything has sounded like Creed, or some crappy form of pop-punk.
Here are some starter sites. I highly recommend checking them out.
New Music Canada
Epitonic
GarageBand
Economy to RIAA: Your CD prices are too high. Market equilibrium is much lower, about half of what you're currently charging. And if you lower your prices, I promise to help you profit more!
..|.. (imagine that as a hand)
RIAA: Damn you evil, stealing, pirate P2P users, you're the reason our profit isn't as high.
Evil P2P users:
RIAA: Alright, we're going to lower the prices and listen to Economy, but we're still going to blame you pirate-thiefs for this.
I keep seeing comments indicating that people are confused that the poster has chosen to rent DVDs rather than CDs, saying that the MPAA and RIAA have a lot in common, there's no comparison between the two items, etc.
Uh, I think the poster was merely trying to indicate that he is fed up with the RIAA, and despite enjoying CDs as a form of entertainment, he has decided he would prefer DVDs as entertainment. I don't read this any differently than if it had said, "In response to the RIAA crackdown, I go to the bar every night and have sworn off CD purchases." I don't think it's telling that it's a DVD substitute as opposed to any other substitute, save perhaps that both come on little plastic discs.
I know to some this will sound like a fanatic or hardline approach, but you really don't need them anymore.
I'm finishing up the prep work on a internet radio station and part of that has been to contact every single artist I'd like to play to ask for permission to use their copyrighted material fee-free. This has been (no surprise) a great experience and just adds fuel to my belief that big industry is missing the boat. Artists are releasing their own music and as the web becomes a more and more common means of distribution and exposure the talent pool is going to get much bigger and the artist to listener ratio similarly with be getting smaller.
This is a (at least for now) nightmare for the established industry but is a lot better for the artists and the listeners. As distribution falls into the reach of the average musician music just gets a little more real. I haven't bought a pop album in a long time, but I'm more then happy to send off 10 bucks for a disk from a favorite artist and it feels pretty cool know where its going (and a little more about where it coming from!).
What I'd like to see is an association for fee-free broadcasting, so webcasters who don't have the time or inclination can look up artists who think the exposure is reward enough and stick it to the RIAA at the same time. Reward artists who care.
Quack, quack.
I came to that conclusion a while ago as well. The prices are too high, the general quality isn't there, they obviously don't sell to me since I'm not a teenager, I won't buy crippled music (even if you rename it 'enhanced'), and I won't buy from folks who take kids to court for having an illegal copy of the latest Eminem ditty. I have thousands of CD's myself that I've collected over time, I'm part of that decline in music sales. Oh-I hate you RIAA. Watch me wave my spending dollars in your face. :-)
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs, and swear off CD purchases for life.
So you got pissed that they're tracking illegal downloads. So you get Netflix and get into fansubs, neither of which have anything to do with music. So you have a portable DVD player that you use while driving or something?
Then you swore off CD purchases, but if you were illegally downloading, you probably weren't purchasing CDs anyway. If you weren't illegally downloading, you would still want to purchase CDs for your music. Did you know that (lots of) other companies besides RIAA companies publish CDs? Ever hear of independent labels?
If you want to post the reduction in downloading and sales story, go ahead and submit that. But don't add in crap that doesn't make any sense.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account
I think you've gotten your *AAs mixed up... last time I checked, the RIAA couldn't care less what movies you were renting/stealing from Netflix or anyone else. I'm pretty sure that's the MPAA's job. So how, exactly, is getting a Netflix account a valid response to anything the RIAA does?
Bullshit walks. As the media companies figure out that they can't inprison all of their customers and that the mind controll devices hasn't yet been perfected they will realize that the only way to survive will be to adapt. I expect to see $10 dollar MSRP cd's by the end of next year. I also think that the iTunes music store being opened to Windows and international sales later this year will have a large impact on the industry.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The man is using his money to support a business proposition that he agrees with!
DVD rental 'on demand'. The medium is irrelevant, he could have been donating money to the public library or gardening, but the point is that when you boycott one thing, the money you spend on it necessarily goes to something else, even if its into a bank.
Me, I've not spent money on DVDs or CDs, and have instead gone to see movies (which are generally not money making propositions!), traveled, and gardened. Money well spent I think, among friends, to see friends, and to improve my environment.
GPL Deconstructed
Two points that we should all keep in mind.
1) If you're going to boycott the RIAA, then make sure that you're not boycotting ALL CD companies. Most of the indie bands out there aren't represnted by the RIAA, and many of them are helping fight it. (Not that you HAVE to buy their stuff--just don't boycott them if they're not part of the problem)
2) "Boycotting for life" is silly. The point of a boycott is to make someone (the RIAA in this case) change their behaviour. If they've lost you completely as a customer for ever and ever, then there's no incentive for them to fix the problems.
If the RIAA started paying artists fairly (including benefits and healthcare), charged a fair price for a CD, came up with an online marketing model that worked, and quit harassing individuals or trying to break CDs (i.e. copy protection), then we would hopefully applaud them for seeing the light, and SUPPORT THEM WITH OUR MONEY again.
(Unless the original poster was just implying that there's no hope in hell of this sort of reform happening in his life)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
And your black-and-white portrayal of the situation assumes there is no one who belongs to both groups. I would predict significant crossover, actually.
I don't use kazaa, but I've had people play mp3's of their stuff at work, and occasionally these didn't get rigorously deleted when those people left. End result? I've bought a few of those albums, music that I never otherwise would have even tried. I have never wanted an album and gotten mp3's instead.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
That's what I do. In fact, just yesterday a friend told me about this cool band 50 cent. I downloaded one of their songs of Kazaa and played it. The first 30 seconds were pretty cool but then it changed to this crappy static noise beat thing with high pitched squeals. Boy that song sucked! I'm glad I didn't waste my money on the whole CD!!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
138 songs had grating audible digital "clips" within them (PAIN on the ears- PAIN on the listening soul-OUCH)
72 songs were 96 KPS
98 songs were crappy 128 kps
The rest were above 160kps, but many tailed off or contained digital clips.
120 had the bad labling and had to be re-labled
87 Songs ended with a second or two left to play, and just cut off.
That left me with 17 good songs out of 212 that were above 160kps. That means about one in nine songs are even the quality enough to store on my iPod.
I like ripping my own CD's. It's done right. All the crap out there should be deliberately uploaded by the RIAA. they should have blips, they should be cut short, they should be 96KPS. If I like the song, I'll go buy it. Usually I buy CD's online. Most rippers today are total amateurs.
One more question: How much of a copyrighted song is illegal to listen to? The verse, the bridge? 30 seconds, or only a complete song?
Seriously, the stuff that is produced today isn't worth a lawsuit, but it isn't worth 17 (or 12) bucks either. Five bucks is okay.
Still, free is better, and intimidation only goes so far. Eventually they'll realize that they've got bigger fish to fry, and hopefully stop suing poor college students.
Here's what I'm wondering: If the RIAA is complaining about losses in CD sales, and blaming P2P, then that must mean they're running short on money. If such is the case, THEN WHY THE HELL ARE THEY WASTING MONEY ON LAWSUITS? Okay, so you sue a poor college student for 2 million bucks or something like that. Do you think he'll actually pay it off? They'll fight it, and if a settlement is actually reached, it's more likely that they've wasted more money of the lawyers than they're actually getting out of the settlement... And then there are the people who can't pay any money, and either go to jail or kill themselves, then you've got a bad situation on your hands...
Still, lawyers have to be a lot cheaper to contract than musicians these days, so maybe the RIAA will stop making music and start employing lawyers to randomly sue college students (because they're ALL guilty of P2P, right? RIGHT...?) to make their profits...
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 nostalgia 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.
.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!
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 when 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 $12.99 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
According to this story over at the Washington Post, a study conducted by Forrester Research has "predicted" that online music distribution will kill off compact discs as a music distribution medium.
While this may seem painfully obvious to most of us here on /., since the suggestion comes up in almost every RIAA related article, it is good to see an "authoritative" organization come up with the same prediction. They may be heard better by the record companies and the entertainment industry.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I wonder if it has ocurred to anyone over at the RIAA that a large part of the fact that their client's sales have dropped is the fact that the products they push the hardest, well, sucks.
You may your taste in music, and I have mine, but what is clear is that the pablum of the Britney's, Madonnas, Christinas, MAriahs, Justins and the like are CD's with just one or two songs worth buying and the rest of the CD is not really worth listening to -- not even by their fans. So why waste $18.99 or $12.99 on music you just don't like?
Most people learn about new music from either the radio or MTV, and to a degree, from what their friends listen to. Go to any typical American city and you'll hear the same music. In the same order. By the same artists. Over and over and over. I guess that's because two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, pretty much own nearly all of the radio stations in the land of the free. And they make the record companies pay "promotional fees" to add a song. No payola, no new music.
So, instead of hearing a great song by some hitherto great new artist, something that makes you want to go to the record store and get that CD right *now* you never even know about it. And nobody is going to take a $20 buck chance on music they have never even heard.
The system that the RIAA and the radio cartel created is the root of their own problem and instead of blaming the kids that can't afford to spend $100 on five CD's, they ought to look at how they promote and sell the music that they record. Then, if they increase the quality and breadth of their offerings, you might see album/CD/DVD sales go back up.
If it's crappy music, why are people downloading it?
Anybody else see the flaw in this? In this day and age, they should cut out most of the retailers. Get rid of a few Turtles, Tower, and switch to using the Internet as your distribution method. iTunes is a step in the right direction. I want one or two good songs, not the other 14 pieces of trash on a cd. If you are having to subsidize your retail outlets, then hey dumbass, there is something wrong with your distribution model.
Now the other side of this is that you cut out people who do not have internet access. Well yeah, but how many of those actually chunk down money on a CD? At this time in the U.S. a lot of people have a computer and Internet access of some form. If they do not, you can take the former retail outlet, put in a server or eight, some fast burners, and setup a computer lab for people to burn whatever songs they want onto one cd. Charge them about .75 cents a song. Give them a massive catalog of music and let them make their own cds.
Maybe the artist should get together and start something like this. Forget about the RIAA, and start their own organization with low entry fees, and low overhead to help distribute their music to the masses through the Internet and through the retail outlets that I mentioned above.
Just a thought,
Honig
Er, because he's watching movies and not buying/listening to music?
Another falsehood that has cropped up: that this statement has anything to do with what the poster said.
You do know how Netflix works, right? You pay a flat $20/month and get to check out as many DVDs as you want. You can have 3 out at a time (more if you pay more) with no due-date. This means a fairly unlimited supply of new DVDs to watch each month for less than the cost of a single DVD.
This may be true, but obviously the poster is going to be buying a lot fewer CDs every month. Perhaps they don't take music with them everywhere, or listen all the time. (Personally, I just listen to di.fm, and there are numerous other free streams out there.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I nearly gag every time I walk into a mainstream music store and see a $18.99 price tag.
And just think...that's for mainstream music (i.e. Britney or the crap that is pop-punk). The last time I was in a record store, it had been about a year since I bought a CD. I figured I'd look at the price for a Lisa Loeb album (yeah, I know...sappy music, but good music to relax to.) Now by my logic, seeing as she's not exactly mainstream, I would have thought her CD would be a little less expensive. What did I find? Her CDs were about $6 more...$25 for one bloody CD. I would have broken my boycott and bought that CD if it had been priced at $15 or lower. Lisa, I love ya, but you're just not worth $25...
Nobody is saying that they are the same thing, he could just as easily have said "My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a library card and start reading more books".
While I have bought less and less CDs since the RIAA became an even bigger bully than it usually is, it's logical that not everyone will stop buying them. However, what did the RIAA expect? You push people around enough and they push back. It's simple stuff we're talking about here, nothing "radical" at all.
As far as companies trying to reduce CD prices, it's a start. Certainly not a major change at all, but someone somewhere high up in the big business world finally said "hey, we're charging too much for these pieces of plastic that people don't necessarily need." While I don't see a major price drop coming any time soon, I think this will slowly be a trend that will hopefully renew interest in the need for consumers to have the physical CD rather than just download, legally or not.
As a side note, Sarah McLachlan's soon-to-be-released album, Afterglow, will be given a lower retail price of $15.99. The album, set to be released November 4th, is sure to sell a ton of copies, as it is her first studio album in almost 6 years. Sarah hopes to promote sales of her album and go against the trend of increasing CD prices that drive consumers away from actually purchasing music.
Maybe she'll make a point with other artists as well.
----------
word to your moms... I came to drop bombs...
The songs for the radio are often very different form the other songs. Two great examples:
1) Fatboy Slim. I happen to be a huge Fatboy fan, and was since before he become generally popular. Well the song of his I heard played ALL the time on the radio Praise You. Now this song is pretty different form most of the other stuff on the album. It's still definatly Fatboy, but there is enough stylistic difference that many people who liked that dislike most or all of the rest of the album.
2) Evanescence. My roomate loves and insisted I listen to them while we were driving around. I was able to pick out the track for radio without ever being told. It is track 2, Bring me to Life. Get back to my house and listen to it on a proper system and it is even mastered differently. Look at the liner notes, it was a different mix engineer that did it. Again, the rest of the CD is similar, but not the same. Bring me to Life is way more Linkin Park-ish than anything else on there.
So it is perfectly possible to get gyped by the radio. You hear a band, think you like their style, buy the CD, and come to find that only a single song is in that style.
I posted this on the prior thread but there were already 500 posts so no one noticed it,
but isn't it Universal that is going to copy protect all their CD's? So even at $12 a broken CD is still a broken CD.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I'm going to disagree with that sentiment.
Your average movie DVD costs about, say $20. Your average music CD costs about, say $15. Given that the DVD probably has at least two hours of things to watch, and the CD is maybe an hour, it seems like the DVD is a better deal.
But consider how much you listen to a CD you like as opposed to a DVD you like. I know I've easily listened to some CDs a hundred times (such as REM's Automatic for the People), while I don't have a single DVD that I've watched even 20 times.
The nature of music allows it to be enjoyed repeatedly much more than with a movie. You have to take into account long-term usage.
If you listen to CDs only a few times, then well, you're buying the wrong ones.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
.. and computers are going to make paper obsolete!
A snappy slogan for bumperstickers like "Friends don't let friends buy CDs" would be a great thing too.
Graphic posters like AdBusters puts out lampooning the record companies is another idea. I tried to adapt an old Maoist poster from the Great Leap Forward to a picture of Hilary Rosen handing out CDs to handcuffed, smiling masses, but I'm a programmer, not a photoshop guy.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The RIAA has to know their business model is dead. I suspect within the next couple years they will follow in Metallica's footsteps, stop turning out CDs altogether, and move into the "all lawsuit" phase of revenue generation.
As anyone who has burned anything knows, this statistic shows that there are alot more safe places to put your cold drinks...
The RIAA is insane if they expect people to permanently stop using peer-to-peer to download free music merely because it sent some letters. Do crack dealers permanently stop selling crack every time a cop drives by?!
People are just waiting for the lawsuits to blow over.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Pricedrops are an old-economy-answer to the problems the music industry faces; copy-protection and suing customers, too...
.) small and effective units generating profit
.) use the technology
.) ignore pirates
The real problem with the industry is that they didnt realize that they are trading virtual goods. They missed it ever since. They missed the MP3-revolution, they missed the internet, they are like dinosaurs not realizing that the times have changed.
Instead of utilizing new technologies for distribution, higher customer satisfaction, more efficience they stuck in their old, flawed business model.
The world would look different today if there were flexible, smart managers instead of old men without vision (and shareholders should make them reasonable for all the damage they did by stupidity to their business).
Why are people forced to buy LP/CD of artists with 12 songs when they only like one or two? Why is a CD more expensive than a tape? Why keep up a flawed business- and distributionmodel if their are lean alternatives to earn more money?
Refactor your business-model! Concentrate on your core-business: find and promote artists. Close your manufactoring fabs, stop making all bands sound alike to reduce risk, stop using old-economy-arguments for new-economy business.
Realize that everything has changed! Today there are twothousand different musicstyles with small groups of fans and not one monolithic common taste. No need for everybody-like-them-billion-dollar-superstars.
Take the following recipe:
Produce small bands and allow them to be different. It costs some hundred bucks to record their songs in a small soho-studio. Distribute their songs to the internet (instead of 100000 CD) and promote them to interested places (not a 5-Million-Ad-Campaign on MTV). If you have a handful downloads for 50 cents, you make profit - and the artists, too.
reduce costs of distribution via utilizing the internet, reduce costs of advertisements by utilizing community-effects
People dont buy music, fans buy! If I like an artist, I will buy all his records. The best way to become a fan is to - listen.
SOme references for this? Ill be happy to buy the music cds for my MP3 use, if the riaa will shut the fuck up, or, conversely, i can tell them to shut the fuck up in court becasue i paid the extra 10 bucks for the music cds.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
From the SFGate story:
So, is it possible the full-bloom Napster phenomenon actually delayed a drop in recorded music sales? (Online music file-sharing exposed more people to more music than they were being exposed to by other media such as radio, and this could have been driving demand. More demands meant more sales.)
I haven't bought any CDs in a long time -- just too expensive and I won't support the copy-protection nonsense. But I do need my new music fix, so I subscribed to emusic. $10 a month for all the DRM-free mp3s I can download. It's been well worth it, and it's allowed me to get new music without running to the record store to pay extortionist prices for crippled products.
There's a nice article on emusic and its advantages here.
No, they're not paying me, but I heard about emusic from a similar Slashdot discussion, so I figured I'd return the favor.
"This is not a victimless crime; people are really suffering from the impact of peer-to-peer downloading," Sherman said.
You find me one person, just one person who's lost their job because of a drop in CD sales. Am I supposed to feel sorry for J. Lo or P. Diddy or whatever the hell their names are this week? Why, because they might have to downsize to a 12,000 square foot mansion with only 2 hottubs instead of the 18,000 palace they're in now? Is that suffering???
I'm sorry, I don't condone stealing, but this is just offensive. You're talking to a guy who was laid off from Nortel in the same year his wife was laid off from JDS, which also happened to be within 2 months of this newlywed couple buying their first house. Trying to make a mortgage payment when your chosen industry is crumbing around you is suffering. Having to sell one of your Escalades is NOT suffering.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I took a couple sociology courses back in college. One of the interesting things I got from the courses was that people enjoy feeling that they are somehow unique, even though population demographics will indicate otherwise. Sure, each person's collective interests will make them unique, but generally, people tend to follow trends and are quite easily grouped.
What's interesting is the choices that the music industry are making when it comes to marketing their product. The 15-25yr old demographic tends to have less discretionary income than the 25-40yr old group, yet the music industry churns out lots of product for the fiscally challenged group. OK, the idea may be that this group tends to buy more music and is more influenced by MTV and radio. Therein lies the problem. With everything else competing for the teen to young adult market, the slice of the pie that goes to the recording industry gets smaller and smaller.
So what to do? Hell, why not legislate some profits then. There's an apocryphal story about candle and gas light manufacturers suing to ban electric lighting and similar ones about horse-drawn buggy folks legislating some ridiculous traffic rules. Why? The new technology would make obsolete their business. But you see where that got the candle makers and buggy builders.
How about this wacky idea: Why doesn't the music industry start marketing and producing product for the 25-40 year old group. We long-toothed, graybearded, geriatrics would enjoy something newer than the constant stream of old Beatles, Stones, 80's era U2, and re-gurgitated 70's "classics" that bombard us. Try something new. Introduce something exotic so that we can talk about it as we quaff our Samuel Adams with our other 30-something year old friends and talk about our 401Ks. We can't exactly listen to Britney Spears or Eminem, you see. We like to feel important, still relevant, and nothing makes use more relevant than being able to "discover" some interesting sounding CD. What'll really shock you is that we have DISCRETIONARY INCOME. How about that! We can *buy* your music. Hell, we'll even pay $18 a CD to be able to be able to put it on our coffee table.
What's even more amazing is that many of these old people enjoy MUSIC. We like interesting lyrics. Some of use are even accomplished or semi-accomplished musicians and appreciate an interesting melody or a novel interpretation of a classic. Heck, even something as trite as musical virtuousity can impress us. I know this is complete anathema to your current marketing philosophy, but what can you lose?
(And tow-truck drivers would see a sudden surge in business, pow-zing!, thanks, I'll be here all week, try the veal...)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Do what I've been doing for a while.
Around here we have a chain of CD/Game pawn shops. They sell new items at retail or roughly close to it. They also sell quite a few more used items.
All of their used CDs are open-cases. They also have a CD deck so they can keep music going at all times. If you want, go by the genre you want (neatly arranged) and find some used CDs of bands you haven't heard before, or maybe that you have but haven't heard the CDs.
Ask the clerk if you can listen to it on the CD deck. They've very cordial about it at this chain. Listen to a few songs. If you're there to buy, they won't mind taking this extra time to help you.
You can also find $2, $1, $.50 and $.25 CDs (budgets), which are just used CDs they either have too many of, or haven't moved for a while. Not all of them are great, but you may find a diamond in the rough, and it won't cost you much.
It'll take some time out of your day, but if you're going to save money, might as well invest some research into doing so.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
They would have sales, IF: (A) They sold the music in the format we want (mp3/ogg) instead of some crappy apple/microsoft/other crippled codec. (B) They offered it at reasonable prices. 99 cents/track, like Apple, is all fine and good BUT that still adds up to $16 to $25 depending on the number of tracks in the album. Give us the full album at $12 or less, and the tracks at $0.75 or less per, and you have something fair to us, the consumer, instead of trying to sell us the same crap at the same inflated, illegally price-fixed rate you've sold CDs at. (C) They stopped accusing their customers of being thieves and concentrated on producing decent products instead of the latest teenie-bopper Britney Spears wannabe crap that sounds exactly the same as the last two albums.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs, and swear off CD purchases for life.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
Netflix is a great way to copy DVDs. $20 a month ($14 if you commit for 6 months) gets you 3 DVDs out at one time. Takes about 1-2 days to get there/back.
You can copy 12 DVDs a week if they're fast enough (provided you get your mail hours before the last pickup at the post office mail box, that is).
CDs.. never again. New movies in the theaters... alt.binaries.svcd and the like, baby.
I'll continue to do this until the RIAA/MPAA stops their bullying tactics.
I know others might not agree with my methods and I might get a lot of backlash for a response like this, but hey, that's what makes us all different. All I care about is the peace of mind that I have in knowing that my money isn't going toward their crap lawsuits.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
The poster says he plans to watch more DVDs instead of listening to CDs (like the MPAA is your friend). Another idea: go out tonight to the local pub/bar/venue, and listen to some local musicians playing because they love to.
To swim, only to die at the edge.
This is interesting, but can we all say:
"Correlation does not imply causation"?
Kevin
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Simple. Movies compete with recorded music for your entertainment dollars.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The situation seems to be that RIAA is hurting and so are the consumers. But, RIAA is hurting more ... and so the consumer seems to have an edge over the RIAA. But, is this edge sustainable, and is the interface of conflict between the the RIAA and consumers as simple as it seems ...
I think the key to visualizing this situation is to understand that the number of consumers are orders of magnitude higher than the number of RIAA participants. It is this imbalance in numbers of the two foes that makes this battle complicated.
On one side of this drop of 26 million units are the small number of RIAA participants. On the other side are the large number of consumers who are inflicting the pain. And on the third side of this triangle is this the linkage that the RIAA has alleged between the CD buying market, and the file downloading market, and the result of this "allegation" by the RIAA is their ability to inflict pain upon the consumers. Thus we have this trinity in action-reacion, in parry-thrust; the consumer can hit the RIAA along one path, and the RIAA hits the consumer along another path. Call these the paths A and B.
The RIAA is hoping to do to the consumers what the farmers do to the monkeys. They know that if the battle goes on long enough they will fail, so they are trying to inflict so much of pain on few of the consumers, hoping that they consumer will give up and walk away ...
So, the question really is, who is going to be able to sustain more pain. A bunch of RIAA participant feeling a little pain over a long period of time, or a few consumers feeling a lot of pain over a short period of time ....
The trend is clear that the RIAA is destined for extinction, but the question is whether the intensity of the experience will be a factor strong enough to change the direction of this trend ... will the strategy of RIAA inflicitng maximum damage overcome their disadvantage of suffering a higher rate of loss ...in other words, is this victory true victory or pyrrhic victory ... and whom is it pyrrhic for - the consumer or the RIAA
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
"Second, Napster was a criminal corporation from the get-go"
No, Napster was just doing what made sense. People wanted access to medium-quality music on demand, and RIAA members weren't interested.
What Napster did was brilliant. And record companies were doing great. All they had to do was work with Napster and they could've owned the market.
But no, record companies are shortsighted and greedy, and I'm laughing as they slowly go out of business because they had the world by the balls, somebody gave them a great business model, and they threw it away because some suit who doesn't like to invest in anything but Shania and Brittany couldn't see beyond next quarter's numbers.
To fucking bad.
Wouldn't this make more sense if it was the MPAA cracking down?
I say people should stop buying music CD's all together to really teach them a lesson. Only buy online music and how they like that one. All the music stores will chew out the record companies and focus on selling movies and music videos.
I want to know where to score some. I never see pirate CD's for sale, unless you're talking about Bill Gate's greatest hits.
Come on, folks - - I know that the average IQ of readers who come here is well above that of, say, the Bush cabinet. And that's even with Rice and Rumsfeld throwing the curve way up. That means you know that "file sharing" is not kosher when the traded goods don't belong to you.
Those twits still calling for record company boycotts, etc., may someday run a business. And when they do, they will see - - as pointed out in this piece - - that for every hit they score, there will be many swings at air. They'll compensate for misses by charging more for hits. Believe me, they will. Don't start believing that all goods are released under the GPL, or anything like it.
In the real world, you pay for what you want. If you can't afford it, you can make it yourself or you can steal it; but then, you can also go to jail. It's been that way for a long, long time.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I'm sorry, but most people are not willing to part with physical objects just yet.
They can pry "Highway 61 Revisited" out of my cold, dead hands....
see-dee?
I haven't bought a CD (new) from the store for a long time. I usually just go to my local library, check it out, listen to it until I hurl and then return it. And if I must have my own copy, I just go to half.com or others like it and buy a used one for a few bucks (including the shipping).
Besides, the money I save usually goes to my pitchfork and torch fund (thx to RIAA and it's inbred cousin MPAA [no offense to those who may or may not appear on the Springer show], and SCO, etc., the pitchfork fund is in high use)
OK, I buy CDs.
This year, I've bought maybe 10.
is it because of file sharing?
No.
Is it because iTMS rocks?
No. I've only bought the equivalent of about 5 or 6 CDs.
Is it because there hasn't been a good album released in over four months (IMHO) ? Yes.
So far I've bought Blue Man Group: The Complex, Live: Birds of Pray, Weird Al Yankovic: Poodle Hat, Evanescance: Fallen and Liz Phair's new one (ugh, she went commercial)
In the past I bought multiple CDs a month, now I thumb through the new release list and go 'ugh'.
Music is in a lull right now. To me it's like it was in the early right before grunge blew out on the scene. We need something new, we need to recover from the deluge of teeny bopper music that owned the streets just like the gold rush after the new kids on the block fiasco of late 80/early 90.
So here's to hoping something new WON'T come out so it'll be easy to boycott. Otherwise, I'm going to buy new CDs if/when the songs recover. I may dislike the RIAAs tactics, but they ARE protecting their interests by going after the folks providing their copyrighted material for free. Don't know why everyone gets their panties in a bunch over that.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I still have a lot of trouble dredging up sympathy for a man I can only picture sitting in a plush leather chair, behind a nice expensive mahogany desk.
That's contrary to the evidence of all of my friends, those who do download music, tend to have MP3 collections in the multi-gigabytes. I don't think they've ever deleted a song they've downloaded, and they haven't bought CD's in years.
Sure it's anecdotal evidence, but if people were deleting the crap they download, you'd think the crap would gradually disappear from the P2P, servers since no one would have it on their harddrives to share.
OK, if downloading music were soley impacting CD sales, then downloaders-who-don't-buy-CDs-in-protest should barely register. After all, as a downloader, I might not be buying anything anyway.
But CD sales are down--amid an economic recovery, no less! Though it would require studies (and they have been cited here bfore), it would imply to me that these downloader/boycotters actually buy a significant amount of music!
My question: if downloading is down, and music sales are down even further, who can the music industry blame?
*flamebait/Troll*
Is when the FSCK did music become as vital to life as food, water, shelter, clothing?
I'll admit I'm not the most musically inclined. And maybe it's just the MTV marketting, but it seems most lives would end should they not be able to get CD's/MP3's of music to listen to 24/7.
Guess it's better than having a conversation with another person.
-- taking over the world, we are.
a trend that shows computer users are not only downloading songs, but copying and burning CDs.
A trend that shows computer users are burning a lot of CDs. A CD can be used for a RedHat iso or a collection of files just as easily as it can be used for audio music. Hell, with modern compression you can fit a DVD quality movie on a CD.
They have no proof, but they love to make accusations.
http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articl es/8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C
The problem with CD sales is they're just not worth buying. I've been buying CD's since they replaced LPs and probably have around 200+ now, but each year I buy fewer because there are fewer available.
Even my kids (16 & 13) have figured that out. They discovered that SOME artists still write and sing their own songs like Third Day, David Ruis, and Jennifer Knapp. They've fallen in love with "oldie albums" like "Desperado" (the Eagles), "Dark Side Of The Moon" (Pink Floyd), and "Out Of The Blue" (Electric Light Orchestra). These kids are supposed to be the RIAAs market and even they can tell the difference between talented musicians and sexed up mouseketeers!
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
Amazon has track samples for many CDs available online and also has user reviews. The reviews aren't 100% reliable of course, but Amazon filters them before posting, so they tend not to be total drivel. I've found them helpful.
Plus, they are also a broker for third-party CD sales, including used CDs. I do wonder about some of the third parties using their site who claim to offer new CDs at discount prices--were these promos, or they fell off a truck, or what? It is similar to some offline CD stores who seem to be able to get "gray market" goods. But I've bought a few this way and not gotten burned, so far.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs
If you're into fansubs, you may prefer GreenCine to Netflix. They have a great selection of anime - I have yet to find an anime that's been released on DVD in North America that they don't stock.
They are a bit more expensive, and have a slower shipping time to Los Angeles. It's worth it for me though.
So how is this War related to the RIAA related to the WTO related to Microsoft related to SCO related to Enron related to blackouts and chaos?
Money.
Just because it's law (copyright law) doesn't make it right, and just because the RIAA is going after them doesn't mean the intention of the law is being followed. The RIAA has no interest in being Right, Legal, or Lawful. They only care about extracting profits, and that's all they should be, as a profit organization.
Law is meant to benefit human society, however, and in this situation I think the RIAA, in pursuing the law, is doing a disservice and discredit to their customers, society, and the legal system. The RIAA, if they want to stick closely to the law, need to attack real pirates, who duplicate and sell CDs at a fraction of the real ones.
And... it is that simple. If you don't like a law, you break it. You break it and suffer the consequences. And if enough people do it, then sometimes the law gets changed. You *can* ignore copyright law if copyright law, or the implementation of copyright law, is wrong. It's been done many times before, when an unjust law, or a law was followed unjustly, exists, and people want to change it.
In this case it isn't nearly so weighty, but it still affects people, as civil rights, or equal rights, or womens rights... but it's still the right of use and ownership. Don't think I disagree with copyright; I take photos and I make videos and my brother is an artist, so we *own* our work. Simultaneously, the act of viewing, enjoying, and appreciating the work necessarily means that other people need access, and you need to balance the *need* for other people to view with my *need* to control the work.
GPL Deconstructed
I notice that the statistics are from the RIAA. Do these statistics include CDs sold by independent artists and small labels not associated with the RIAA? I heard a report on NPR about a month ago that while RIAA sales are down, the independents are having a banner year. Sales are way up and they are taking a significant market share away from RIAA members.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
From the article:
Meanwhile, he noted record stores report that blank recordable CDs are outselling recorded CDs, a trend that shows computer users are not only downloading songs, but copying and burning CDs.
Sorry, I don't think they can make that claim. Can CompUSA or the BSA claim that the same increase in sales of blanks is from people copying software? I buy about 200 times as many blank cd's as pre recorded audio cd's and I might make 2 audio disks out of the 200 and more then likely it is a compilation disk of music I already own. My 13 year old daughter listens to music all day. She does not buy cd's because they are not worth it to her. The popular song this week will not be popular next month so she does not waste her money on it. The "in thing" changes to fast so she settles for the legal free alternatives like the FM radio, MTV, internet radio or Yahoo.
What about the Audio CDR's. Doesnt the RIAA get a cut of the money from this anyhow?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Let's face it. Most people are now used to visual as apposed to aural stimulation. Think of the mid 20th Century. When people relaxed at home, they were talking, reading or listening to the radio or a record. During the last third of the 20th Century, people were watching TV instead. People prefer to watch moving pictures instead of listening. And now the DVD is providing the same video sales revolution that the CD did for audio sales. Add video games to the mix and even less "entertainment" money is going to be spent on audio CD's. And that trend isn't going to stop. Ever.
When I went to a Large-Media-Store yesterday, I did a quick comparison of the CD section and the DVD section. The DVD section was mostly around $20 with a bunch of older titles at $10. DVD sets were around $40. So let's say that I went to this "L-M-S" with $40 and wished to spend it on something to entertain me. Among the bundles I could buy were:
I don't know about you, but those last two look pretty fucking anaemic compared to the first five. That is why CD sales are down. And why they aren't going to ever recover to the levels they were during the 80's and 90's.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Overall, recorded music sales are down 31 percent since mid-2000, when the Napster online file-sharing phenomenon was in full bloom, said RIAA President Cary Sherman.
How very odd. Napster was open and legal, and it seems to me you cracked down on it. Didn't the crackdown work, guys? On the level of the argument being made here, they'd better re-open the old freewheeling Napster right away. Good for business. Right?
Moreover, sales of top 10 selling albums, which generate the bulk of profits for record labels, have dropped from 60 million units in 2000 to 34 million units last year, Sherman said.
"It's obvious we have a very serious problem," Sherman said. "Those are the revenue streams that have financed this industry, and they are shrinking."
And it's equally obvious your solutions have amounted to wrongheaded tactical measures with no strategic vision for your industry, and that those tactics have alienated the buying public -- and that your recent legal actions are only an escalation of them reflecting your paranoia and inaction in the face of the real issues. Hello? Anyone home?
Talk about your dog and pony show of a press conference. Even as a correlation-equals-causality argument, it doesn't quite make sense. The moronic pleasure of that last statement from Sherman is so thorough, too... "It's obvious we have a problem. Not enough money. Big bad problem." Blame your customers, quick.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Some cool bands I've discovered this way:
Note that most of these aren't that new - but they were new to me.
I don't know what the hell's happened to alternative radio over the past decade, but it pretty much all sucks.
You don't have to stop purchasing CDs to stick it to the RIAA; you just have to make sure that the artists/labels that you do buy are not members of the RIAA. You can use the RIAA Radar to see if a purchase would be giving any money to the RIAA or not.
There are hundreds of labels releasing music that is independent of the RIAA. Start listening to college radio stations towards the bottom end of the dial! Many of these stations broadcast online as well - WFMU, KDVS, and KFJC are great stations that focus on independent, non-commercial music.
There's a world of sound out there most people never hear. You don't have to be a slave to the major label marketing executives and the RIAA!
http://www.ice-pla.net/article/myth.htm
Now I have to listen to the CD in 2 song chunks as I drive back and forth to work
No. Now you have to take it back as a 'broken' CD. By keeping it, you are reinforcing their premise that the public has no problem with these pseudo-CD's.
Consider this lovely irony: Linux doesn't support Kazaa, the number one file-sharing utility (if Kazaa disappeared, so would the majority of internet file-sharing). And yet the music industry is working to ENFORCE the Windows monopoly of the desktop by releasing copy-protected CDs that will only play in Windows (or on a Macintosh, which barely counts :P ).
War on drugs
D.A.R.E.
DVD encryption
DRM and DMCA
Patriot Act
911
Censorship
Oil and Halburton
Terrorism
Theft
MPAA
Tucker
Amber Alert legislation
2000 Election
WMDs
Challenger and Columbia
Nationalism and the Media System
Fear
on the other side of the fence:
Open Source and Linux
indimedia
freedom
time
did I leave anything out?
One argument I greatly miss in the piracy/RIAA debate is the fact that it's been held before.
To make my point:
0) When records (LPs) appeared musicians predicted the death of live music and classical music - the sales increased and the market increased many-fold.
1) When radio became big the music industry thought that no one would buy records any more - the sales boomed.
2) When tape recorders became popular the music industry predicted its own demise - the sales (of both tapes and records) increased.
3) When VCRs became popular the movie industry predicted that sales (to TV and movie theaters) would plummit - they increased (and the market of buyable tapes was created and flourished).
And now that everyone has forgotten this we repeate...
I'm also slightly confused about that there has been very little fuss from RIAAs side about bootleg CDs (which for up until a few years ago was the big threat) been in comparison to Internet-piracy.
Open source is the art of letting other people write your bad code.
How many CDs do you have in your collection? Other than a just released Weird Al, the newest album I have is either Nevermind (Nirvana) or 10 (Pearl Jam). I've got roughly 400 CDs. I could buy 100 tomorrow, none newer than the aforementioned albums, and still not own half of the total records I would like to own. I don't like new stuff. I don't buy new stuff. I like old stuff. I buy old stuff.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I know this has already been said above, but I've been buying more used CD's. I have a local used book/CD/game store near me that a year or so ago I dropped in to check out. Huge selection of used CD's from just about every band you can think of, and for only $7 or 3 for $20. Now here's the kicker, you have 7 days to bring back anything that you don't like and exchange it for something else. The result? I've been trying a lot of bands that I have never heard before because there is no risk on my part. If I don't like it, I take it back and pick something else out. I'm sure this isn't something that can only be found around here. You might want to call around to your used CD stores and see if they have a similiar garrantee.
Aych tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash
I don't reply to Anonymous Cowards
Anonymous Cowards reply to you!
The marketing droids win again. It's not $12 a CD, it's $13 ($12.98). Just like I don't pay $1.93 per gallon of gas; I pay $1.94 ($1.939). Sheesh!
You find me one person, just one person who's lost their job because of a drop in CD sales
Well, music and movie retailer Tower Records has been closing stores, and in the DC area discounter Kemp Mill Records is closing as well.
Monopoly vendors aren't interested in providing a better value; only competition ensures that. Monopoly vendors are only interested in how to get (more) of your money. If there was another organization called the IARA that "represented" (as if the RIAA represents anything other than top execs at dominant labels, but I digress) the other half of the recording labels and artists, then you would see something like this.
As for right now, you don't, because there is no IARA and RIAA just looks for ways to make their profits an automatic deducation from Americans paychecks.
What the people who defend the music industry's arguments about paying for music don't understand is that people who copy music would never buy it at the price it's sold. By copying music, they take nothing away from the music "owners". They aren't even lowering profits, since they wouldn't buy it, anyhow. If music "theft" is causing the death of music, how come music has survived so many decades of being freely broadcast over the radio?
Am I supposed to feel sorry for J. Lo or P. Diddy or whatever the hell their names are this week?
Not that I sympathize with the RIAA much, but for every J.Lo, there are a thousand musicians struggling day by day to keep their heads above water. Their contracts with the RIAA may pay them enough to eat, or in some cases, nothing at all.
It's like saying, why should I sympathize with you, when I hear Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are rolling in cash?
What does Netflix have to do with the RIAA? Do they let you rent music over there now or something? Is this about movie soundtracks?
Re #1: No radio, no MP3 downloads... no purchase.
Re #2: Tons of this crap on radio (i.e. hear it but don't like it) because radio isn't an open forum, it's bought and paid for and it's hard to find variety if you don't like what radio is doing right now. Okay, let's face it, there's a lot of crap in MP3-land too... but the barrier to entry in MP3-land is lower, so artists that can't get on radio or that haven't been played on radio for years can be found in MP3-land.
[And no shite I won't pay for what I don't like and don't ever plan to listen to again-- repeat listening is after all, the express purpose of recorded music.]
Re #3: Every now and then something I like is on radio (and then I buy it), but mainly I find it through downloading MP3s (and then I buy it). But the point is, if I like it, I buy it. Because I want to do my own, high-quality rips instead of the net-quality stuff. Because if the three tracks I've heard are good, the other four might be worth having as well. Because I want the artist to make more. Because I want to have media around in case my hard drive dies and I need to re-rip.
Discourse:
I've bought at least 75 albums over the last two years that I first heard as a download or when someone emailed me a 128k mp3 file and said "wow, listen to this." Before the MP3 "era" I bought maybe 5-10 discs a year and often was dissatisfied with those. After MP3 started to happen, my CD purchasing increased exponentially and so did my level of satisfaction with each purchase.
I have 60+ gigs of MP3s, and I can show you an original CD to back every single one of those tracks up. Happily, I can put all those damn CDs in boxes in storage rather than having them take up space in my living area thanks to MP3. And yes, sometimes I do email one to a friend and say "wow, listen to this!" and I know that I have generated a number of CD sales this way.
Here's the kicker that drives RIAA crazy: probably 50% of the CDs I've bought after listening to MP3s are indies. Often I have to write the band after tracking them down on the 'net just to buy a copy because they're not out there in marketing channels. I know for a fact I've sent people to live performances... More than once I've emailed a friend an MP3 track along with "Hey man, this artist is going to be at XYZ in your town." Friend listens to track, likes it and *boom* another ticket is sold to the performance (and the artist makes a buck)... and nine times out of ten, the friend also buys a CD at the performance-- *boom* another CD is sold also.
The problem isn't that MP3s hurt sales of all music. The problem is that MP3s drive only the sales of good music-- and with barriers to entry (ala radio and RIAA contracts) removed, artistic expression isn't something the RIAA can get any kind of government-sponsored monopoly on. That is of course in contrast to, say, marketing and distribution channels in a particular commodity (i.e. crap music).
P.S. Please do not respond with an Ogg post.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You're not looking. Do you really feel your demographic is being ignored just because Paul Simon isn't invited on TRL when he comes out with a new album? The fact is that older listeners just aren't as likely to be affected by marketing as kids. They're smarter, secure in their self-image, have developed brand loyalties and don't have unanimous cultural focal points like TRL (at least not any that are available for marketing purposes). All of this makes marketing to your demographic harder and more expensive. Frankly, it doesn't make sense to devote money to it. There are plenty of great older artists out there making sophisticated, mature music -- John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams and Steeley Dan all spring to mind. You don't have to look any further than the rapidly-rising Adult Contemporary radio format, or the bluegrass fad of a few years back, for evidence of there being real music out there for a mature audience. But frankly, if you're looking for something to speak to your age group the way Britney speaks to 18 year olds, you may be out of luck -- both because it doesn't exist, and because it'd probably be pretty intolerable. I suggest just looking for good music that isn't tied to a specific age group. NPR's occasional music features might be a good place to start.
but I think you're onto something.
It reminds me of what a friend in the clergy told me recently... he said something to the effect of "The church today is competing with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Cable TV, the Internet and a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't around 10-20 years ago. We've got to evolve or we'll become irrelevant to the kids".
Go figure... a simple country preacher gets it, but RIAA members don't. Amazing.
I've found that it's usually tech savvy people who are most likely to keep the mp3s they download especially if they buy the cd. Who here doesn't have an mp3/ogg/cd-r backup their favorite discs?
My mom, sister, sister's friends, aunt, download music to see if they like it then in most cases get rid out of a "So we don't get caught" state of mind even if they've bought the cd.
No sig for you!!
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 - .40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs).
How fast do you think mirror ftps would appear?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think $8 is the magic price point. I don't mean list, I mean what it rings on the register.
I can afford lots of albums, but I won't buy them because if its $12-18, I'm comparing it against a blockbuster movie, and the movie usually wins.
So, it was a good move, but not enough. Lets knock another $2 off the price and we'll all be out there buying 10-12 CD's.
Oh, and to top off the plan, put out some low-quality MP3's or AAC's (128kb) with a promo bumper wrapped around it and stick it on Kazaa. Watch sales rise.
I download movies and watch them in my computer. If I think it's worth a movie ticket to see it on the big screen, I go to a theater and buy a ticket. However, with the current trends in ticket prices and film quality, I find myself buying less and less tickets all the time.
I wouldn't piss on Lars Ulrich's head if he was on fire.
Maybe he'd forgive you for downloading his songs if you put out his head fire. Plus there's some delicious irony in having someone appreciate your pissing on them that's just oh-so hard to pass up...
Right now, the most "noise" is coming from the record companies, because quite franky, it doesn't require nearly as much bandwidth and time to download music as it does a movie.
As broadband technology becomes more prevalent and inexpensive though, the MPAA will be in the exact same boat that the RIAA is in today. (They're already in the first stages of it.)
The whole controversy about "is it right or wrong to download music" ignores the larger reality; technological changes are causing a lack of interest in purchasing music on prerecorded media. 5 years ago or so, the multi CD changers were a big deal. I remember being jealous at the people who got the fancy 200 disc CD changers for their home stereo. (I even ended up buying one for myself eventually, near the tail end of their popularity - on a closeout sale price. It's a Kenwood with a wireless IR keyboard that lets you type in the names of each disc, so it shows up on the changer's display.) Nowdays, these things are selling for $25-45 in the local "Surplus Electronics" hole-in-the-wall stores, along-side beat-up old speakers and Atari 2600 game systems.
People are realizing that it's more beneficial to have the music in digital form, stored on their computer, than stuck on a plastic audio disc. The people I see buying music CDs nowdays are immediately ripping them into MP3s, and storing the originals away as a "backup". They're not even playing the purchased CD itself anymore!
This can and will happen to movies on DVD, as well. PVR's are the first "mass market" example of technology headed that direction. It's just that right now, the sheer amount of data on a double-sided DVD (8 gigs. or so) + the cheap prices on set-up DVD players keeps the format viable for a little bit longer.
Until the MPAA and RIAA come to grips with this, and quit trying to keep a business model centered around providing music on overpriced tapes and discs using a proprietary format, they're fighting a losing battle.
My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a Netflix account, get into fansubs, and swear off CD purchases for life.
Can I ask how the fansubs come into the mix? I'm assuming you're talking about anime fansubs. Domestic (US) anime companies generally have nothing to do with the MPAA or RIAA (AFAIK). In fact, most anime companies have a very positive relationship with the fanbase, something the RIAA could learn from.
I hope that you're going to support domestic releases rather that simply leaching. If you're going to just leach, then all you're doing is stealing from a more fan-friendly (and smaller) industry, rather than stealing from a bunch of greedy, corporate jerks.
This was mentioned by a few other posters, but the original idea behind fansubs was to promote a show without profit. Once a show was licensed, if you watched the fansubs, there was a responsibility to buy the actual release. There's no real gray area with fansubbing. It's illegal. Some companies have been more willing to look the other way than others.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
This may come as a shock but CD-Rs can also be used to record data (gasp) or am I the only person in the free world who uses them for this purpose?
This would be significant if the CD-R sales weren't taking place in record stores. When people go to a store dedicated to selling music and buy blank CDs instead, it's reasonable to assume most of those CD-Rs are being used for MP3s.
Hey I might not be thinking about this in a sufficiently technical mental mode, but how can the RIAA or anyone else gather download statistics about entire global p2p networks? How do they know whether downloading is up, down, or how much traffic of any kind is happening, ever? Maybe I just don't use them often enough. Or maybe this is in the same category as other statistics, being open lies that the public doesn't know how to refute and hence might believe. Any clues?
Subject says it all... I was LMAO when I read it.
"Almost no one buys music blanks any more (unless they happen to own a Philips recorder)"
s/Philips recorde/any AHRA-compliant recorder/
Any standalone recorder, whether made by Philips or otherwise, is legally not permitted to record on "data" CD-Rs. This restriction is mandated by law with the Audio Home Recording Act.
PC equipment happens to be exempt from this law.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...is also running an article on the stats: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60282,00 .html
Nowadays, the new stuff is the old stuff. The Dixie Chicks are covering Fleetwood Mac, some teenyboppers are covering Abba. . . hell, even bell-bottoms have made a comeback.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Yeah... I've gotten around to calling every new "alternative" band Nickelbus-20...
They just all sound the same!
-Montag
Check out http://www.di.fm/ - Lots of cool stuff, most of which you will NEVER hear in the U.S.
From what I've heard, Paul Oakenfold, one of the few european-style electronic/techno/whatever artists to make it in the U.S. is regarded as a crap-pumper on the order of Spears and Timberlake in Europe.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Regarding not having any guitar solos on the album... can you imagine how many solos Kirk has done throughout his carrer. I think he may be running low on notes to play. I dont like Lars as a person, but he is a badass metal drummer and he's good at what he does.
In closing, dont tear down Metallica because its the popular thing to do.
He's taking the money he would have given to AOLTW's music division and giving it to AOLTW's movie division.
That'll teach 'em!
File sharing dropped 22%, even as sales of CDs continued to plummet. Now, even if we assume that both statistics are accurate and relevant (the file sharing stat only covers a few weeks), it's possible that both are a result of less interest in music from the major labels. That could be because fewer "high demand" CDs are being released at the moment, or because some of us found other things to do with our time, or because new networks are emerging that are more difficult to monitor (WASTE, et. al).
We can't necessarily attribute the file sharing drop to RIAA fear by file sharers. The statistic itself seems pretty easy to manipulate. Nor can we assume that CD sales continue to decline because the RIAA has alienated its customer base. Though if someone has found a way to blame Microsoft, I'm willing to listen.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I stopped buying new music CDs in 1995. I only buy used. The price is too high, and seems to only go higher.
On the other hand, I'm an independant artist, and only sell handmade CDs. I wont use an RIAA company because I don't want my fans to be raped for money.
my band: http://www.subatomicglue.com
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
Even at $12.95, it should be considered to have value add in the sense that I choose how I want to associate the song with my expierences. If that same song is also going to be mass distributed during a TV commerical to associate the song with buy beer, a car or whatever, then I'm going to feel robbed. Universal needs to drop their price further or promise that the songs aren't going to be sold out as also being advertizing material. If their going to let Pepsi or Coke spoon feed me the song whenver I watch my favorite show or have the Gap blast the song whenever I go shopping to the extent that I'm sick of hearing the music anyways, then why should I have to pay almost $13 for the shlock?
The people they're now catering to are the ones whose CD purchases will be influenced by how cool lesbianism is.
The heterosexual male market is a pretty big one.
Wait. That won't work either. I think lesbianism is cool, but that won't make me buy any CDs.
And here are Billboard's Top 10 albums for this week!
- Mary J. Blige, Love & Life
- Hilary Duff, Metamorphosis
- Various Artists, The Neptunes Present... Clones
- Alan Jackson, Greatest Hits Volume II And Some Other Stuff
- YoungBloodZ, Drankin' Patnaz
- Beyonce, Dangerously In Love
- Evanescence, Fallen
- Soundtrack, Bad Boys II
- Chingy, Jackpot
- Coldplay, A Rush Of Blood To The Head
I think we've located the problem.Besides being completely off-topic, the latest Iron Maiden release can't even wash Metallica's St Anger socks ...
St Anger rocks, it's pure Metallica, and is not made for IM sissies.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
They've been telling us that every one of the people that got a give song free would have paid $18.99 for a CD containing that song! I'm pretty sure that's how they calculate their "losses" from piracy and file sharing... now you're trying to tell me this is an inaccurate method?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Reminds me of this for obvious reasons.
"recent Weird Al Yankovic CD, "Poodle Hat""
:)
OK, this shows how out-of-touch I am with the music industry. Weird Al released a CD and I didn't know about it.
Time to do some shopping.
Yes, this is part of the RIAA's problem - People are so sick of the crap they pump out that they no longer go to the stores to see if the artists they *LIKE* have released anything. I go to Best Buy every couple of weeks to look around at stuff. How many times have I stopped in the music section since it opened up over a year ago? Not once.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think one main reason why I haven't bought a CD in a long time is the fact that by the time all the radio stations get through playing the same music several times a day for months at a time, I'm so sick of the songs I certainly don't want to own it. And because it's not worth the extra $10 - $20 to buy one song that just happens not to annoy me after months of having drilled into my ears by the radio, I simply download it. What difference does it make? It's played constantly for free on the radio anyway. Why doesn't the RIAA try to bring down the radio stations for broadcasting copyrighted music for free? For me that hurts my willingness to purchase more than being able to download it for free. Take movies for example. I like to download movies and sample them. If I like it, I buy it, if I don't I just don't watch it alot. I have several DVD's that I bought after I downloaded the movies. I was willing to buy them because I wasn't sick of them and because they don't come on tv every day for free, several times a day, for months at a time.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
All This means is that poeple are not downloading 50 songs a day, and i havent heard anything new lately worth downloading
Damn republicans always ruining everything
Seriously, though, his main point is he's giving up on CDs for other forms of entertainment and that's a shame.
There is another way. Go out there and start checking out the stealth galaxy of independent music. And when you find something that you really like, send 'em an email and let them know that you want them to stay independent and free from DRM and RIAA rotten tactics.
Start with CD Baby
http://www.cdbaby.com/
Or just start browsing. A random selection of links from searching independent musicians and independent music.
http://www.indiemusic.com/
http://www.musicbizacademy.com/directory/indiemusi c.htm
http://www.secondfret.com/
http://www.hotbands.com/
http://www.sonicawareness.com/ http://www.narcopop.com/musicians/
http://www.rainmusic.com/
http://www.musicianmp3.com/
http://www.indie-music.com/
http://www.galaris.com/
http://www.internetdj.com/
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Hell yeah, if those music industry types put their money in the bank instead of up their nose, they'd have nothing to worry about.
Also to say that they dont display talent on that album makes me think you arent that knowledgeable of music. LOL.....
wait, I'm still laughing...
Okay...
All right, now I can type. Your assertion, rightfully done as AC, indicates that you don't really know musicians all that well either. Perhaps you know music, but not musicians. Stating that Kirk has run low on notes to play is like saying that a fish is suddenly tired of swimming or something.
When you play, you play because its what you are (let the flame wars begin), and to suggest that he has after all this time lost his desire or creativity is absurd--except for one tiny problem, the abulm is not that good. Certainly not like the days when they had bass god Burton around. I like Newsted, but he was not Burton. And the new guy? DEFINITELY NOT BURTON.
There in lies the problem. It's not that Metallica has lost their musical ability--but that they no longer have the raw edge that made them what they were (not are, that was something else). In the beginning they were about two things: music and fans. The money was great, I'm sure, but it certainly wasn't about "intellectual property".
Now, however, they whine about fans stealing music, and they harp about the evils of P2P, when they know that the whole idea of bands like theirs is to make music that people enjoy.
If you don't care if people like your music, then don't complain about not making money. But when people indicate that they like your music, let them see you, and have your music. Do a tour, and have some concerts. YOU WILL MAKE MUCH MORE MONEY THIS WAY!
Maybe, just maybe, you won't be able to sell albums, but really, does it hurt your bottom line? The only time that you are justified in being outraged about the use of your music is when someone else makes money of it without your consent or knowledge.
END RANT
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
"# 1 current release video game (3-30 hours of game play)
# 2 older release video games (6-60 hours of game play)"
If the games are crap, yes, maybe you're right.
But anything that's multiplayer is likely to be FAR more than that. I know I've racked up FAR more than 60 hours of gameplay with Quake 3 alone, and I STILL play it, nearly 4 years after I bought it.
And I'd rather listen to some of the Sonic Mayhem background tracks over and over again for hours than a Britney Spears CD.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There is also the small fact that there is currently a lot of ill-will toward the RIAA over the lawsuits. Surely that could have contributed to the decline in sales as well.
***$25***?! I hope it was a Japanese bootleg of a 10 year old concert with rare songs on it, or else that is the worst price gouge for a cd I've ever heard of. You'd think they'd have security guards near the Lisa Loeb section with that kind of price. Maybe now you can get it for $12.99 if you haven't downloaded it already.
This should be arranged through all of the broadband providers - bill me based on the MB downloaded via FTP.
I personally have stopped buy any CDs, but I feel a hunger deep inside for new music. I recently found a VERY useful website where you can search for artists, labels or albums to see if they were distributed by the RIAA members. This site has surely become my best friend.
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
Also take note, I read that any radio stations that fall between 87.5 FM and 92.0 FM are non-profit stations and often you can find at least one college/high school station that plays a lot of independent music. Be informed.
Reminds me of the advertisement before a movie I just saw. It's one of the crew guys in Hollywood telling us how downloading movies doesn't hurt the millionaires, but it hurts him.
I might be wrong here, but aren't people in those sorts of positions paid an hourly wage which is independent of how many people watch the movie or buy it when it comes out on tape?
What?
I swear, these executives are so stubborn and condescending. One thing that I have learned about business - any business, is that you aren't entitled to $]-[|T!!! Of course, you have the right to offer a product for sale, but if people don't buy it - too bad for you!!!
We have the same guy who said that we shouldn't have VCR's doing the same thing again with our computers. They want to freeze the world exactly where it is so that they can maintain their business model. I understand how business can be frustrating, but the MPAA is going to have to adapt to survive. Jack, you don't have the right to tell us that we can't have new technology because it undermines your business model. So change your frickin' business model. Now, go ahead and try to buy some Congresscritters to try to hold back innovation to make your life easier.
End RANT
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
There are a lot of people working in the recording industry whose faces you've never seen, voices you've never heard. From the factory floor to the studio, in management and talent services, in promotions and marketing, and etc.
When a corporation's profits decline, costs are cut. What the corporation sees as cost, someone else sees (or doesn't see) as income.
I got the new Meteora CD with bonus DVD for about $13. It is one of the few modern CD's worth the money, as the entire album is excellent and top-notch production, and the DVD bonus is really cool. Also the CD has a music video of "Somewhere I Belong"
I personally stopped buying CD's, but this one is worth buying and you should get it (you don't have to pay $20 for it)
Security is inversely proportional to the commitment of one desiring to circumvent it.
Moreover, fuck users of P2P. They are stealing. Plain and simple. That being said, Fuck buying cd's as well. They are way too expensive. Concerts are a good way of making money, but do you think every band can go out and start doing concerts and make millions of dollars. No, most startup bands rely on record sales to convince the record company that funding their tour would actually be profitable.
Im done with talking about metallica. Slayer is better anyway.
In the last month, I've bought 2 CDs:
Evil Adam - I Want My Money Back!
3 Inches of Blood - Battlecry Under a Winter Sun
Neither artist belongs to an RIAA label, meaning
1. the music is good!
2. my purchase won't be used to pay a lawyer to sue some file downloading llama.
Don't swear off buying CDs forever, just boycott RIAA label CDs and you'll be fine.
[o]_O
"Trying to make a mortgage payment when your chosen industry is crumbing around you is suffering"
no, suffering is not having to sell your ikea crap to make morgage payments... suffering is lying in a pool of your own feces while desperately trying to sniff up that last little bit of crack you thoughtlessly dropped onto the floor of an alley behind a slaughterhouse while absorbing animal blood and having shards of broken beer bottles cut your face.
you have a house and a wife and im supposed to feel sorry for you... maybe its time to grow up and stop wining.
You know what... I work in the tourist industry and sales of my company are down about 15% from last year and almost 30% from our best year, which happened to be 2000.
But unlike the RIAA we can't blame filesharing for our poor results. Lets face it: People are just not willing to fork out their money for "luxury" goods like CD's or vacations during a recession.
There is a limit to the money people are willing to spend on CD's, and even if all filesharing stopped tomorrow, CD sales wouldn't rise. People are rather saving their lower income and will buy only low-price "luxury" goods, like used CD's.
Actually, some smaller vacation companies are still doing good, because they were able to target to low-price segment early and efficent. And that is what the RIAA needs to do to survive: go for the low-price segment.
max 10$/ for a CD
max 0.50 $/ for a single download
and lots of sales at even lower prices.
Changing markets require changing business models.
X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
XX ITE AD X
yeah the grateful dead allowed tapings of all their live performances, and it ended up boosting their record sales.
That looks like the list of nicks at some 'leet board... No wonder this is what gets traded on KaZaa.
You might never buy a CD again.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I can't believe that this audience, a group of software developers, IT professionals, etc, actually believe that downloading music for free is "OK"!! That is rediculous.
Our own income is made from the buying and selling of intellectual property, software, information products, etc. If people priate our property, we get angry...right?
The open source community is the only exception to this obviously. But, if millions of people weren't running M$ products, there would be nobody utilizing most open source programs.
A great example is Apache. A great open source program, but if millions of people weren't surfing to pages served up by Apache on their M$ powered computers, it wouldn't matter if the program existed or not.
Rant a tat tat
Blanks are sold in packs of 10 or 30 or 50.
I think if the average user buys ONE pack, they've bought more blanks than CD's in a year.
The last 5 times I've attempted to buy a CD at an actual store in my area I have not been able to find it. Each time I check the tower records, the circuit cities, or even the used CD stores around here I can't find what I'm looking for. I'm attempting to pay money for music I want, but it's not there.
The stuff I'm looking for isn't terribly popular, but it's not obscure either. A lot of it is from the mid 90s and not from this month. Apparently the stores have some sort of problem keeping stocks of stuff from only a few years ago.
I could always order them from Amazon or something, but I want my music the same day the impulse to have it comes. I don't order a burger online 5 days before I plan to eat it. If I'm going by impulse, why not just download it instead of waiting? If they won't supply the product why should I waste hours of effort trying to pay for it? Is this just their way of forcing people to buy newer inferior music instead of the older stuff?
This is the kind of thing that a decent legal downloading service would help with (for Windows). Impulse purchases with the same instant rewards of downloading, and no more driving all around town trying to find an album only to end up wasting gas and time.
My bad, should have posted this earlier...
[o]_O
Whereas Sherman and the record companies have an unalienable right to huge, consistent profits even during recessions; they also have the right to collusion and price-fixing. They have the right to determine the technology you will use to listen to "their" music.
Fsck you, Sherman. Fsck you, RIAA. Fsck you, record companies.
awsome, tons of users, lots of sharing, very original stuff, even artists hang out here: slsk
---
sub atomic glue
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
I've noticed that the mainstream press automatically links declines in music CD sales with increases in P2P downloading, as if it's a fact that one affects the other.
from the article: "Meanwhile, he noted record stores report that blank recordable CDs are outselling recorded CDs, a trend that shows computer users are not only downloading songs, but copying and burning CDs."
So it appears the the rise of the CD-recorder is the real culprit for lost cd sales. This has always been the nightmare of the RIAA, long before napster. Digital copies can be recopied without loss of quality, so stolen music can spread like a virus. I don't believe all the cdr are being bought to back up data, so don't bother replying with that excuse. That's as bad as the excuse that a bad economy is causing lower cd sales (which doesn't correlate with rise in concert ticket sales over the same period of time). So, increased decline in cd sales is not a protest against RIAA prosecution of file sharers, but instead a result of cd-recorders becoming for widespread.
Vote for Pedro
as proof of pirating ?!?! I buy cd-r's by the 100 pack every 2 months, and use one every night for back-up of application data, not ONCE has one of those disks EVER, contained a SINGLE NOTE of music, in any form, unless the humming of the drive is music to your ears. What we need to do is find a source of cd-r disks the RIAA does not have catalogued and cannot monitor. If the recordable media sales decline while music STILL TANKS and downloading declines what will the chicken littles of the corporate world cry next...poor HUMPTYRIAA, all of King Georges' men could not put him back together again.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I have made it a point since all of this junk began to cease buying CD's from the major labels. I only buy direct from artists via their websites, where I'm sure that I'm getting a fair price, and the musicians are getting the money, as opposed to some money grubbing self-important corporation Down with RIAA!!!
I know a person who runs an indie music label. Six employees. Used to be ten, but when sales dropped, he had to lay four of them off. These four people were all hard-working people. They were not coke addicts, nor did they fit any of the other stereotypes that some people like to perpetuate to make music piracy go down smooth and easy. They were young people being paid an hourly wage and struggling to get by in, as you put it, their chosen profession. They chose this profession because of their love of music.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I have more data CDs than music CDs. Furthermore, I make a copy of my music CDs and listen to those and store the original so that I don't have to worry about getting it all scratch.
Crew guys like the guy in the PSA work for unions and are hired on a per-job basis. It's not a 40-hour-a-week, 52-week-a-year job in the sense that you're probably used to.
If you're a union electrician and you're hired to work on a film which bombs, you still get paid for that job, so you're correct on that front. I believe the point of the PSAs is that if the film industry suffers due to piracy, fewer films will be made, or smaller budgets will be allocated per film. This will mean fewer jobs to go around in Hollywood.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
If we're suggesting good sources for sampling music, Let me also pimp my favorite modern rock station: 97X (WOXY) outside of Cincinnati. They stream their broadcasts, and their playlists reflect some of the best in modern rock today -- and a good majority of the music they play is from (surprise) small indie labels.
pop music is getting worse and worse... ;P
Last time I was on that aisle of a BestBuy store, there were still Audio CDs as well as Data
Isn't a blank CDR just that? Or do you actually have to get one preformatted for Audio and another for Data these days?
The RIAA recently announced that on-line piracy has further decreased sales in the music industry however, the RIAA continues to ignore other factors such as the current economy, many bad releases, escalating prices and many people boycotting their tactics. The reality of the consumer market may finally be setting in. According to some comments, the consumer is tired of being ripped off. CDs cost considerably less to produce and distribute than their LP albums of the past yet prices continue to be almost double what the LPs cost consumers. The lies about the costs to produce CDs are well known to a majority of consumers to be just that -- lies. Maybe the labels are finally listening to their customers and possibly, other labels will do the same and follow Universal's lead with more reasonable pricing. Much like trends in airline tickets, once one of the majors makes a price adjustment, the trend for all the airlines also go in the same direction. The major labels have been accused of price fixing many times however, they have never been found to be doing anything wrong. As prices of one label went up, others also went up but the rise in prices has always been attributed to other market driven forces. If the other labels also reduce prices, then the arguments of the past will have been proven to be false. It is unknown how this will impact smaller and independent labels."
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
What, then, are concerts? The icing? Or the cake?
And let us not ignore that due to 'clever' bookkeeping, most movies don't post a proffit until AFTER the movie is released for rental and purchase.
The author's flawed logic assumes there's a 1:1 correspondence between a song offered online and a CD bought. I highly doubt this is true.
A very likely scenario is that RIAA scared away many casual users -- those interested in merely browsing and who weren't ready to buy CDs -- but did not scare away those who were sufficiently motivated; for example, someone who was willing to risk legal troubles to save $50 or $100 by stealing music he or she was ready to buy if it couldn't be found online. In fact, such hardcore users would be tempted to steal more while they still can.
The ratio of songs stolen to CDs purchased depends on the number of tracks taken online from each CD. If users typically want an entire album, the moral and legal consequences of stealing it online might tempt them to buy the CD instead; however, if most users only want one song from each CD, they may just go without rather than fork over $15.
Hence, it's easy to imagine a 22% drop in music stealing occuring simultaneously with a decrease in CD sales caused by music stealing.
There's a lot that goes into the retail price -VAT, retailer's cut, distribution costs, advertising and other marketing costs, producers' fees and studio time, not to mention the artists nd songwriters who need to be paid.
The artists and songwriters are mentioned last. Why am I not surprised?
What came before the Big Bang? Hum, it must have outside of time...
Sorry, i hate to burst your bubble, but vagrant is a memeber. Sorry, i know it sucks. The RIAA and the big 5 suck, but unfortuntly some great bands on lesser known labels are also members.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Is there a similar difference between "Video" and "Data" DVD-Rs? I haven't heard of any and has often wonder what that is about.
No, most startup bands rely on record sales to convince the record company that funding their tour would actually be profitable.
Most record companies don't hear about bands from their record sales. Someone hears them play, gets a demo or puts them in a cheap studio to put together a demo (if they really believe in the band), and puts it through to the right people at the record company. The record companies pay people to do this, as well as to check out bands on independant labels when they're touring in the area (I've met a number of these people at local shows, and I'm currently nowhere near LA. My uncle also did this for one of the major labels for a couple of years back in the early-to-mid-90's, as well as making sure stores had the current promotional materials for the label on display in proper areas to get the right amount of attention).
The reason Metallica and a few others are so heavily against P2P is because either they do (in the case of Metallica), or believe they do, make a very good amount of their money on album sales. Metallica had a fairly good deal when they got their first major label deal, because they had 2 solid albums available independantly. When they renegotiated in the early 90's, I'm sure the deal came through much sweeter after having a #1 album for quite a good stretch. If Metallica makes a lot of money touring (they used to piss it away quite nicely on each show), it's because of the large number of shows they do, not because they pull in an exceptional amount on each show (though this may have changed in the last 10 years as ticket prices have skyrocketed for any act that can get an arena or stadium show, locally a show at the sports arena runs ~$100 for cheap seats).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I never had less money to spend on stuff like CDs than I have now. Unemployed and with a bad job market. I haven't bought myself a CD in ages now, and it has nothing to do with downloading from the net I'm afraid. I just hate it how they only blame downloads, as if that could be the only thing (screw food, car, heat, and shit like that, people just want to listen to music, right?).
A wise man once said that there are "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statitics". According to the RIAA, they are "loosing money" because all of us are burning not buying. Now, they are spending less in recruiting new acts, promoting CD's, promoting tours, and generally doing less of everything that generates revenue for them. The kicker is that now they want to complain because they are making less money. In my workd, when I work less I make less. Hmmm, guess the RIAA thinks that they should be exempt from having to work to earn a living?
I suppose that they have decided that they are going to make up the "difference" by taking it out of the artists pockets. The most telling piece I have seen was an independent audit conducted on 1000 randomly chosen musicans/groups by a music magazine. All of the musicians/groups were represented by the RIAA. All but 2 of them had been underpaid by the RIAA. The amounts ranged from $163 to over $500,000.
If I want to buy a song, why can't the band just post an reduced-sample rate mp3 on the internet and make me pay a minimal fee to download it? If I want something of higher quality, I'd be willing to go to the store and buy a digitally mastered CD. But I don't want to pay $16.99 for a CD that has 1 good song and 14 other bits of cheesy crappy filler that you slapped together and tossed on the CD so JUST so that you can call it an album and go on tour with it.
They are too smart to make their entire catalog digitally available at the record store. I can't just walk in anywhere and get Etta James or Chee-Yun or Ledbelly or Complete Mushroom or any of the other stuff that I'm really interested in. If I could walk in and get them to burn me a CD with the tracks I want, include the lyrics, and let me pick my cover art, I'd be probably be quite happy to pay.
Instead, they are hide bound dinosaurs that offer nothing of value either to the artist or the consumer.
They take a perfectly good artist, repackage them into some generic format that "will sell" and turn out one hit wonders by the truck load. People don't eat cornflakes all the time. They like things that are a bit different. This is unfair to the artist because they have now been robbed of their intital following and since this is not their style, they are now unable to follow up with anything of merit. They also extort unbelivable percentages of the gross, net, concessions, etc. in exchange for screwing the up like this. It's as unnatural as "Processed Cheese Food".
It is unfair to the consumer because we end up with a 1000 Brittany Spears wanna-be's and very few artists of substance. It's like trying to live on McFish Sandwiches. In 10 years, who is really going to care that Brittany "did it again"? or that NSYNC went "bye bye bye"? If you don't want your stuff downloaded and passed around, maybe you shouldn't cater to 12 year old little girls that have no taste yet??? not to mention no money! You should try catering to segements of the population that are gainfully employed and have disposable income. We're less likely to download and more likely to buy....
My 3 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
In the 80's they sold a lot of CD's because people were replacing their tired cassette collection with audio cd's, it was a new medium and it was catching on in popularity. Plus, you had MTV (yes, they did actually broadcast music videos a long, long time ago) which helped drive sales because for the first time, massive amounts of people were being exposed to new artists. These trends dwindled away til now, where (as I see it), there's little compelling reason to buy most of the crap, er music being produced today. If I download a song, chances are it's music from the 60's or 70's that I haven't heard in 20 years or so. Much of it is out of print. If the RIAA wants me to buy CD's, then the record labels should publish what I want to listen to.
Excessive drinking is fine...in moderation.
The record industry will continue to contract. There will be the 'mating of dinosaurs' as some of the big boys merge. When it is all over, the recording industry will be mostly open source or low cost and spread among a few big guys, and a plethora of smaller open source and small labels.
The music will be better too - since crappy marketroids won't have their hands on it...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
There was a big fuss earlier this year about a settlement for a class-action suit for RIAA price-fixing. Everyone who signed up was supposed to get a check for $12.00 or so from the settlement.
Anyone seen their check yet?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
WOW, wouldnt that be great. Then all the artists we enjoy would stop producing music, go back to pumping gas and we could all be stuck with britney spears and n'sync albums playing over and over and over again.
You people are retarded and are just plain cheap. Yes, I am aware that cds are overpriced and artists dont get most of the profits anyway. But think of what goes into producing one, from marketing to plastics to graphics designs to studio equiptment. But since you think its overpriced the logical recourse is to steal it until they lower the prices to what you'd prefer. Think Abercrombie clothing is overpriced? Steal it until they learn the error of their ways and sell it to you at cost.
MP3s drive sales of good music, and of good music only. Nobody that has downloaded an MP3 and found the music crap is going to buy the CD.
And that of course is intollerable to the studios, for reasons that are pretty obvious.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
"Moreover, sales of top 10 selling albums, which generate the bulk of profits for record labels, have dropped from 60 million units in 2000 to 34 million units last year, Sherman said."
Am I the only one that find this pathetic and sad? I interpret this to mean that the majority of people buy the same 10 albums (more or less). The problem with music today is this..it's all about marketing!! Market the top 10 boy bands, one hit wonders, trends etc. and make your money selling 10 albums.
Maybe it's just me, but I think it's "fair" that they be losing money. Like any other business they need to adapt to the changing market. They can't get away with selling the same 10 albums (which are probably all crap anyway).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
That's sad but I find it hard to believe that their job losses were a result of file-sharing. The mp3s shared are usually mainstream groups and songs (read: NOT indie). Whenever I try finding mp3s of an obscure group I usually fail.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Internet radio has done more to broaden my musical horizons than anything. I can listen to any genre of music at any time, and have discovered an immeasurable number of new bands and even some new styles I didn't even know I liked. I don't mind being spoonfed music as long as it doesn't suck.
22% drop in downloads was CAUSED by RIAA threats?
You surely meant COINCIDED with RIAA threats. Don't forget people were out getting a life this summer. Now that it is over we're all going back to Kazaa!
Yes we are, but you need help. The idea is to force a change in the business model. Then maybe the artists that actually have talent, (none in the top ten in most years) would get the money they deserve and prices would drop. Just the paper shufflers loose, who cares about the people that don't create anything, they just siphon money.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Music Biz to Give File Sharers Amnesty?
But only if you given the RIAA a photocopy of your drivers license, check here:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/030904/11/lkfp.html
That's beyond my ability to guess. He was asking for examples of folks who'd lost their jobs as a result of declining CD sales. For all I know, his sales went down because he signed a bunch of artists that nobody wanted to listen to, or he didn't spend enough money on promotion, and so on.
However, you bring up a good point. Assuming that indie music is "shared" at the same ratio to sales as mainstream music (e.g. no matter how big the act or the label is, they lose C percent of sales to piracy where C is a constant), piracy can hurt the indie labels harder. If you're a conglomorate like Time Warner and your Warner Music subsidiary posts a 20% loss, you can just shuffle some things around and the corporation will survive. The indie labels with a handful of employees are much less failure resistant.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
The industry as presently constitutes serves no essential purpose and will be dead in a decade, perhaps less.
Record company execs like to talk about rights and stealing and piracy, but really, who is listening? They are thieves and pirates themselves, and no one cares about them having a dwindling amount of slop with which to stuff their fat faces.
The Internet and pocket mass storage devices destroy the original purpose of music publishing and distribution. Passing laws against using these technologies is like passing laws against using our brains. And about as effective as outlawing drug use.
There are plenty of ways in which established artists can leverage their popularity. Like live concerts, like product endorsements, like commercial sponsorship, grants, like licensing from merchandizing and use of their music in movies and television and radio or on commercial websites. Like fees from Internet music archives. And non-established artists essentially have no chance with the current big money industry, they are greatly enhanced by the Internet in their ability to reach a broad audience.
I don't care what happens to the Record Companies, as long as they die in the end. They exploit and oppress both artists and the listeners. Perhaps they will be replaced by much smaller, less evil entities which act as marketers, promoters, and agents for musicians.
But this nonsense about putting a lock on every device that can store or transmit a bit is truly Orwellian. The Music Exploitation Industry wants everyone to be branded a criminal by default and shackled and placed under Internet home arrest. I wouldn't buy a CD even if I could pay for it with stolen money.
I downloaded American Life and got Madonna sign "What the F*ck are you doing!".
Pretty cool, so I bought the whole CD and was disappointed that it actually had crappy music on it.
Let that be a warning to the "Try before you buy!" crowd.
Do you think that maybe..uh...never mind...
...I hope they're not including the hundreds of CD-Rs I've used to backup my documents, e-mail, and code in their statistics!
During the news conference, however, Sherman said the industry had the right to take steps to survive as a business. "These people have no right to free music," he maintained.
What fucking planet is this guy from?
Should I take away my kids keyboard?
Stop singing happy birthday.... o wait.
From what I've read indie labels are actually more for file-sharing than mainstream labels. The reaosn is because small and lesser known artists don't have the money and power to get their names known like Columbia or Arista does.
For them, the web provides an easy way to get their music out to the largest audience. It's a fast, easy and effective way to spread their music.
Anyway I think your math is wrong. You're assumign that loss for all artists is linear. That's an incorrect assumption. If the exposure of mainstream artists is exponential that of lesser known artists then it's quite possible that it would hurt mainstream artists exponentially more.
The other incorrect assumption is the way you group artists. Comparing the sheer number of small artists (huge number) compared to the the artists of the top 10 selling albums (which = 10 and is the albums most companies make their money off of) the math that you spelled out just doesn't add up.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
If this was mainstream behavior CD sales would have dropped to zero
Please remember that piracy is NOT a mainstream. Most people don't even know how they can download music or movies on the internet.
____
nico
Nico-Live
Being the music junkie that I am, I have formulated my own solution - I only purchase cd's from pawn shops. I know that sounds strange, but there are lots of shops in larger cities that only purchase non-scratched cd's with their original cases, and in lots of cases, I have purchased music that I HAVE heard on the air. In the end, I get the music that I want (even though I often have to search around) for 2-3 USD per disc. I get a good deal, and the RIAA doesn't get my money. I have purchased maybe 3 cd's at full price in the past 5 years, but hey, what are the odds of finding Steve Vai in pawn shops? I save lots of money, and I feel like I've won a little victory. Everyone should try this.
http://page33.port5.com -- Spread the paranoia.
"If you believe that this is the law then show it to me. You won't, you can't because the law doesn't say that."
Just copy the music and keep your mouth shut.
Cripes, we're not out to save the world, we just don't want to spend $18 on a CD.
I would like to see statistics on how much of the music that people download is Top 40. I think that the greatest fear of the music industry is not that people are "stealing" their music but that the net give people a chance to hear music that hasn't been shoved down their throats by MTV and Top 40 radio.
The great thing about music on the net is that any band can make its music available to the whole world without going through a record company.
For example http://http://www.funkyside.com/ has music available for free from Donna the Buffalo and other bands that seems to be making a pretty good living from tours and CD sales, while allowing for recording and distribution of their live music.
The web is a great experiment in the open distribution of creativity. If CD sales are down it may be that people are finding better music that what is offered by the big record companies.
Keep in mind whole chapters are often photocopied as a reference for a class. How is this so different than one song from an album? Okay -- I'll give it to you: It's been common practice for a long time -- and isn't threatining to force a change in the business model of a multi billion dollar industry.
If you aren't sure whether or not that album you've been looking at is affiliated with the RIAA or not, RIAA Radar is your friend.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
I have to agree. I don't buy CD's but I don't download either. The worst thing that I could have seen was an episode of Cribs on MTV the night the Grammys were being awarded a few years ago. My wife and I were switching between the two. The guy who was President or CEO at the time, I don't remember which, came out talking about the 3 kids they had downloading music for 3 days. I'm sure the /. crowd will remember this. The kids managed to download like 6000 songs in the few days..blah blah blah. And he goes on to talk about how this is destroying the industry...blah blah blah. Anyways, as he is doing this we turn back to Cribs and there is Babyface, a SONGWRITER more than an artist showing off his house with marble floors, the huge pool. It was quite a fine house. Then, as we watched more, there was guy with 24 karat gold faucets. That is right FAUCETS. The thing we all take for granted that most of us use to get a drink of water or turn on to take a bath. His were 24 karat FUCKING GOLD. Now someone please tell me how am I supposed to feel guilty about not buying music over downloading it and burning it. It made me madder than hell to watch that and then have to hear this guy tell me how the music industry was hurting. All I could ask is where is it hurting? That was the night I stopped listening to commericial radio. I try to listen to either college stations or other public stuff.
(or the MPAA for that matter)
NOTHING, that's what
The closest you could probably get is with some of the REALLY big voice actors being union but still the companies themselves next to never deal with them whatsoever.
If you are actively in the fansub and not buying the legit domestic releases then your only killing the very thing you love (The avg anime that makes it to the US makes more money HERE IN THE US than it does in Japan....due to the sheer fact that America is larger and as such even though the anime fanbase is % wise smaller than Japan the overall population difference makes us QUITE larger....)
IF you don't believe me just check attendance on the AnimeExpo US vs ANY Japanese Anime convention...
Scarry fact part two: On the avg year more anime is shown now on TV in the US than in Japan (thanks to syndication and there are so many channels that are willing to show anime now...hell Cartoon Network on a typical year shows more anime than most Japanese stations)
As I recall, Tower started closing stores 4 or 5 years ago, about the same time that some local [Los Angeles] used CD shops closed their storefronts and went to doing business entirely online.
So I don't think there's a correlation between Tower's store closings and the CD market. I suspect it's more due to the cost to profit ratio for maintaining already-marginal outlets. Costs have been going up radically due to other factors -- frex, California's new workers comp laws, which per recent figures can generate as much as 70% of a business' total costs (WalMart and Costco are threatening to pull out of California entirely because of it. I think that's an idle threat, but it gives you an idea of the magnitude of the problem.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Speaking firsthand, you are absolutely correct. In fact, every crewperson on the film set or in the music studio is paid a fixed rate for every hour worked, paid at the time the production is made, whether it ever makes it to market or not (and many don't). And these workers receive *nothing* from royalties.
I think the message that was *intended* is "if you don't stop pirating movies, no more movies will be made, and we'll all be out of a job". But in that case... well, they'll just have to find new jobs, exactly as buggymakers had to in a previous century.
And considering the obscene money generation (and laundering) that goes on at executive levels, an industry shutdown will never happen anyway.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The difference being that a small indie studio is not cushioned by the massive money generated by the "star making machinery" of the big labels. Rather, a small label is forced to cope with realworld economics (just like the rest of us). Which means they'll naturally be hit more directly by an economic recession.
I suspect that overall, filesharing *benefits* indies' sales, by giving them product exposure that they otherwise cannot afford to achieve. (Can't cough up for payola? then no airplay; so sorry. Can't afford to "buy" shelf space at Tower? No room on the shelf for you; too bad.) I'd guess that without P2P, a lot of indies wouldn't have survived the recession at all.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
What an idiot...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
There are some good bands in there. I will admit that I do like the White Stripes, a new band. Also one to check out is Sam Roberts
You may be right, but for every classical (or even jazz) listener I've run into, there are probably at least 20 who prefer rock or other contemporary music genres.
Many of the jazz listeners I've met are still enjoying much of their music on vinyl - so I have to somewhat dismiss anything they say about "sound quality". Pops, hiss and warble are every bit as bad as the supposed loss in details on a high bitrate encoded MP3 track.
The recording industry primarily targets the teens and 20-somethings, who are the demographic most likely to regularly purchase music.
As for issues such as "not dealing with recordings over 10 minutes long" or "tracks with no pauses in between", that's easy to overcome and isn't a problem inherent in the format(s).
I have a Rio "MP3 car" player which allows playing multiple ripped MP3 tracks back-to-back with no silence in between, so you can properly play material that isn't supposed to have pauses in between "songs".
You're correct; they're just guesses. I don't think either of us have the proper background to write out accurate equations. I think we can agree that the indie labels are less failure resistant. CD sales are down 31%. That may be skewed by the type and popularity of music (another area where neither of us have the data), but if you're an indie label, even a drop in sales in the high single digits may mean that hard-working people lose jobs.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
This will sound as elitist as hell, but you may be on to something. The mouth-breathers will install Kazaa and happily pirate away with no sense of guilt or understanding of the economic harm they're causing by downloading without paying. Meanwhile, smarter folks, who might be more inclined to listen to indie music because it's better, might also be more liable to use file sharing as a 'try before you buy' mechanism and otherwise have a stronger sense of a moral obligation to support their favorite struggling indie artist or label because they like their work.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
People talk about a changing medium and the effect on prices. This shouldn't be RIAA's big concern and I don't believe it is.
The RIAA's only real carrot for artists is this: the RIAA can get them exposure and is the only way for artists to go big fast and get large exposure. The real threat of filesharing concepts are that artist can have multi-national exposure in a couple of days with some good word of mouth and some good web advertising, which could come very cheap.
At the point that artists on a large scale are also technology savvy or have friends to assist them, they will realize that the RIAA has very little to offer and at too large a price. And then the RIAA will be faced with the true threat. That instead of losing their customers, they will have lost their artists. And then they have nothing but old music to fight for extending the copywrite on.
That is why the RIAA must squash P2P. And they probably already know this and realize that the legal battles are not enough. Unfortunately they are too stupid to realize they are doing too little too late. They are too arrogant to realize that a lot of people already know their music mostly sucks. The are too haughty to say they were wrong and try to apologize to the public they have offended. They are too blood thirsty to throw in the towel and try to fix things. All their legal fights have shown them is that a hand that's been bitten isn't going to feed them another dollar.
That's likely also the diff between someone who grabs every MP3 they see (no intent to buy, may not even listen to what they download, just wants to have the biggest accumulation), and those who are not only more selective about what they download, but also more willing to try obscure stuff that doesn't make them part of the "in crowd". IOW, the diff between mere hoarders and real music enthusiasts. And the latter are also buyers, whether out of fairness to the artist or for a desire to have impeccable backups in the form of real audio CDs.
I can certainly attest that what I buy comes as a *direct* result of what I download, just as back when I was DJing (25 years ago), the stuff I taped and dragged home from the studio was also what I later hunted down and bought as genuine LPs.
OTOH, when I've had no such "free sample" access to music, I don't buy any, either. None. Zilch. It's not intentional, it just works out that way. What I'm listening to (by my choice, at any time or place I wish, not just whatever commercial radio cares to feed me) is also what I get an urge to own.
As marketing, NOTHING works better than "free samples". And nothing gives the consumer more of an urge to be part of the scene, by owning a genuine piece of it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Thank you sir - I was about to post a rant on how emusic missed the target too because their MP3s were only 128, but I thought I'd check them out again just to be sure and lo and behold - they have swithced to VBR files! The only thing they are missing is a full catalog. For me, they are still worth 10$ a month becuase I can download a bunch of great hardcore thrash from the 80s that I would never have paid even $10 a CD for. So RIAA - look at emusic - replicate that with a flush catalog and I'd pay you $30 a month. Think about how much cash you could make off of me then. $320 a year vs $0 - the choice is yours.