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Music Industry Compared to Movie Industry
tgibson writes "The Denver Post has an article comparing the missteps of the recording industry to the movie industry's success with DVDs: 'The best-selling "Chicago" movie soundtrack is available on CD starting at $13.86. The actual movie, with the soundtrack songs included, of course, plus additional goodies ranging from deleted musical numbers to the director's interview and a "making-of" feature, can be had for precisely $2.12 more...'"
The artists who make movies get paid reasonable sums of money for their work.
I still go to see movies. I no longer buy CDs from major labels.
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okEven if CD's were priced at $3, it would be much easier to download them instead of buying them.
To be quite honest, I would rather have cds of my entire music collection. When I purchase cds, I listen to them much more intently, I hear music the way it was intended in an album sense.
I have no idea what songs I have are on what album. I couldn't name you 1/4th my collection on a good day, but I can name you almost every cd I own.
When I burn a cd, it just doesn't feel the same.
If you priced cds at 5 bucks a pop, I would never download another song (aside from learning about a band to subsequently buy.)
I walk into a music store, and I WANT to buy thier music. I do. I refuse to because of the prices (except for punk/emo/techno comps that are reasonably priced.)
I can purchase a video game with the latest graphics, or two cds.
It has EVERYTHING to do about the money, and not about the ease. I hate walking into music stores because I want to buy their albums.
I really do.
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The problem is psychological. People simply do not compare the prices of CDs and DVDs. It is not how we think. In America, everything is $15 instead. Exchange rates do not matter--it is the number that is significant.
P.S. Why does slashdot strip the pound symbol?
In the past year I've bought over 52 DVDs that works out to at least one a week. In that same time period I bought exactly NO CDs. Why is this? The DVDs are a much better value, many cast as little as $10, few are more than $19, they typically include making of featurettes, director's commentary, music videos, actor interviews, a good story PLUS the movie itself.
I would say that I love listening to music, but at the prices CDs are going for I find that my money is MUCH better spent on DVDs. For the same or less than the price of a CD I can buy a movie with all sorts of extras. The DVD has audio on it and a picture, the CD just has audio and no extras, why should it cost the same? The answer is it shouldn't.
I also have a lot of problems with the way the RIAA is trying to keep hold of their antiquated distribution methods and huge markups. Why should I support thier lawsuits with my money? Granted, the MPAA has not been the best player all along wither (they fought the introduction of the VCR for example) of course they have learned their lesson as the sales of movies in VHS form have made them a bundle of money. The RIAA refuses to see the future of music, not even doing a good job of promoting legal online distribution methods or interested in lowering prices.
I'll continue to add to my DVD collection, but until prices are MUCH more reasonable for a CD (say under $5 for ANY title I'm interested in) I won't be buying very many, if any. If the price and distribution method are right I think the record companies can get people to buy music again. Of course, this assumes the music is worth listening to, but that's another story.
This is ofcourse totally subjective but, it seems to me the general quality of music has decreased with time while movies have improved.
I feel contempt when I watch MTV while I actually pay attention to movie trailers.
I feel used by ("new") musicians while moviemakers entertain me.
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
I say that buying the DVD is definietly worth it. You'll probably only watch the movie a couple times, but you'll listen to the music a lot. Last time I checked, Blockbuster charged about $3-4 per rental. The DVD costs $5 more than the CD. So, if you buy the DVD and only watch the movie twice, it's still cheaper than buying the CD and renting the movie twice... correct me if i'm wrong, plz
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
OK, I see your point but how about this argument: it costs around $40M to make a typical movie but less than a tenth of that for a CD. While it is true theatrical exhibition produces revenue, home sales produce more so it seems a CD ought to be maybe a quarter the cost of a DVD. If a DVD is $20 then a CD ought to be $5.
-- arugula
Wait until the day we have gigabit ethernet in every home
by the time that happens we will have movies in 3D and each movie will be around 1TB in size... or something
The way the telcos are going... we will have Gigabit ethernet in every home sometime after the sun explodes.
The problem with CDs is that you usually pay for one song you want to and 15 others you're not interested in. With movie DVD, you just pay for what you want.
Maybe, but there's still a common misconception that CDs are dramatically overpriced because of this.
If a CD which costs $15 has 15 tracks, 5 of which are good, 5 of which are average, and 5 of which are bad, then it's inappropriate to say that the songs are worth $1 each. Maybe the good songs are worth $2, the average songs are worth $1, and the bad songs are worth nothing.
On the other hand, if you claim to like bands that produce CDs with only 1 good song, then my conclusion is that you obviously have bad taste in music.
-a
I remember buying a VHS of Pink Floyd's The Wall so I could record the songs to an audio cassette for my Walkman because the double CD was just too expensive. I couldn't figure it out at the time but a few years later the band I was in decided to get out of a deal with an Indie label (Beggars Banquet) and onto a major. Within weeks of dealing with major label A&R, PR, Marketing and assorted assistants I realized the music industry was a lost cause. It really wasn't about making great, innovative music (as I used to believe) but merely about making as much cash as possible. OK, call me naive but I was a musician who really likes music and thought, just maybe, that the industry was geared to help me make more great music. Nope. We made several demo reels, paid for by several majors (each one costing thousands to make) and on every occasion had to listen to some clueless A&R rep tell us the sound was "wrong". After several months of this we decided to call it a day. No more music from me or my band (The Bolshoi). That was the mid 80's and the slope has been getting slippier for the music industry ever since. And, yes, I wish we'd just stayed with that little old indie!!
To paraphrase the introduction to an early Copyright Board ruling:
On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy.
It does not matter whether you own the original sound recording (on any medium), you can legally make a copy for your own private use.
To emphasize this point, endnote 4 of an early Copyright Board ruling says:
Section 80 does not legalize (a) copies made for the use of someone other than the person making the copy; and (b) copies of anything else than sound recordings of musical works. It does legalize making a personal copy of a recording owned by someone else.
Note that the Copyright Act ONLY allows for copies to be made of "sound recordings of musical works". Nonmusical works, such as audio books or books-on-tape are NOT covered.
The wording of the Copyright Act gives rise to some very odd situations. In the 6 examples below, "commercial CD" means a commercially pressed CD that you would normally buy at a retail store.
2 1337 4 u!
"Also, music takes less money to make than a movie. I.E. I will pay more for a movie."
Albums might cost less to produce but movies rake in far more at the box office than most albums do and the return on movies is much quicker. Consider that even a crappy movie will sell in the millions of tickets at the box office where as a CD will be lucky to sell more than a million copies. Most are lucky to sell more than 500,000 copies and even more still will see no more than 250,000 sold.
Let's see; The movie industry is giving me movies in a format that I have confidence in that they won't degrade any time soon at an affordable (sometimes dirt cheap) price with loads of extra material that wasn't in the theaters (a good percent of which is actually worth my time to enjoy). All of the discs can play on devices from my four year old DVD-ROM drive to the latest progressive scan player from Panasonic without a hitch. Yeah, that sure fits the definition of anti-consumer.
Also, you're underestimating the revenue DVDs bring in. It gets more and more significant each passing year and many movies that flopped at the box office have nearly redeemed themselves on DVD.
As for the anti-priacy ads, I thought those were supposed to be for comic relief! And here I was rudely chuckling with many of my fellow movie goers...
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
I buy DVDs instead of going to the theater. Why? Because it's cheaper to buy it than take someone with me to the theater. Also, I like lending a "find" to a friend and borrowing something from someone else. Do I watch them over again. Yes, but maybe one old movie a month.
I buy a DVD about once a month, and like building up my collection. Not too much overlap with my VHS collection, because a lot of my DVDs are of movies that have come out in the last 10 years. I like the extras, especially when the extra scenes are inserted into the movie, like in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
On the other hand, I rarely listen to the Top40 music stuff in the last couple years. My station is almost stuck on the classic rock and light rock stations.
I completed my classic rock CD collection about 3-4 years ago, and haven't bought a music CD in the last 2 years -- more out of disgust against the RIAA. Haven't borrowed a CD from anyone in a couple years. And now that I ripped all my CDs to my PC, I prefer listening to my own mixes of favorites rather than a store-bought.
Not sure if the RIAA wan't my business anymore. Not sure if I care.
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
Well, yes, the MPAA did go after Jon Johansen (and some others). However, they seem to have either stopped, or greatly reduced, the number of enforcement actions taken against their own customers. The RIAA is ramping up the pressure on people who buy CDs.
I think the MPAA lost (and won) a few battles in court, and decided it wasn't worth alienating many potential customers for every battle they might have won.
In theory, the MPAA could have taken the draconian measure of making all DVD players obsolete as soon as DeCSS was released. "To keep DVD prices low, future DVDs will not be playable on current equipment" could have been the press release. But they were smarter than that.
Maybe the higher margins in the movie industry allow them to pay for a smarter industry group?
High prices didn't lead to people downloading music. The pure convenience of being able to download songs en masse online couppled with fairly high prices brought many people to download music. Which in turn lead to higher prices. Which lead to more pirating again because of its ease.
But you forgot to point out that people do it because it's more convenient. It's not just about high prices. It's about how people do what's easier.
Sock puppets stole my sig.
On the surface it sounds wrong that CD's and DVD's differ in price but only a few dollars. But understand DVD sales, while important, aren't the ONLY source of revenue for movie makers. Each movie makes money by selling tickets in theaters, selling ads before (and sometimes during) movies, product tie-ins, etc. So that CD, which should cost $30, only ends up costing $15 because it's subsidized by all of the other ways Movie makers make money.
Music writers & singers have no such options. There is no advertsiing capability on a Justin Timberlake CD. There are no Justin Timberlake action figures.
The price of CDs at $15 is not a mis-step, it's the reality of the costs and lack of other ways to make money off of CDs.
Also, with a DVD, the cost is often "shared" in that you will watch it with other people. I find a lot of the fun of watching a movie is in discussing it afterwards. With a CD you are a lot more likely to listen to it on your own (almost certainly if you like Justin Timberlake).
I'm not sure if I have really made a point here, but those are just some thoughts I had.
I have to say, I love this article selection for SlashDot. In a sea of articles that complain but offer no solutions, this article clearly shows a path to financial success. In other words, instead of poo-pooing the music industry for all their mistakes, this gives some pretty interesting evidence that taking another route leads to profit.
Believe me, as a business owner (and a techie who feels both sides of the equation), complaining alone gets a lot less of my attention than something with a solution.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Encryption and region coding sure fit the definition of anti-consumer, as are their lobbyists that are trying to make things like NAT and VPN illegal.
It's an operating system, not a religion.
DVD's in Japan typically come out months later than in the USA and cost about 2x as much. As for wanting to copy DVD's etc, if a DVD is really packed with content it just isn't worth the time. It's not as easy or fast to copy DVD's as it is to copy CDs. It takes 4 hours+ to rip a DVD plus DVD costs. Why do it if you can get commercial dvd's, save time and get pretty packaging for $15 bucks. Also XVID, DIVX are not the same as MPEG2 in quality.
OK, I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing people complain about how there is "no good music" that has been released in the past couple of years. This is the most ludicrous statement I have ever heard. When you say "no good music has been released in the past couple of years" you really mean "the music that is marketed to me by my local ClearChannel radio station and my Viacom Cable TV music networks is not satisfying me" -- that's like saying "the era of good sports cars is over" and using only Kias as a point of reference.
:-)
So, for your information, I am going to list brilliant albums of the past ten years (even half-brilliant ones), and categorize them by genre. Please try one of these out -- you're not guaranteed to love each one, but I do. If you hate all of these, then you don't have good taste in music to begin with...
Rock/Alternative/Folk/etc
Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast
a-ha - Minor Earth Major Sky
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump
Radiohead - OK Computer
Beck - Sea Change
Beck - Mutations
Clinic - Internal Wrangler
Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head
Elliot Smith - XO
Yo La Tengo - And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
The Hives - Veni Vidi Vicious
The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Hey Mercedes - Every Night Fireworks
Brand New - Deja Entendu
At The Drive In - Relationship of Command
Hot Water Music - No Division
Sting - Brand New Day
Counting Crows - Hard Candy
Ben Folds - Rockin The Suburbs
Ben Folds Five - Whatever and Ever Amen
Thrice - Illusion of Safety
John Mayer - Room For Squares
Jazz/Blues/Classical/etc
Don Byron - A Fine Line: Arias and Lieder
Soulive - Turn It Out
Kronos Quartet - Nuevo
Clint Mansell and Kronos Quartet - Requiem for a Dream OST
Christian McBride - Vertical Vision
Pat Martino - Live at Yoshi's
Pat Metheny - Speaking of Now
Greyboy Allstars - A Town Called Earth
Tan Dun - Hero OST
Electronic/Techno/Ambient
Air - Moon Safari
DJ Shadow - The Private Press
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing...
Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
Royksopp - Melody A.M.
Crystal Method - Vegas
Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun
UNKLE - Psyence Fiction
Turin Brakes - The Optimist
Hip-Hop/Rap/R&B/Urban
Breakestra - Live Mix Part I & II
D'Angelo - Voodoo
Greyboy - Mastered the Art
Mos Def and Talib Kweli - Black Star
The Roots - Things Fall Apart
Quannum - Solesides Greatest Bumps
The Coup - Steal This
Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein
Deltron 3030 - Deltron 3030
Mr. Lif - I Phantom
RZA - Ghost Dog OST
Jurassic 5 - EP
Again, you're not guaranteed to love each and every single on these -- but it's a good start. More info on any of these: AMG: All Music Guide
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
They wouldn't be losing money at that price. Some people would have to make less money per CD, but sometimes less is more.
.85 "Other" .80 Performer royalties .65 Songwriter royalties .65 Advertising and promotion .35 Producer .30 Recording costs .25 Music videos .20 Managers and lawyers .10 Artist pensions
Here is an approx. current price breakup:
$ 2.00 Record-label profit + Executive salaries
$ 1.40 New artist development
$ 1.15 Distribution
$ 1.10 Manufacturing (CD + artwork + jewel case)
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
That's a total cost of just under $10. If they cut those prices in half, they would sell more than double what they're currently selling right now. Probably quadruple.
Now, let's just do this:
$1.00 to the artist, including songwriter fees and pensions
$1.50 to the record label (including salaries, legal expenses, managers)
$1.00 for costs (including shipping, packaging, marketing)
$0.50 for new artist development, recording costs, music videos.
That's $4 per cd. The retail store (best buy, amazon, whatever) can charge a small surcharge over that, say 50 cents. So, $4.50 total cost (less tax) per album. With a $5 bill you could buy a CD, and since sales will skyrocket, not only will the industry not lose money, but they'll actually make more of it.
Of course, this would mean the industry saying "we fucked up."
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Having RIAA and the music industry trying to prevent people from copying music digitally is like trying to have a law that keeps people from using tractors on a farm to save the plowmans' job.
Technology has advanced where we do not need a recording industry to capture and distribute music, any more than we need to have farmers plowing fields by hand.
The DMCA should be argued against as the act of corporate welfare that it is.
Goodyear didn't get gov't breaks against the onslaught of radial tires which lasted longer. Horse and buggy makers didn't get breaks against car engine makers. Propeller plane makers didn't get breaks against the Jet engine makers. Neither too should the recording industry get breaks against the new computing industry.
Imposing artificial restrictions and charges in the music world completely goes against the grain of technological progress and truly free markets.
This is my sig.
Yeah, it's almost definitely legal for the downloader. It isn't particularly legal for the distributer, probably, however. You're allowed to make personal copies of an audio recording. There are no provisions in the act limiting the source that one copies from. There are limitations with what your intent for the copy is. Intent to distribute, and intent to transmit via telecommunications are not allowed. So, downloading music and then not sharing it out is probably legal, while sharing it is not.
If you take a look at the Copyright Act (don't actually remember the full name... it's got copyright in there somewhere) it's article 80, IIRC.
They've already been paid as a part of the movie. IF the music is orignal, the composers and preformers were paid directly as part of the deal with the studio as a work for hire. If it is preexisting music, royalties were paid, often millions of dollars for a 30 second clip if the song is popular.
This would of course beg the question as to why a movie soundtrack would be so expensive, given that it was already paid for in the context of the movie. This gives rise to another intersting question: The music industry wants to pretend like when you buy music, you are buying a liscence to listen to it, not the actual good itself. In that case, do you have a right to the movie soundtrack through owning the movie (of which the soundtrack is a part)?
http://techcentralstation.com/081803C.html
From chatting with friends, the gist is that it's illegal to upload music to a public ftp server but it's perfectly legal to have file sharing turned on in your computer.
It's also perfectly legal to download.
The article leaves out mention of subsection 2 of the relevant section.
Subsection 2 states that copying is not allowed if it is for the purposes of: (a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental; (b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade; (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or (d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
It seems to me that it would not be hard to make a legal argument that P2P file sharing is prohibited by either section (b) or (c).
Which poses an interesting question - why are there so few complete albums anymore? There are plenty of classic concept albums, from Sgt. Pepper, to the Wall, through to The Downward Spiral. There have been a lot of albums that were a single entity - sure they were broken into seperate tracks, but they needed to be listened to as a whole.
Do people have a sufficiently short attention soan that this concept is unappealing?
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
In their new study, AT&T Labs researchers found the following:
"We developed a data set of 312 popular movies and located one or more samples of 183 of these movies on file sharing networks, for a total of 285 movie samples. 77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders."
Gee, big surprise.
Musics *used* to have large audiences paying cash that would pay to see live performances. Surprise, surprise, when tickets to a concert with a bigname band started to top $50 the overall size of that market has slipped a bit. They don't exactly offer concert season passes, do they?
For example, how much does it take to produce a typical audio CD? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000?
:-)
$50,000 is enough to build your own professional-grade home recording studio. For $100,000 you can build a dedicated, acoustically optimized extension to your house. For $250,000 you can have multiple studio rooms to rent out. And this is all assuming you don't know anyone who's already done this. Cost to produce a quality audio album is almost negligible today.
Contrast that to a major motion picture which might have cost the studio a hundred million dollars or more to create, and I can buy a copy of that production for the price of a music CD. That, to me, is not a bad value.
It sounds like a good value until you start to investigate where that hundred million dollars actually went. First consider $5-15 million for every big-name actor(ess) and/or director(s). (sometimes more!) Then consider all the bogus production costs like extravagant cast parties and pampering. Then consider that many movie studios burn money simply because they can. With the kind of profit margins in the movie industry, efficient spending tends to go out the window. So when you pear it all down, how much should it really cost to produce a decent flick? Certainly not more than $5 million for anything that's not an epic or special-effects showcase. Probably $1-2 million or even less if you're careful. And do ticket prices reflect production costs at all? Nope. How about DVD prices? Nope. (Unless it's a budget movie that totally flops too and ends up in the $5 junk bin) So, in the end, movies certainly cost more than music albums to produce, but need nowhere near as much as typically budgeted. And regardless, any good movie makes several times its production costs while still in the theaters. So home DVD sales are just the extra gravy. More specifically, Hollywood would still be extremely lucrative if movie copyrights expired in a couple months after they left the theater. Wow.. imagine that.. a flourishing public domain: what the copyright compromise was originally intended to create.
Sure, I dislike the encryption and region coding, and frankly the DMCA is almost enough to keep me from buying DVDs at all, but really there are some damned good movies out there nowadays.
DMCA should be enough to keep you from buying DVD's and not supporting the bastards that have so helped to corrupt our legal system. But let me give you a few more good reasons: 1.) DVD video resolution sucks. 720x368 is not enough to do a 2.35:1-aspect movie justice. DVD's will soon be obsolete because of this and the move to true HDTV formats. 2.) DVD audio is also notably weak. 448kbps is simply not enough to do 5 full-range (and one low-band) channels at a time in "CD quality". Sure, with really intense optimization, you can make it work by directing the bitrate to the channels that need it most, but there are still tradeoffs in sonically dense scenes. Many encodings seem to simply neglect the rear channels except for a few whiz-bang effect sequences. 3.) Watching the same movies over and over is a terrible waste of life. (yeah, that's subjective, but I still think it's a valid reason.
Honestly, I don't mind paying $17 or so for a copy of The Hulk or Spiderman or any of the other major motion pictures in recent years.
I've noticed that most people who collect movies don't actually watch them that often. How many $1.59 rentals would that $17 buy? Refer also reason #3.
ps.) Just for fun, check out the insane production costs for various popular movies on IMDB.org and then compare the even more bogus grosses. Then compare some quality "small budget" films like Memento and Greek Wedding. It is truly a wonder that the independent film industry has not taken off more than it has already.
Interesting point.
Kevin Smith (silent bob himself) has said that, with the advent of DVD's, it changes the way that he films. Previously, he used to cut the scene when the actor started ad-libbing or embellishing (aflack is notorious, appearantly). Now, he just lets them rant and rave as long as they want, and then he cleans it up in post, and throws the cuts on the DVD.
So, directors are thinking about DVD's even as they are filming.
~Will
sig?
In canada you can give away as many copies of music that you want to once you have baught it.
No-one has tried it with CD's, but with tapes it was ruled legal to tape copies and give them to all your friends (you cannot charge for them though). You also cannot give them away to people whom you don't know.
But that is becuase the price of blank media is already taxes, however with cd's there are 'music cd's' that you could likelty get away with doing that (they cost an extra 1.50) while 'data' cd's are currently not taxed and you would likely be in more trouble if you tried it, but who knows...
the RIAA sure isn't going to sue anyone in canada that's for sure, and neither would the canadain RIAA equivilent, they wouldn't have the nerve, and the law isn't completely turned and twisted (yet).