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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 $2.12 more...'"
They're nickel-and-dime-ing the consumer to death, and no one will do anything about it. What, do they think we're made of money? The surcharges and the "Artist" tax for all CDR related equipment has to stop. When will people take notice? (fp)
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one decent justin timberlake song
uh huh right and I'll find that along with element 118, cold fusion and bigfoot, and non-buggy M$ products.
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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.
"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
Even 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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How absurd to see the MPAA cast as the "good guy" on here: Wasn't this the same MPAA that was cast as Satan-in-the-flesh when the whole DeCSS fiasco took place? Indeed, the only reason why the MPAA isn't more on the Slashdot hippocrisy-hitlist is due to bandwidth constraints making it a tad onerous to download DVDs (and compressing a 9GB movie down to a CD or two makes for a vast quality difference, quite unlike CD rips where a CD rip that's perceived as the same quality is an easy download). Soon enough, as bandwidth increases, these same jokers will be yipping about how the movie business model is broken, and they should put out movies for free and make money on toys, or some such moral justification.
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.
The more people that say this, the greater chance the music industry will start paying attention to their customers' wants again.
Yes. Part of it is the investment made in producing the product. For example, how much does it take to produce a typical audio CD? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000?
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. 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. 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. And, I find that there have been thousands of releases of older films that I can buy at Walgreen's for three bucks.
On the other hand, the music industry may or may not be in financial trouble (hard to say, they lie so often.) If they are, I can tell you this: it has nothing to do with anything they say it does. Rather, their problems are a direct result of providing a poor quality product for too much money. This translates to not being a good value for the customer, and is a typical outcome whenever monopolies are involved. What has happened is that the customer base has been exposed to alternatives (all the way from "free" music from online applications to purchased music created by independent (non-RIAA aligned) musicians) and has begin (slowly, to be sure) to wake up to what a rotten value the major music studios actually deliver.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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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.
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.
CDs first came out around when I started college in 1984. You could only buy them new, and they cost at least $13. All of the news articles claimed that the high price (about twice an album cost) was because there were only a few factories in the world making the things, but the price would go down soon. I bought an average of one CD a week.
In 1989, the prices still hadn't come down, but I started seeing widespread sales of used CDs. I bought everything used. Aside from a new CD I bought in 1999, the labels haven't seen a penny direct from me since 1989.
In 1999, the prices of CDs still hadn't caught down, but I started downloading music, making MP3s, ripping my friends CDs, and doing direct hard-drive exchanges of MP3s.
It's 2003 -- 19 years since I started college -- and the price of CDs is about the same as it ever was. Two months ago, I finally bought a CD burner of my own -- a 52X -- so I can make my own CDs. I got it for ten dollars after the rebate.
If they can't get those damned facories built by now to significantly lower the price of CDs, they deserve to go out of business.
You've vastly overestimated the costs to make a DVD from a movie. Many movies *only* make money once the DVD/video sales are factored in. I believe the original Austin Powers movie was a mediocre success at the box office, but so huge on DVD/video that it spawned an entire (unfortunate) franchise. Movies make about 50% of their profit from overseas and video $$. So the DVD isn't just gravy, it's an integral part of the business structure. As for cost of goods, in the quantities they manufacture, COG for a top of the line DVD is probably well under $2.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
However, you need to realize that the customer doesn't care. The question is "I have $20 to spend... What should I spend it on? Chicago DVD with the music for $15.98 or just the music for $13.66?" A heck of a lot of people are going to go for the DVD.
It's not our problem that the RIAA has a broken business model. In fact, that's exactly the problem. That's why they are suing their customers instead of selling to them. They're trying to defend a broken business model. It's unsustainable.
They have to compete for a customer's limited entertainment budget. That budget may be split over seeing movies in the theater, buying DVDs, going on a vacation to Cancun... and maybe buying CDs. Their most direct competition is DVDs and in that area they are NOT competitive.
All they can do is lower their prices DRAMATICALLY and hope that's enough. I'm not talking $10... $10 for a music CD or $15.98 for the same music on a DVD is still a hard sell. I'm talking drop the price down to $3 - $4.99. And even there it's a crapshoot as to whether or not they'll make it. Music is free now because they've overpriced their product and driven tens of millions of customers to get their music for free online. The cat is out of the bag and it's going to be hard to put it back in--even if they lower the price of a CD to $5, a price which might have prevented the original exodus to P2P music sharing, it might be too late for that to bring people back.