Slashdot Mirror
Downloaded Music Gets More Expensive
Reverberant writes "Just as the online music market is starting to gain traction, what to music execs want to do? Why, raise prices, of course! Under consideration is raising the price of online singles up to $1.25 to $2.49, or bundling less desirable tracks with hot singles."
The point you missed here is, competition normally drives prices down. They know this too, thats why they want to artifically inflate prices so they can continue riding high.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Will they ever learn? Having to buy whole albums with only a single good tune was one of the major reasons why online music became so popular, and why P2P is so useful. Downloading single songs is great, costs very little yet delivers exactly what we want.
And now they're going to "bundle" it up again? Force us to get more than what we want with the package, and obviously pay for it?
They'll never learn...
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Even though the record companies have ultimate control over their portion of the price, something inherent as an Apple users tells me that Apple would either lower their profits from each song to keep the price lower, or possibly raise incentives to purchase songs, like giving the Music Store a refreshed look, or increasing play quality as an option for high-speed users.
I truly doubt that Apple would just raise prices to $1.25 without a fight, there is nobody who is more pro-music in the technology sector than Steve Jobs himself.
Let's see: $2.49 x 10 songs = $24.90
And I sort of consider 10 songs to be a short album (unless its classical, jazz, etc..)
Brilliant ideas abound with music execs. CD's cost too much, so lets offer music online that costs even more! Hahaha, I'll enjoy seeing them squirm even more, harping to the newpapers that their sales are declining due to evil pirates.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
Yes, actually paying for a product or service is against the "grout think" here. The idea that a copyright owner can charge what ever they want for the use of their property is lost on some people. For some reason, big business is dirty for wanting to profit on their IP, yet these same Slashdotters almost certainly demand a paycheck for their work...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
A strategy like this will only serve to discourage legit online music purchases, and throw fuel onto the fire of P2P illegal file sharing.
Yes, you read that right - online stores just selling downloads are charging *more* than Amazon does for the CD itself (and Amazon typically has free shipping if you get at least $25 worth of stuff). That's seriously ridiculous: while I'm looking at this new "revolution" of pay-for-download music optimistically, I must admit that having the hard copy is still just better. Much better audio quality if you're an audiophile, ability to rip it and do what you want with it, and while the jewel cases suck the little inserted booklets are often pretty handy. Stick the CD and the booklet into your 288 CD binder and you're good to go. Unless they start packaging downloads with nicely designed info files with picures and lyrics and such, I'm not interested.
This just totally makes me sick. As soon as I feel that the two sides have made some headway in the deal, the music execs are trying to get their grubby paws on the rest of the deal.
;)
This is a slap in the face to Apple and everyone else who joined the online music store business because they feel they were just trying to make a good fair deal (Napster doesn't count because they are sell-outs and Microsoft just wanted to "enforce a standard" of WMV) to both the consumer and industry.
The music industry doesn't need regulation, the music EXECS need regulation. Who wants to regulate?
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
- Listen to a copy your friend has
- Skim through it at a record shop (if they will let you)
- Download it
I personally don't have money to burn (and like to make up my own mind) but I do like to own CDs because they sound better on my equipment than MP3s do. I wish there was a way to not get duped into buying something which wasn't up to scratch without 'being shadey' or having to wait for someone else to make the leap of faith.Well, it that doesn't inspire and promote piracy, I don't know what will.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Not crap attached to it.
Not stuff that'll cost more than it's worth.
I thought they had got this right, and now they come up with this crap.
If they had half a brain they would've realized by now that songs should be sold like domains are now.
Remember when domains cost $35? Now that they've opened it up, everyone and their grandma is selling domains, most of the time very cheaply. And you're not stuck having to buy hosting or other crap like what the music execs want to do now.
Imagine when (if) this will happen for music! Everyone and their grandma sellings songs, for cheap! And unlike domains, you can sell any song more than once!
But, for now, we're stuck with this BS. Oh well...
AC comments get piped to
From the article: "One option under consideration is bundling hit songs with less-desirable tracks" ... differs from 'just buying the CD' how? Apart from price... which will be far more than a CD if they raise prices.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
...or bundling less desirable tracks with hot singles.
Sheesh, don't they get it? I can't speak for everyone of course, but this is the very reason I have stopped buying CDs by pretty much every artist out there.. There are only a few bands now that I even buy the CD for, because most of it is one or two good songs, and the rest is just filler. Just when I thought they were starting to catch on, they go and do something stupid again.
Well, maybe the MPAA will get it right, and offer paid downloads without commercials and extra crap that a lot of people simply don't want. Once bandwidth and (good) video capture equipment gets cheaper, they may have a chance to do things that are good for the customer and still profitable. I guess I just don't get it, the *AA industries (and most companies) always seem to see customer satisfaction and profitablity as mutually exclusive. What's known about the guy that is taking Valenti's place, Congressman Billy Tauzin?
Segfault
I signed up to iTunes a while ago, but just really started using it in the last few weeks. What I've found is that the music I like is there in the form of "partial" albums. Today I was ready to fork out 9.99 for Johnny Cash's Live at Folsom Prison, only to find out that it's missing two tracks and it'd be cheaper to buy the cd than download it.
Another thing I noticed is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon can only be purchased as an album, and it's around 17 bucks! While that's still a fair price, it defeats the purpose of this.
If you average the price of a CD to $18 and with 13 tracks that comes out to $1.38 per track. Until they offer 44.1Khz+ CD-quality tracks, you won't catch me paying for any of that stuff. Why should I pay up to twice as much for a track with limited playability and a fraction of the quality found on a CD?
Granted, a lot of CDs are padded with bad songs, but that's not my problem.
I don't buy songs-per-track and won't until it's CD-quality. I might consider what the industry is offering IF the quality were there, but it isn't. It's a joke. Then again, maybe I'm the oddball that hasn't blown his earing by having a pair of bazookas mounted in the back seat?
What's most interesting about the online music sales is that it says a lot about the state of the music industry. We buy SONGS now. We are less interested in artists as we are "hits". The band has taken a back seat to the packaging of individual songs. That probably explains why half the bands these days all sound the same.. they might as well because it's all about the track, not the music, not the message, not the group.
Video killed the radio star. The Internet will kill the concept of a band/album.
Music industry expects us to pay just as much for downloadable music (with lesser quality and no package) as we pay for the already overpriced CD's...? Prices need to be significantly lower for regular CD's, and especially for online music!!
I buy CDs because I like to get whole albums, rather than picking individual singles. Why is that? I really enjoy albums that are a complete whole - concept albums, themed albums, whatever you care to call it. That is, I don't suffer from the "Buy a CD to get 1 or 2 popular songs, and get a whole bunch of crap" problem because I just don't buy those albums. My problem is thus: The amount of stuff out there is getting thinner and thinner.
In days gone by you could get Animals, or The Wall, and even albums that weren't that tightly bound often tended to be designed to at least have the tracks sit together as a collective whle - to have some sort of theme and order to the m aterial presented on an album. In the last 10 years or so we've The Downward Spiral, another fine concept album, and the likes of Aphex Twin, and Autechre still put together albums as if all the tracks were designed to sit next to one another, plus myriads more doing similar things. But mainstream? Anything even approaching mainstream? It's harder and harder to find anything but a random collection of singles that bear no relation to one another, that fail to hang together in any way shape or form. I have an attention span that runs longer than 5 minutes. I'd like to listen to music that is more thna just a single. I'd like to listen to an hour or so of music that has theme and progression. Why is that getting so increasingly hard to find?
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
There's a lot more that goes into that album then just packaging and studio time....
Just to name a few more expenses:
--Advertising (this includes print adds, video ads you see on TV, those nice displays you see in stores for some albums, etc)
--Food (the record company usually pays for the food the band eats in the studio)
--Room and Board (record compnaies usually pay for the artist to live in a hotel while the album is being recorded)
--Payola (assuming the record company participates in this practice, believe it or not some don't)
--Photographers (gotta put photos on that album and adds right?)
--Music Video for the first single (this isn't always done, but with a lot of artists it is)
--Producer, Engineers, co-writers, etc (all these people have to be paid for their work, most producers get what's called "points" of each album sold)
--Travel Expenses (the record company pays to get the band to and from the studio, the tour bus, flights to interviews, etc)
So yea, theres a lot more that goes into making an album then what most people think. However there are ways the companies could circumvent such costs. Like for instance, pick a studio in the band's hometown (or close to it) and fly the producer down and just pay for ONE persons expenses rather then 3-6 peoples. That's just one example.
The music companies are reluctant to talk openly about their wholesale-pricing strategies, but they are quick to blame the retailers for higher prices. A spokeswoman for EMI, for instance, stresses that the retailers, not record companies, ultimately set the prices consumers pay.
I call bullshit. Retail price is directly related to inventory cost. Any retail outlet must meet operating costs by marking prices up. While I do feel some retailers are enjoying rather healthy margins, I know what it takes to run a brick-and-morter shop in direct competition with an online market. Which brings up another point- in the article it's mentioned many albums are now more expensive when downloaded online than actually paying for the physical CD.
Looks to me like record companies are starting to recognize that the problem is not piracy, but a crappy product. Even in legit download sites like iTunes, people are going right for the songs they like, and ignoring the crap they don't. What does the recording industry do? Raise prices on good songs, and bundle crap via the label "Also included!"
It's all about control- they want you to hear only what they feed you. They want you to pay for what they produce, whether or not you like it. Instead of buying the 3 or 4 songs off an album you like, they make it cheaper to buy the CD in a store, or if you still download- you get the other 4 or 5 crappy tracks along with it, "as an added bonus" (paid for by the price increase).
It's complete crap. What will it take for these overpaid execs to see what their market wants?
This is why I maintain a Rhapsody subscription at the same time as buying a bunch of music from iTunes. I can listen to streaming music with my Rhapsody subscription, which saves me at least one poor album purchase every month, and then only buy the albums that are actually worth it.
They're just rehashing an old marketing plan. Think CD or cassette 'singles'. They generally had a hit track and a couple fillers.
From my perspective, online prices are still too high. CD prices are much too high, and what do I gain by buying a $17 CD for $10 online and then spend my time and media burning it? A CDR is less durable than a pressed CD, it requires me to supply the jeweled case or sleeve, and includes no liner notes. I'd rather just go buy a used one. To encourage me to buy digitally, they'd need to price to be less than 50 cents a track and $6 for the whole CD.
But then again, it's not price or P2P that is keeping me from buying CDs now. It's the fact that the artists I buy are not putting out new music and they aren't introducing new artists that interest me.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
"considering they have to pay for advertising, marketing, distribution, renting the studios, etc."
How much marketing do the record companies do for Elvis, The Eagles, Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles these days?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
...this is one of the reasons why I refuse to buy any "new" record these days. I've started listening Jazz and a lot of brilliant artists of this kind of music are dead, so no royalties are needed there. The only problem is, that the industry takes the money earned in this area and invests it into lousy music made for charts instead of promoting and developing(!) new diamonds. A real shame...
Pirate his stuff. He doesn't need the money anymore.
(The technicians have long since been paid, and you're not taking any physical product from the record companies, so why not??)
Hands in my pocket
According to the AZ Central: "Some executives, for example, believe they should be charging a premium for the online versions of older tracks because consumers may be willing to pay more for harder-to-find material."
Hmm. Material out of print makes the record companies zero income. Selling it online therefore represents a significant new source of revenue with none of the marketing and physical distribution costs that accompany new releases. Profits therefore are considerably enhanced for these products. Traditionally new markets are developed initially at a loss to build volume and recognition. Therefore price the product at a loss leader to build sales^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h higher then new downloadable releases or scarce physical media to grub the most money possible.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
Keep in mind that for every like 200 bands that the record companies sign only like 5 ever go platinum and less then that make gold and even less then that make silver (100,000).
As much as most people don't like to admit it, the record companies DO take risks to sign and record those artists.
When all the testing is done, songs that consistently score 1's don't get radio time (this is obvious). Songs that consistently score 5's also do not get played (this is not obvious). Songs that get scored 5 by some people are bound to have the opposite effect on others, so actually songs that score 3's the most often are what go on to become most popular, since 3 is usually "good enough" to keep most people tuned in.
Of course, now that the music industry has found a way to make millions of dollars promoting new artists, instead of wasting millions of dollars on them, the whole system which decides who gets popular and who does not is beginning to see a real change.
So the question becomes--do you think that any of this year's crop of American Idol finalists can count themselves among the worlds best musicians?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Vanilla Ice "To the Extreme" is the highest selling Rap album of all times. Thus by your reasoning since it is the most popular it must be the best.
If a new CD costs about $15 and has 10-15 tracks on it then that's $1-$1.50 a track. If you buy the same tracks if bought online would cost $1 each (99 cents). That's not much of a savings. That's still about $1 a track and there is a huge savings to them, they don't have to buy, produce or distribute the CDs. That takes time, and time is money. By doing it online they are saving piles of money and not passing the savings along to us. I will not be using the online music stores until they actually start charging proper prices.
This comes as no huge shock to me. The big label execs have never figured out that this is about how easy to manage and maintain a digital collection of music is, not about it being free, for the vast majority of people. That's why they refuse to make an actually usability equivalent, legal alternative to what's already available. They don't get it, and they won't until it's to late.
Instead, they want to make this market into an exact clone of what they see the cd market being, and continue wading in the money they make, and spread around to all of the middlemen, corp shills and various greedy bastards that line the entire music industry.
However, just because they can, doesn't mean that everyone has to follow suit. They are going to see an increasing number of smaller artists being able to directly market themselves, and completely free of any fair use limiting tech (IE, pure format compressed audio, ala mp3, aac, ogg, whatever). These people will see that, while they get less sales overall (less huge piles of marketing clout, etc etc), if they can market themselves well (or hook up with a good, small, dedicated marketing company), then they get a much larger cut of their smaller sales, and in the end, more profit for their hard work. Less babying, less huge rockstar lifestyle, most likely, though.
Anyway, just this strange monkey's 2c.
Meanwhile, I'm sure the artists who rented the studio and spent a month recording the music don't find the joke so funny. If Slashdot was made up of musicians instead of programmers, the opinion of this whole website would be completely different.
As it is, everyone thinks they're fighting for artists when they don't know any and have never asked them if they wanted the "help."
They're talking about raising the prices, but they don't mention anything about the artists getting a bigger share of the take. Except for a select few, it looks like the majority of the musicians will still get peanuts, whether it's from traditional CD's or online downloads. That's why I have no qualms about downloading massive amounts of music.
I archive it, listen to it at my leisure, and when I find music worth listening to on a regular basis, I might buy it, or better yet, go see the band when it comes to town. I can think of quite a few bands that have made more money from me because of this and I can't think of any bands that have suffered because I download music.
Then why does The Matrix Revolutions the movie (Widescreen) cost only $4 less than Matrix Revolutions the soundtrack? What do the musicians need that the actors, writers, producers, etc. don't need? And, remember that the sound track is INCLUDED in the DVD.
So, after paying royalties and payola etc, that leaves about $4 for the cost of the blockbuster movie series that helped to redefine US action movies?
Maybe it's because the expected value of the CD is $15+, and without competition, the monopoly that owns redistribution rights can set the price.
Yeah that's great and maybe Britney Spears get's all the perks of getting the recording company to pay for her own jet, radio time, all those posters, music videos and such but why do I have to pay for all that when I'm buying an old Pink Floyd Album where they aren't paying for anything they haven't already recouped 100x over? For an artist like Britney Spears, they probably make more than they spent in the first month (maybe week).
So I know... let's say that all these people downloading mp3s are stealing our music. Then we'll jack up the price of a cd and wonder why cd sales have fallen. Who get's the extra money? Certainly not the artists but the manager needs a new summer home.
I mean come on... I can find dvds that are cheaper than cds. Movies have million dollar budgets which include better advertising, Food for a heck of a lot more people, trailers for the bigger stars in addition to room and board if it's needed. (not for everyone obviously) By payola I'm assuming you mean paying the artist. Yeah, there are a lot more actors in a movie than there are artists. Photographers, camera guys, lighting guys, sound guys, special effect guys, etc... Instead of a music video there's the previews. Producers, engineers, etc also involved in movies, same with travel expenses.
Obviously a lot of people will go see a movie in the theatres and then buy it when it comes out on dvd but do you really think this happens a lot? On a typical movie someone will *either* go see it in the theatres, buy the vhs/dvd, or rent the movie. So $7-$8 per person... not too bad but you don't get to watch it again and if more than one person is watching it, it gets expensive.
DVDs... Kill Bill on amazon: $19.49, "Rum Sodomy & the Lash" (cd) by the Pogues is $18.99 from amazon. So a movie is a dollar more than a dvd. Which do you think costs more to make? Oh and the Pogues cd was released in 1992... Do you remember any advertising or the Music Video? Not every cd costs a lot to make. So let's have a pricing scheme where the albums that take millions of dollars to make costs more than the album that takes a few thousand dollars to make. But who is going to buy a $50 Britney Spears album when they can buy a flogging molly cd for $10?
No, that was just for 2001. Look at the page again.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I don't think anyone is missing the point, nor are people claiming it is *immoral* to raise prices on a CD (or music single), people are questioning raising the price at a time when the record companies are struggling as a result of falling demand and higher prices.
Like it or not, free downloads are the real competition to the record companies, and we can wring our hands all day about the morality of it, but the fact is that it is out there and record companies will ignore that outlet at their peril.
I think they'd be better off lowering prices, diversifying their product and offering extras that make people feel happy they bought the CD.
But raising prices seems like folly right now. I thought they might wait until electronic downloads reached a critical mass. Perhaps they want to kill off electronic distribution?
Many posts are talking about how the MPAA has it figured out, or at least moreso compared to the RIAA.
As some have noted, this is due to the fact that the theaters are where the money is made.
(PS - an exercise for the reader is to consider how a theater model might work for music)
But, as far as walking into the store and choosing between a DVD and a CD, many things are taken into consideration (esp. if you have piracy as an option)
Music: I could buy this CD, for about $16-20 which is a couple bucks more than this DVD, but instead I could go home and download the one song I really want (legally or otherwise) and take a hit in quality. Given the speed of my net connection and the price differential, it's far better for me to not buy this CD, and use other means.
Movies: I could buy this DVD, for about $10-15, or I could go home, get online, and pirate an approximately 700 meg version that will be of crappy quality (far worse of a quality hit compared to CD vs. MP3/Ogg/ACC), which will take me a few hours to download. Or, I could spend the money, get the sucker in a portable format (and off my HD), with immensely superior quality and all the bonuses. Yeah, that's worth the money.
If you consider that time is money, at minimum wage in CA ($6.75 an hour) you could spend 2 hours on DSL (if you're lucky) pirating a movie ($13.50) or buy it for about the same price. Meanwhile, a CD costs about 3 hours ($20.25) and is compared to about 3.5 megs for about 12 tracks, or about 42 megs, which comes in, if you're lucky, in about 30 minutes ($3.37). That includes the tracks you DON'T want. If there's only 3 that are good, it's about comparable to buy those on iTMS legally.
This isn't difficult math. It's just math the RIAA can't do.
I totally agree. In a way nothing has changed. Restricting what other people can copy has nothing to do with property rights, or even creativity rights. Because of copyrights, they were enabled to be abusive and monopolistic to begin with. Then when copyright enforcement became threatened they started to file tons of lawsuits to keep alternatives at bay while offering other download venues for cheap prices. Now that they have a market toehold they are leveraging copyrights to choke off alternetive distribution and raise prices as they do to finance it.
Moral: liberty is an is an end in itself, not pricing, not artificial markets, not unjust property rights, not distribution of profits, not creation of music, or even the artists. There are a lof of good sounding cuases that people can sell their freedoms down the river for, but only one major reason to have liberty - and that is to have more freedom in the future.
Conclusion: Anything less than the outright abolition of copyright monopolies is just going to delay the inevitable and make the situation worse.
They haven't been able to kill downloadable music by direct means, maybe this is their method.
Price it out of the market so their business goes down, whine about "pirates destroying the music industry", and get sympathy for more draconian laws
Steve
they say "the 5 major music companies discussed"
arent they acting like a trust? monopolizing the marketing, then banding together to get the most money for themselves by abusing the consumers...
I thought that was highly illegal according to several anti-trust laws...
Why not its completely feasable it was an mp3 server(it might not have been, but it could have been). Here is a breif history of the mp3
It all started in the mid-1980s, at the Fraunhofer Institut in Erlangen, Germany, which began work on a high quality, low bit-rate audio coding with the help of Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen. In 1989, Fraunhofer was granted a patent for MP3 in Germany and a few years later it was submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO), and integrated into the MPEG-1 specification.
Frauenhofer also developed the first MP3 player in the early 1990s, but it turned out to be a pretty underwhelming application. In 1997, a developer at Advanced Multimedia Products named Tomislav Uzelac created the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, which is regarded as the first prime-time MP3 player. Shortly after the AMP engine hit the Net, a couple of university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev (who more recently created MacAMP), took the Amp engine, added a Windows interface and dubbed it "Winamp." In 1998, when Winamp was offered up as a free music player, the MP3 craze began: Music fiends all over the world started MP3 hubs, offering copyrighted music for free.
I remember transferring mp3's via ZIP disc's at school and swapping ZIP's full of MP3's and that was the fall of 1996 and MP3's had been around for a while then.
AAah the good old days of getting them off of usenet, Oh wait... I still do!
moo.
What are you smoking? Pop music is most popular with the people who spend the most on music: teenagers and 20-somethings. People in their 30's, 40's, and 50's don't generally listen to pop music. If they listen to anything, it's stuff that was popular when they were teenagers. But look around: the biggest fans of Britney are no older than 15 years of age. I would consider such people to be single, have no kids, and have a lot of spare time.
Kids don't listen to pop because it's good, or because they don't have free time to look for something better; they do so because, at that age, they're easily impressionable and highly influenced by their peers.
There is thematic unity, progression, variation, and transformation on a theme, different styles (baroque vs a classical symphony), structure, etc. The same piece performed by different artists added additional insights and interpretation as well.
Not to sound snobby or anything but a classical music can be both something to enjoyed simply or an intellectual exercise if you want it to be.
Lastly, I know 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the line, I can still listen the the same Mozart, Paganini, Bach pieces I enjoy today. So may my kids. Would I enjoy Coldplay or Coolio 30 years later? Not likely.
This happened to me with a double live album I wanted to buy. I checked the price on iTunes and checked the price on Amazon and they were the same. Of course, I would have had to pay shipping from Amazon. I saw that their price was just barely below retail and I decided then that I would buy it at an actual STORE, believe it or not. I hardly ever buy CDs at stores anymore, and I've bought 1.5 GB of music from iTunes.
For this one album, I decided it would be worth the inconvenience and very small additional cost to walk out with the CDs that I could then rip into whatever format I choose, with liner notes and the whole nine yards.
But this was because the online version was just a tad cheaper than the store-bought version. I'll tell you right now. If you make them more expensive, or even the same price, as the CD version, you will absolutely NOT sell albums to me. Maybe individual songs (for not much more than 99 cents, by the way), but definitely not albums. $9.99 is a very good price. Keep it there for a few years and see what happens or you'll die an ugly death.
RP
Now notice that these ARE the starving artists that those that want to crush P2P talk about. Almost all of them have other jobs to support their art. The engineers tend to be full time, but none of them are rich by any means. It pays ok for a job that requires quite a bit of skill, but not a ton. These are the ones that need money, these are the poor and struggling.
They do not benefit from the music industry as it is now. It is designed to lock people like them out from major distribution, unless the labels decide they want to sign them on, which means reliquinshing creative and monetary control, as well as being unlikely. Even if they get signed, unless they become huge, it's highly unlikely they'll profit. The record labels, not the artists, are the ones making all the money under the current system.
Well the Internet is their weapon, and they can use it to fight back. With it their music can be distributed to the world, it can get some publicity, and people can discover them. It doesn't make them money directly, but it can lead to things that can. More importantly, it lets the world hear and appreciate their work. I don't know any musicians that are in it for the money, it's just not that kind of field. They are in it because it is what they love. Part of that love (I'm a musician too) is wanting others to share it. Playing a live concert for a crowd is a powerful feeling, when the audience shares your emotion through the music you create.
So please get off your high horse about the poor, starving artists. P2P is not what is keeping them from making money (or are you so quick to forget receant emperical studies by non-biased parties), it's the record labels.
This will probably get lost in the noise, and for all I know it might already be in another response. But read this article by Steve Albini about the finances of being phuct by the majors:
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic. html
It'll give you a better understanding of why bands are like startups and the majors are just VCs.
I, to date, have not bought an MP3 online. Why not? Because I don't want to pay the same price as I would pay for buying the whole effing album if I'm not getting a damn thing but a 2 meg binary string. An 11 song album would cost around 11.00 to download, and about the same in the store. Some are more some are less, but the fact remains.
So basically, it costs the same for them to print a cd, print the liner notes, buy a jewel case, shrinkwrap it, send it all the way around the country, and let the seller mark it up 20%, as it does for them to let me download a copy in an inferior format onto my own damn media.
And now they think they're making too little? They want to bundle songs? I just told my cable provider to shove it for their crappy bundling.
Fuck them. I'll never buy another damn song if they're going to keep acting like morons. I'll feel better about myself if I spend the money on crack and underage prostitutes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.