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RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
Bruha writes "It appears the RIAA is being very low key about the fact that the five major labels think that 99 cents per song is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the tariff to $1.25 up to $2.99 per song. I was a huge fan of the 99c per song, but if they think that they can raise the price on me just because I don't buy full CDs anymore, they've got another thing coming. Suggestion: make good CDs, and maybe I'll buy the whole thing."
These labels just don't "get it". Maybe people will abandon pirated downloads if they can get the legitimate version for a reasonable price, but not if the price is just stupid ($2.49 for a 3-minute song?).
The RIAA obviously has a severely inflated view of its own importance. Reality is going to catch up with them, whether they like it or not.
K
its called mute
Many CD versions albums that were originally released in the record-and-tape days have silent tracks that represent a gap of time on the original albums. iTunes will gladly sell those tracks one-by-one for 99 cents as well. It's just a matter of the database building happening on autopilot... if you want it, you get what you paid for.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
1. its not $2.99 a CD, smart boy, its $2.99 PER SONG.
2. monopolistic practices are NOT capitalism at work.
This space available.
For the new song 'Hole in the World' the Eagles made an agreement with BestBuy to have the exclusive right to sell the single for 30-45 days.
Why?
Because they owned the rights to it.
Exactly. I know the prevailing theory on Slashdot is that indie music can't get on store shelves because the big music companies have retail outlets in a death grip, but the reality of the situation is that it's fucking expensive to get your album on the shelves. Consider how much it costs to get your album on the shelves of nearly every Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, FYE, Coconuts, all the smaller chains, etc. That's what it takes to sell millions of records, and that's why artists rely on record companies. They have the money to get the artist's product on a majority of the shelves in the places Americans buy music, and they have the promotional tools necessary to ensure that the average person is at least somewhat aware of the artist in question before heading to a retail store to buy that artist's album. It's not a conspiracy to keep the little guys out, it's just the reality of the situation: it costs a lot of money to stock products, and if there is little indication that your item is going to sell, stores will be hesitant to waste shelf space on your product when there are products that have a better chance of getting sold.
Maybe it would make more sense to charge per minute of song, or by bandwidth.
:)
http://www.allofmp3.com/ charges by bandwidth, and offers some losslessly encoded CD's, as well as encoding to a large veriety of lossy formats. I've bought 5 albums from them so far, and I've been very impressed
http://www.magnatune.com/ also offers losslessly encoded files, and charges on a sliding scale letting you pay between about $5 and $15 per album iirc.
This is what I was waiting for. iTunes and co can go jump in a lake with their silly lossily-encoded DRM-encumbered overpriced music.
It's called a loss leader.
iTMS gets people to buy iPod's.
It's the same way that M$ makes money out of the xBox. M$ get nothing for the hardware, but they get money form the software.
For Apple iTMS and the iPOD are the other way. They sell the songs at cost and make their money on the iPod, Also it helps them get a market segment.
Since your mental prowess seems to be a bit hindered I'll try to spell some things out slowly for you.
Remember cassette tapes? I know it was a long time ago, but think hard. They used to be "the thing", than this wonderful new technology came out called "Compact Discs" which could be produced at half the cost with near perfect sound. Did the cost of an album go down? No, almost overnight it rose by almost 50% (cost of product transition we were told...only temprorary). Now here we are with a distribution method that virtually eliminates all costs of shipping AND manufacturing. Allows for mass copying (not illgal, think cost of burning 1,000,000 cd's as opposed to copying 1,000,000 mp3's) and they're jacking the price up AGAIN.
Since mathematics seems to be a bit of challenge for you let me break it down: 16 song album at Amazon-->approx. 13.49 = 0.84 per song. .99 per song on iTunes = 18.81 for the same album.
Are you scratching your head yet idiot? Also when we take into account that the artist is only getting on average $1.00 per album the absurdity becomes more apparent.
If the RIAA were anything but a bunch of exploitation hungry vampires living off the talents of others, they'd drop the price half and raise the artist's cut by double. Then I'd say "Hey, those are some upright fella's!!"
I've said it a dozen times already, download everything you can and send the artist $.25 per song, (look out here comes some more math). That works out to $4.00 per 16 song album. 4x as much as they're currently getting. Maybe that way it'll put the RIAA out of business and "artists" will have to make it on their own merrits and not succeed by virtue of how well their agent is at convincing 10 year olds they're"Awsome!"
For works under 30 seconds, you can listen to the whole thing; however, you can't save what you hear. (There's about 20 of Shel Silverstein's poems from "A Light in the Attic" and "Where the Sidewalk Ends" that fall in this category.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.