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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."
This is ridiculous. At some point the RIAA's proverbial bubble is going to burst and the fat cow will collapse under its own weight.
Just let them kill themselves. Something else fill in the vacuum created by their departure.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Trying to generate an unbiased opinion : without name-calling, there are a couple of huge issues here. It only costs a tiny fraction of the money record companies receive to make good music (even with groupies and band buses and the works it is still a pitiful few million compared to the billions groups that get all this take in).
And second, how can they compete with free? The threat of a lawsuit is almost insignificant compared to the ease with which one can grab pretty much anything they like.
So how is this going to play out?
well, the worst deal i've found on itunes has been .99 for a 4 second interlude track (janet jackson, i think). the RIAA needs to either make better music, save money by stop paying off radio stations, or die. well, it doesn't need to, but it would be nice.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Get together, purchase the tools or access to the tools to create music directly, make CDs, and together, negotiate to sell them to stores.
You don't need any RIAA "representation" - your music is yours to do what you want with. This is your life, and the lives of countless other artists - so work with other artists to cut these brain-dead suits out of the picture finally!
Ryan Fenton
$.50 a track, 192kbit stereo is what it'll take to get me to buy my music. Until then I'll just drive around and listen to the dozen used CDs I bought five years ago. $1 a track is already too expensive for most of the music out there. In a perfect world we'd be able to pay a small subscription fee for access to all the music we want via audio on demand.
Can you imagine how popular XM radio would be if you could go online and set up a playlist of ANY music you want (and none that you dont) and listen to it from you car?
Can someone (that doesn't work for the RIAA) please explain to me how this isn't price fixing and at all legal?
_______
2B1ASK1
On another tangent, they may be shooting for the first reverse discount I've ever heard of: Since online distribution is competition to CD sales (their traditional business), they need to make CDs appear to be a better bargain. By increasing the price per song online, they have given CDs a discounted rate without ever really discounting them.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Why not make the prices fully variable and a function of the rate of downloading. All music would start at 0.99 per song. If the rate of downloading is high, the price would creep upwards until the rate of downloading slows. If the rate of downloading is low, the price would subside. Maybe the good songs are worth 2.99, maybe the sucky one are worth only 0.25 -- let the rate of downloading set the price.
And if you really want to use a market mechanism, then let people put in bids. When the price of the song drops to the bid price, the bidder gets the song. If the bidder wants the song sooner, then they will have to up their bid.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Or a trick to increase perceived damages?
Well, considering that the RIAA still hasn't figured out that the ridiculous prices CDs sell for is one of the major reasons why illegal filesharing became so popular in the first place, I'm somehow not surprised that they don't realize this point, either.
I think maybe they've been milking so much money for so long that they don't realize how expensive their music is. How else could they not reason that if I'm not willing to pay $14-$20 for a CD, why would I be willing to pay something like $15-$40+ for electronic copies of the music where I have to worry about keeping it backed up incase of hard drive crashes and I don't get to have a copy of the jewel case, liner notes, etc.?
At this point in time, I only have legal music on my computer. I've been trying to take the moral high ground and stick with golden ethics even if it means giving money to these shitheads. Granted, they're still shitheads so I try to stick to (truly) indie labels, used CD's, and $10 albums bands sell at their concerts. If they go through with this plan, though, I think I'll change my operating mantra from "turn the other cheek" to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and download a copy of every single filesharing program I can get my hands on.
What bands are you listening to?
I'll never understand this. Why do people listen to songs from a band that can only turn out "3 or 4 good tracks", when you could buy an alblum from a good band and get an entire CDs worth of good music? Is it really that important to you that you get those three tracks, or can you live without those few songs that will end up never being listened to after year? Must you stay current with whatever's popular?
I really am tired of hearing about how a CD will only contain a single good song or two. Bands that are creative and sound good through an entire alblum do exist, people. Maybe you should try looking at sources other than MTV for what you want to listen to.
http://cylan.deviantart.com/gallery/
"99 cents a song is a pricing model designed to protect CD sales, and not one designed to move people into a new digital music marketplace," senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Fred Lohmann told us recently. "If an iPod has room for 4,000, does Apple think people are getting to spend $4,000 filling it with music?"
Why is the EFF even asking a question like that? That's economics....that's business....that's marketing. That has nothing to do with My Rights Online.
(Yes, I'm an EFF contributor, but they shouldn't be worrying about how much a music track should cost...)
This wouldn't surprise me. Although a service like iTMS doesn't turn much of a profit for Apple it's certainly very successful, and definitely doesn't help the RIAA with it's argument that online music sales won't work and that piracy is killing their business.
An alternative is that perhaps the RIAA has seen that online music stores can work and they want to kill the opposition by raising prices before introducing their own service.
Free market capitalism exists only in textbooks. Not even the blackmarket drug trade is truly a free market--those markets wouldn't exist if not for massive government intervention. It amazes me that someone can blurt out the names Adam Smith or Ayn Rand and get modded as "insightful" as if that's the end of the discussion on anything that can be assigned a "price." Is there ANYTHING on the planet, including money itself, for which the only concern is the price?
I havent used iTunes myself, but I would have expected then to make allowances for track length....
.99 each. That's a little over an hour of some of the best music ever recorded.
Sometimes they do, but occasionally they don't. This can be advantageous, though, I got Pharaoh's Dance, Bitches' Brew, and Spanish Key off Miles Davis' Bitches Brew album for
...to get me an Audiotron (check it out at ThinkGeek if you don't know what it is).
Then I'm gonna get me a good-sized USB hard drive and rip all my CDs. Then I'll add all my dad's MP3s (he went Napster-crazy back in the good old days). And then I'll ship them to my brother.
He's already ripped all his CDs, and a bunch of his buddies are doing theirs. We're talking about folks with good taste in music and larger collections than mine, and I have somewhere around 500 albums. Even with dupes, there's gotta be a lot of good material in there. Varied, too; I'm into folk, my brother's heavily into blues, another guy has a huge classical collection...
Then we put them all together on a server and point our Audiotrons at the server. Bingo, instant online music library. I'm really looking forward to this.
It's a good thing these people are all friends, 'cause here in Canada, we can share music with our friends. As my GF would say, "That's... just... great." Anyone else thinking of setting up something similar?
Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Sadly, that doesn't work. All it's going to do is continue to distance the recording industry from the users, and as such the users will have zero qualms with moving to cheaper more effective means. Namely: P2P.
Karma: Non-Heinous
It's a personalised 128k mp3 stream that adapts itself to your musical taste. If you don't want to hear a particular Janet Jackson track again, you never will. No fixed $$$ per month (although they are happy to accept donations)!
No downloads though - and right now I expect that there are few people in a position to receive a "broadband" stream in their car, so it won't solve that problem immediately.
Still, assuming you're not in your car you get your taste in music but with no "entertaining" DJ spiel and no adverts. Can't be bad.
I tracked it down. Be baffled.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
After price downloading music is popular because you get just the songs you want.
Sometimes the "other songs" on an "album" are not just filler, but actually good songs that are more artistic and show a little more of the muscian's talent.
Often these songs don't have a "pop enough sound" to make it onto the radio and sell themselves.
What happens to these songs or other "less then pop" songs that people may learn to being bundled together on CD's if the download model replaces buying full CD's?
Will the record companies only shell out to produce the most popish, top 40 friendly songs?
Ick.
Steve
Why yes, the estate of avant garde musician John Cage managed to wring a six figure settlement out of alleged infringer Mike Batt, according to CNN. Batt's infringement would have had a better chance of going unnoticed, had he not jointly credited himself and Cage for his own silent composition. In an article in The Independent, prior to the settlment, Batt defended his One Minute's Silence as not infringing Cage's 4'33", saying "But my silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence."
I don't know why it's never discussed when this topic comes up, but there are a couple of on-line music sites that sell for approximately 6-8 cents per song, high bit rates, no DRM. What's really amazing is that it's legal, at least until the RIAA finds a way to buy some Russian legislators.
allofmp3.com has a large selection of music, lets you pick your own encoding (mp3, ogg, wmv, etc.) and your own bitrate (up to 320kbps) and then sells you the files at $0.01 per MB.
As I understand it, the whole thing works like this, legally: Under current Russian law there is no difference between a radio station playing music over the air and a web site downloading music over the Internet. All broadcasters have to pay some small royalties for the right to play the music, and allofmp3.com and mp3search.com pay their royalties and have the legal right to sell you music over the Internet.
So grab your favorite songs at 10 cents each for 320 kbps encodings. And then send a couple of bucks directly to the artist. They'll make more than they would from your purchase of a CD, you'll get the tunes the way you want, no DRM, for less money, and the RIAA will get next to nothing.
I'm not happy about paying $16 to Big Music (BM), but I'll gladly support the ARTISTS behind the whole thing. As far as I understand, the artists nowadays gets about 5-10% (?) of the profits of CD sales, and the rest goes where? To some fat ass in the corporate offices of Sony and EMI? No, that's not the guy I want to support: I want to support the artist! Obviously, BM isn't going to benefit the artist any time soon, as long as that artist isn't Britney or Christina. Wouldn't it be nice to have whole albums available at $2.50 per album (a quarter a song), but recorded legally, by an independent studio, on a clever website with user stats and artist promotion? I'd support that!
the worst deal i've found on itunes has been .99 for a 4 second interlude track
How does the 30-second sample of that work?
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
"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."
Okay. These points have been beaten over and over on Slashdot "I don't buy full CDs anymore" "make good CDs and maybe I'll buy the whole thing". This angers me very much.
THE MUSIC IS THE ARTISTS. It is their's. They, and who they create it for (record companies) and those who represent them (RIAA) have the right to set -any- price even if its $1000 a track. If its a $10,000 album that is the price. Don't try to negotiate, don't try to justify what is "right" and "wrong", what is "too much" because its totally subjective and it is -their- property.
If you don't want to buy a CD then don't. Thats great. Go listen to the music on the radio for free (and legal) like I do. But don't try to somehow justify copyright infringement (I'm civil and won't call it theft cause its not) by saying "too much" or "filler" in your sentences because thats an opinion not a fact.
Music is an art and like all arts there is no "good" or "bad". No "crap" no "great" because it is all opinion. So while you may think 10 out of 12 tracks on a CD are filler, the artist might have spent much more time working on those "fillers" than on the big radio hit that you wanted and downloaded from kazaa.
This "now they are charging too much" is just another excuse in the copyright infringement chest. Before it was "I want a company with a more realistic business model". So they put music online to compete with lost business through Napster et all. Then it became "I don't want to buy a whole album, I want to pick and choose" so after awhile things like iTunes became available where you could be selective. Now it is "oh...well....you can't decide the price for tracks, its uh...not fair!". The tactic is ever-changing and its annoying as hell. At least stand your ground and live up to your word. Artists are going farther and farther out of their way to accept the new technologies and you just keep making more excuses.
Believe it or not the music industry has bent over backwards to consumer demands more than any other industry has in recent decades. Look at the movie industry. No one demands the same crap from them. "I downloaded Matrix Revolutions because...uh well I didn't fully enjoy the filler in Matrix Reloaded so it is owed to me!"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: YOU AREN'T OWED A GODDAMN THING SO PLEASE STOP THINKING THAT. You have no right to music. You have no right to demand how it exists, the quality, how it is distributed or the costs or means of it.
I posted this la\st week and got rejected... two other websites post it and all of a sudden its /. worthy... whatever
anyway my take on this is that this isnt even close to being new.... A Perfect Circle's first album wasn't posted as a full album up until recently.... when it was posted as a full album for 11.00... 2 dollars over the 9.99 original album minimum..
there are 13.99 dollar albums out there now... Its a joke
Why we still pussyfoot around and dont file a anti-trust lawsuit for the obvious theft of money from consumers.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Let me get this straight. They have a delivery system for their content which costs them nothing and gives them 100% profit revenue stream. And they want to kill it by jacking up the price to try and slow the deathmarch of their other revenue stream? iTunes makes no money off the service and the labels get a cut of every track downloaded for simply allowing Apple to sell their intellectual property. I would guess that they have the same deal with all the other services but I don't know for a fact. How stupid are these people? Are they just scared blind?
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
They get away with the price hikes for two reasons. One, people continue to pay them despite the hike. Two, the artists you want to hear continue to sign with them. Why do they sign? Because the label offers them more than they can get elsewhere. As soon as the public gets their crap together and comes up with a real solution to getting the artists to stop signing with these money grubbing labels, the prices will stabilize at a reasonable rate. The solution: 1) A new label whose primary delivery method is download based. 2) The share holders are the people who purchase the music. 3) The artists are comfortable that they have the general public's support and that they have some hope to earn relatively the same dollars that they did under the money grubbing labels. ( that's the hard part).