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Would You Pay 5 Cents For a Song?
irikar writes "An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening."
Yet, Pearlman went further. He said that since this plan puts the onus on a massive Internet presence to distribute all the music in the world, why not have such computer companies as Apple and such major Internet companies as Yahoo simply buy up the world's four major record labels? Pearlman was careful to add, though, that he doesn't see his plan killing off demand for CDs.
.05/download we could make 10x as much if we sell them for .50/download and 20x as much if we sell them for .99/download.
And somehow this isn't a pie-in-the-sky idea? Oh give me a break! So what? Apple, Yahoo, Google, Foo buy up the companies and what happens? Their bean-counters decide that well if we can make billions selling songs for
Pearlman said that Pfohl misunderstood the idea. Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?
Thank you so very much for proving my point.
It would also obliterate musicians' choices on how their music could be sold by conscripting them into a 5-cents-a-song system. And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts, Pfohl said.
Somehow I doubt that most of the musicians that are under the current cartel's contracts care how their music is distributed as long as they get paid. Those that don't give a shit already allow their music to be distributed for free on the Internet.
Let's stop with the whining and bitching about the artists you sleazy fuckers and start talking from your own business perspective. Everyone and their grandmothers know that you don't give one iota of a shit about the musicians unless they are filling your ever greedier pockets with money that you can throw at more shitty musicians and sympathetic lawmakers that will kowtow to your bullshit. Someday you will lose but I'm certain that this plan won't do it to you...
It amazes me that no one looks at the successful bands that have been distributing their music for free for years and says, "hmm, why is this still working for them and we are continuing to put out class acts like Ashlee Lipsynchson and we are hemorrhaging money?"
Some of the more recent big bands that allow their music to be distributed include Wilco and Los Lonely Boys. Wilco won the best alternative album this year. Hmm and yet they allow me to download their shows. Guess what RIAA? I would buy their album ANY DAY over someone like Ashlee who lip synchs her live crap and refuses to let us hear it for nothing. I mean, it's not even her doing anything why shouldn't it be free?
Just a FYI Apple, no matter how cheap something is it is NEVER as cheap as free. Free will always win out.
I'm sure that's still too much for many a Slashbot.
Who will play me 5c to listen to the Crap that in the charts now...
Yes, I would pay 5 cents a song and I currently do thanks to some kind Russians. =)
this isn't entirely new. The german magazine C'T proposed something similar a few months ago.
And YES, I would pay five cent. It's less than I pay now...
www.weberseite.at
No.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Would you pay 5 cents for a song?
Hmm..no! Why? I can gett it for free off the internet...
Like Linux or FreeBSD, which are far more substantial than any song
Apple might be listening, but I bet you that the RIAA is not.
25-cent a song is what it takes to stop piracy completely. Songs are 4 times overpriced
It's the security issues of ANY internet transfer.
5c or 0.005c im not putting my credit card details online.
i would definitely be willing to purchase music at 5 cents a song.
99 cents a song is still too expensive. Alot of albums are coming out at 9.99 with about 15 tracks or more!
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
When the record companies sell what i want to hear. everything i pulled off of napster back in the day was 80's rock and metal stuff that has been discontinued. For god sake guys, put your back catalogues on line, (or even press a cd or two on demand) and then we'll talk. :(
Of course the opposite argument is:-
If I only give them five cents per song, then they won't miss my money that much, thus I won't pay this time.
I mean after all, what difference can one individual make?
5 cents is NOTHING. If people complain for 5 cents then they are screwed up. But you always find whiners that will complain because they just love complaining...
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
This is the same scheme that we have today on blank CDs and the like and it is total BS to apply it to computers. I have no idea why anyone outside the entertainment business thinks that it's OK to put a music-stealing tax on every computer, or DRM on every computer when not every computer is even considered for such use. What about the company that buys 10,000 computers per year and because some 12 year old is "stealing" music they have to pay an additional tax and further have to have their computers crippled with DRM?
I'm a big tall mofo.
.05 USD for a song? But then again, there is only so much music one can download, and after that is it really sustainable?
Apple should simply be charging 5 cents instead of 99 cents a song, he said.
The issue is not what Apple is charging, but what the record companies are charging Apple. As I understand it, Apple Computer Inc. is making essentially nothing on the sale of each song, but rather are using song sales to drive sales of iPod and thus Macintosh computers and Apple software. I am sure that Apple would be more than happy to participate in a 5 cents/song pricing scheme, but it is the record industry that is going to be the hard ones to convince. I do not understand how the recording industry can say it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts when the potential for much greater revenues can be had with increased volume and lower prices. What they are missing is that new music is what is going to be transiently valuable, but that pre-existing libraries of music are a commodity and should economically be treated as such according to all economic theories I am aware of. This means low prices and high volume.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
Ahem.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
For that much, I'd want a song and dance.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
see allofmp3.com
Slashdot simply isn't posting enough about Apple. I demand more Apple-related stories!!!
The record labels will figure this out eventually and we will get to five or ten cent songs. However, I don't see them figuring it out in one 90+ cent leap. I think they will bungle their way through a series of successive approximations and end up with something similar to allofmp3.com where songs are in that neighborhood. I do agree that at very low prices the volume may well indeed provide the labels and the artists what they need (but maybe not what they want?)
http://www.busyweather.com/
"Just a FYI Apple, no matter how cheap something is it is NEVER as cheap as free. Free will always win out."
Until there's nothing left to be free. Then free loses badly.
Why pay 5 cents if you can pay 0 cents? Here in Canada, it's pretty much understood that music downloaders won't be prosecuted. Besides, if this ever were to happen and the music industry decided 5 cents wasn't enough, they'd have a tough time raising the price now that the bar would be so low.
Here's a thought: how about artists GIVE their music away for free and make money doing concert tours? Oh wait...that's the way it works right now.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I would, definitely. And I would gladly give $20 gift cards to friends and family. Most importantly, I would have cheap, reliable access to decent versions of music (even if encoded at non-optimal rates; 128k or so). If you could still pay more and get "full" quality, I think you could have a working double-tiered system.
Of Course.
No, no and fucking no! I refuse to finance any industry which I don't have anything to do with.
When I buy computers for my business, I don't buy them for anything music-related, so I see NO reason to pay a tax, or levy or whatever the fuck they want to call it to support any music-related thing.
I'm tired of corporations and government thinking society exists for the sole purpose of ensure their profit.
AC comments get piped to
never, ever, ever, ever. when will they get it through their heads?
I would definitely buy tracks at that price, but I'd certainly have privacy/tracking concerns with such a centralised system of distribution.
... filly sool! :p
;)
"Pearlman said that Pfohl misunderstood the idea. Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?"
Why not charge $1 and multiply your profits 20 fold?
He suggested 5 cents because it's cheap. Increase that and you obviously get a lot less. For example, you could get 20 tracks for a dollar at 5 cents each, but at 10 cents per track you only get 10 of them.
I say more bang for your buck is better
From the article:
Richard Pfohl, general council for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, refuted Pearlman on numerous points at the conference forum, arguing that the plan would violate every international intellectual property law that Canada has signed in the last 100 years. It would also obliterate musicians' choices on how their music could be sold by conscripting them into a 5-cents-a-song system.
Oh, right! Like they have a "choice" now with the labels? Have you seen the frikkin' contracts you've got to sign to get on with a major label? You sell your arm, leg, and any potential children's arms and legs. Give me a break!
Why pay five cents for a song when you can get it for free? There will most likely always be P2P type services, and getting rid of ALL the torrents out there is a daunting, maybe impossible, task. If we're paying for this music and theres an easy and free alternative, we better get SOME sort of advantages, such as: Ridiculuous quality, lossless, small file size, all different types of files available for purchase, maybe even a points system (such as ThinkGeeks) and something ELSE to put those points toward... Band t-shirts, live concert performances (streaming, of course)... You get the idea. Maybe they could even pick up a few tips from Steam's digital distrubution technique, minus the updating every second.
I hate Halo and GTA. Sue me.
Another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman [progenitor of this idea] after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?
Yes, guys and gals, it's money.
Money, money, money, money.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
free.........
.05 is just about the right price per single......
Some people will always want something for nothing regardless of how affordable that something is to be gin with. I do agree that considering the quality of the greater percentage of today's mainstream music,
K
I've been using iTunes for a while now, paying $.99 USD a song. So, a low price 5 cents that would be welcome.
My music needs are small, resulting in like 1 or 2 songs a month. iTunes is so much less of a hassle than P2P, plus I dont' have to worry about the RIAA.
No thanks.
...just my 2 gil.
yes!
hell i'd even pay 10.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
I had an opportunity to pay a nickel for a song once. This homeless guy was selling them. "Hey buddy, wanna hear an original song, I swear to God it's original. Spare change please?"
Give him a nickel and he started singing. It wasn't very good.
Unknown host pong.
So, am I the only person left in the world paying over a dollar per song by, you know, actually buying CDs?
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
I used to buy a very few CDs and download most. With the rise of iTMS I buy more. At £.05 (dollar prices are almost always translated directly to pounds for things like music, grr) I'd probably buy most of my songs. But not all. Some just aren't worth that much. I don't think they're ever going to eliminate "piracy" completely, except by cutting prices to zero.
I am trolling
Any takers?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
To a certain extent, he's somewhat right. It would substantially lower the bar and you'd have far more impulse buys (and drunk song-buying binges wouldn't hurt as much. Fear the drunken one-click shopping spree!)
However, I am not such a big fan of his idea of taxing PCs. However, the last line of the article is THE MOST INFORMATIVE OF ALL:
These guys don't even get *OLD ESTABLISHED CONCEPTS* let alone "new fangled concepts." Pearlman's response is that if you double the price, you cut the sales by more than half, so you actually DECREASE your revenue.
They just don't get it. [I'm not saying Pearlman is necessarily right with the
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
From the article ...
Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?
You wonder why we have so many problems with the RIAA and friends?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Just because the RIAA companies might loose CD sales doesn't mean CDs are doomed. CDs are still sold on any club on any night from the bands playing, so if the RIAA labels stop selling them, then Best Buy will just buy from a record label that will.
If the price of songs dropped that drastically I would be inclined to just pay for the music I want instead of trying to keep up with new sites/software as old ones get shut down. And on top of that I would also not have to constantly worry about goofy legal issues as well.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
When first reading the article, my instinct was to not go along with the notion charging for downloaded music, even only $.05 a song. Especially with DRM, etc., always on the sideline poised to come in and wrap you around the axle anytime to you try to play the song (in the proper spirit of fair use)... (I'm STILL upset about one of my recent CD's purchased not playing on my car CD player.... took it in, they would only exchange it... and, sure enough, the exchanged CD failed to play in exactly the same places in exactly the same way... had to demo this to the store personnel before they would agree to a refund.)
But, maybe they have something there... certainly when: "..., The recording industry is against Pearlman's plan. ..., ", I've got to think
it may be something that could work.
The part of this idea that I have a hard time with is "In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers".
Is there a tax on TV's that goes back to the networks/TV industry? How about stereo equipment?
How about if I don't use this particular PC for music? Does that tax apply? What about a PC I built from parts?
For many reasons I would not want that 10 bucks going to certain companies/individuals.
This is a huge issue that you just can't get around... fine, Canada wants to impose a media and now hardware tax to support groups I strongly dislike that's fine, but not in the US , at least not if I have anything to say about it!
I
He dances for nickels..
Arrrrr.
(Its a simpsons reference...)
1)People like to buy things.
2) It's easier to rip from a CD
3) A lot of people find creating a CD to be listened on a standered CD player intemidating.
4) Artwork (In theory. I have yet to see a cd with good artwork)
these answers are a generality. Certianly YOU may never buy one again, but a lot of people would. Also, thye would become cheaper.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Mr. Pearlman seems to understand economics pretty well, but not IT. Here's the breakdown of an ITunes purchase of $0.99:
Label(s): $0.55
Apple: $0.34
Artist(s): $0.10
Now, let's chop that down to $0.05 instead of $0.99. Let's break it down this way:
Label: $0.03
Apple: $0.02
Artist: $0.1
So, when a customer goes to ITunes, they'll surf through several (large)-database-driven webpages to find the songs they want. They'll make a purchase against their already-paid-for credit through ITunes (of probably $10 increments), then download the 5MB song.
So, Apple now has to run power-hungry servers with a large staff of IT guys making sure they're patched and running correctly. They gotta hit customers' credit cards and give probably 5-10% back to the credit card company.
All of this... for $0.02 per song?!?
His model makes sense, but maybe for $0.25 per song... there's no chance Apple would make money by giving up that much bandwidth.
just my $0.02.
The recording industry is against Pearlman's plan.
hrmmm....what a shock! the music industry not willing to adopt change?? surely not!
seriously, this sounds like a decent proposal, although i highly doubt it will make a significant change (free is less than $.05), but let's face it, will probably never happen. apple can listen all they want, and that's great, but the recording industry will never go along with it. the best idea i found in that article is "why not have such computer companies as Apple and such major Internet companies as Yahoo simply buy up the world's four major record labels?" now *there's* the kind of change that needs to take place.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
McGill academic has a plan to end file swapping and save the music industry
File swapping isn't just music.
it's movies, TV series, software and ebooks too...
For a DRM-free, lossless, flawless copy of a song? Absolutely! I'd buy songs by the boatload. 100 songs of my choice for $5? Score!
But the quotes at the end are hilarious!
"The recording industry is against Pearlman's plan. Richard Pfohl, general council for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, refuted Pearlman on numerous points at the conference forum, arguing that the plan would violate every international intellectual property law that Canada has signed in the last 100 years. [SO CHANGE THE LAWS!] It would also obliterate musicians' choices on how their music could be sold by conscripting them into a 5-cents-a-song system. [OR THEY COULD JUST OPT OUT AND DO THEIR OWN DISTRIBUTION AND CHARGE WHAT THEY WANT] And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts, Pfohl said. [WHY, BECAUSE IT WOULD BRING IN HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN REVENUE?]
Pearlman said that Pfohl misunderstood the idea. [DUH!] Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?"
ROFL! Don't you just know that will be the endless series of suggestions they will make. "Hey, look at how much money is coming in! Let's double again to 20 cents and get lots more moola!"
base the price on recent popularity of the download
then i can get an album by paying for the good songs and the crummy ones come along for free
and artists can make bank on hits while getting real in-the-wallet feedback on crap
supply and demand. it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
PLEASE. While I agree that several patents are whacko and I am a big advocate of Open Source, music and movie copyrights MAKE sense. After all, people actually work making the movies (it looks like many Slasdotters don't) and they need to sustain themselves. I wouldn't waste my time watching "free as in freedom" movies
Here's some more thoughts on this topic from el Reg: How the music biz can live forever, get even richer, and be loved
"This is the same scheme that we have today on blank CDs and the like and it is total BS to apply it to computers. I have no idea why anyone outside the entertainment business thinks that it's OK to put a music-stealing tax on every computer, or DRM on every computer when not every computer is even considered for such use."
That still doesn't mean that the broadband and computer industry isn't benefiting indirectly from piracy.
"What about the company that buys 10,000 computers per year and because some 12 year old is "stealing" music they have to pay an additional tax and further have to have their computers crippled with DRM?"
What about the high insurance costs we all pay because a few commit crimes?
5 cents? Is that a new rapper? 50 cent's midget brother?
$0.05 is nothing, agreed. But Joe 13 year old is still going to fire up KaZaA or whatever the latest GUI P2P program is and download them for free, just because it's easy and he doesn't have a credit card to pay $0.05 for.
What would stop them to rampant rise the prices when almost everyone will be using their services and will have abandoned free (i.e, pirate) p2p networks? It's a nice plan for them... start with 5 cents, make everyone dependent (addicted) on it, then start charging 30 cents... and then $1,50... and so on...
Like people who complain about people who complain
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
Sounded interesting up to that point. Lots of people don't listen to music on their computers. I have a new Powerbook that I bought purely for field work, I'll never listen to a song on it. I"m not paying 1% more for it to support one specific industry who is having trouble adapting to a new era.
Some people use computers to infringe on software copyrights, should there be a tax to help compensate software authors?
Some people use computers to infringe on book copyrights by trading e-books, should there be a tax to help compensate book authors?
What about movies next? I'm sure the MPAA will say they're hurt worse than the music industry by piracy, so they'll want a mandatory tax too.
The fact that there are a large number of people infringing on songs/movies is an indication that the current business model doesn't work for consumers. Right or wrong, I think the vast majority of people out there wouldn't bother with Kazaa and the like if there was a much easier and cheap way to legally buy music.
However, forcing them to pay a tax on computer equipment/internet connections when there's a very good chance that they'd never use their system for such things... No, not going to work.
I'd really like to hear a breakdown of how much "old" ( 2000 ) music has been downloaded. I haven't purchased or downloaded anything from the year 2000 on up from a major record label. It has nothing to do with prices, practices, or piracy; it has to do with the cookie cutter pop music mold that is all I ever seem to hear these days. Sure, many small, independent, failing record lables still have something out there to listen to, but you can find that often legally for pennies or for free.
I find it offensive that an industry would be allowed to demand a sales tax on Internet services and P.C. purchases.
If I never use my P.C. for music, I would still have to pay this fee. This would be pure theft at worst, or coersion at best.
As far as the five cent model goes, that is a good idea. Charge the people who use the music. I for one do not download music, and rarely buy music.
I would change. Sifting through all the music, finding a decent quality track, d/ling, etc can be a pain in the neck...my time is worth more then 5 cents per song. So yes I would.
Now I do think there are many people with my mindset, but I definitly do realize there are people out there who would find it difficult to pay 1 cent per song - or even 1 cent per CD!!! Why? Because people are cheap, want to get something for nothing, and people want to be "rebels".
If this price happened, I would say that it is the step in the RIGHT direction...in fact, at 5 cents per song (assuming no other strings attached) I would say that this is the nail that should shut the coffin and nobody could have a reasonable excuse as to why they are pirating instead of paying for the music.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I think part of the problem is that people have a set budget of what they're willing/able to spend on buying music. For teenagers, this may be in the tens of dollars a year. If this buys them 20 songs a year, they're likely to pirate those other ones they can't afford. If this buys them 400 songs a year, they're much less likely to pirate.
In the end, though, I can't see the recording industry making much more than they currently do, piracy or not.
$228.80. Although that's because of a hard drive failure. I'll just roughly multiply it with what I had and the new stuff I have now and it'd be about $1,000. Granted it'd be nice to pay $15 for the Aphex Twin discography but at a 320-500KB/sec compression rate. Even still, at this point in my life (student, broke ass), 5 cents wouldn't cut it for me since I can barely pay my bills. Once I have a full time job then I *might* ...
You know what? Fuck it. I wouldn't do 5 cents. Fuck 'em. A lot of the music I listen to isn't pop anyway (i.e. IDM), so if I did have a disposable income I'd support the artists themselves by purchasing straight from the record label (i.e. Rephlex, Ghostly, warp, etc) or the artist even.
So in reality I guess I'm not even their customer. :D ...Ah what the heck, I'll hit submit anyway.
If the choice is between buying them from iTunes at the current cost, and paying a mere $0.05 but having to pay a subsidy on every. fecking. piece. of. hardware. ever. then I'll stick with the $0.99 please.
I've bought a total of 1(one) song through iTunes, because it was an import-only single that was going to cost me about ten times that for the physical version (DJ Shadow's Keane remix, fact fans). At even a 1% tax rate, I can tell you now I've bought a shitload more than $94 worth of hardware over the years.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Songs trigger memories, and songs are memories. I'm not willing to let corporations control my memories.
allofmp3.com is a resonably well known quasi-legal outfit selling music, by the meg in whatever format/bitrate you want. Downside with it is that currently money isn't making it's way to the creators of it.
The service is cheap, but with economies of scale, could obviously get cheaper. Stick a % cost onto the tracks for artist royalties and you've got something which completely disproves the theory that you can't get much lower than 99c. It's there, it's working.
It's called http://www.allofmp3.com and songs only cost me between .01 and .08 depending on the size of the download. This site is the best thing to happen to music downloads, though, I'm not entirely sure of its legality. Songs cost .02 per meg, and you can specify your bitrate, format, etc. Beats the pants off of iTunes as far as cost is concerned.
"In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists."
Um, wait just a second there - so there are people out there that buy a new computer and get the Internet PURELY to download music free? Yeah, right.
Even if - the music industry doesn't need to be subsidized by the gov't. That's just wrong, on so many levels...
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
As long as I was buying it as opposed to renting it as the current online music stores offer you.
The DRM, for me at least is the deal breaker. With a limited amount of downloads of a "purchased" song and no option for just copying it from one computer to another after a period of time I would no longer have access to the song, and that's why I don't use any of those services.
Heck, I'd pay 10 cents no problem.
IF...
If I can download them in non-DRM'd MP3 format at a bitrate of my choosing. And if the 1% tax on computers idea goes away.
I'd love to have legal copies of everything I've downloaded from "a major discussion group provider", and I would at those prices, but A) a lot of it simply wasn't available in stores, because it was old and obscure, and B) it was overpriced if it was available, for the same reason.
But I refuse to give in on DRM. At prices like that, it would frankly come very close to being more of a pain in the ass to copy music from someone else than to just pay the lousy buck.
I agree that the music industry has no idea how much money they'll make with $0.05 downloads. I won't pay $0.99 when I can bittorrent something for less effort.
I pirate everything. All the music I've listened since the advent of the MP3 has been out-and-out stolen. I salve my conscience by dumping hundreds of dollars on tickets and merchandise (purchased at-show) whenever an act I enjoy comes to town. I've managed to find relatively shaky moral standing here, fighting against the grossly overinflated price of music while still supporting the artists I enjoy.
As wonderful as iTunes is, 99 cents a song is too much.
That said, I would lose all basis for my current stance with a nickle-a-song system. That's nothing. That's acceptable. I would gladly shift my entire little piracy operation legit under such a system. I know I'm not alone on this.
This is an already proven business plan. Its shown that a mojority of people prefer to stay within the bounds of the law when given affordable and easily accessible alternatives.
That all music should be distributed by one large omnipotent organization and should be of minimal cost to the user. I'm surprised the writer didn't propose that all music should be maintained and distributed by the government like employment insurance.
What a bunch of bunk.
Sam
How easy is it to compile an entire album, in equal recording quality, named under the same convention?
If I could buy an album (12 songs) for 60 cents and save myself HOURS of looking, downloading, listening, deleting, renaming, looking... I would GLADLY do it.
I'd pay $2.00 a song if I knew that it was mine and I could use it on any computer/mp3 player from now on. (READ: MP3)
I format/change machines atleast 4 times a year, my cd collection is in mp3s and do fine on my portable HD. The iTunes songs burned me once, and that was 1 time too many.
A big fraction of Internet users don't download music. Most business PCs don't. Many don't even have speakers. They should't be taxed by the RIAA.
Just scream "no new taxes" at your nearest Republican elected official to make this go away.
That plan is very good, but not good enough.
War againts piratism has never been about the money. It's about control over the distribution channel. When people have free access to music, they tend to listen albums they like, not the ones that records companies have invested millions in.
When radios became common goods it scared hell out of records companies. Atleast until they realized they could control what's played on radio and use it as a marketing channel. There have been other inventions too, but all of them were conquered by record companies, until the Internet..
You will never see a business model that gives power to the people -- in music industry anyway. Otherwise those ideas, presented by that guy, were great. They would work perfectly in an ideal world.
that would actually be a great gift...a $20 gift card under that system would be like giving them 20-25 CDs today...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
I'll pay um, 0 cents a song. Maybe, just maybe if they had a service with every song ever, with perfect metadata and organization, at high bitrate, and super fast reliable downloads, without DRM of any sort. Then and only then I might just pay a fee like 1 cent a song. Or something like 50 bucks a year for as much as I can download. I should be able to download as many as I want at a time as well. Recorded music has no value, even at 5 cents a song its a rip off. Play more concerts I will go to them. At the current rate there's a decent concert I can go to once every few months. There should be at least 2 a week in any civilized area.
Oh, and all the money should go to the artist. Remove the obsolete middle man.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If one can decide on several encoding formats (including lossless formats like FLAC), *and* one can also listen to it as many times as one wishes, I'm in!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've long thought that music quality degenerated in the last few years because music companies realized they could promote fewer bands at a higher cost per unit, therefore making more money.
If this type of model took off, they would have to spread out their talent searches and promote more bands in order to (potentially) increase uptake rate into a lot of niche markets.
This might also mean you end up with a lot of garage bands with mediocre studio recordings... but heck modern recording studios can make a relatively inexpensive recording sound damn good.
I think there is a "you get what you pay for" effect in music. But I wouldn't mind if there was a greater influx of bands, even with maybe reduced produciton quality, that would then allow the real market instead of marketing executives to decide who rises to the top and therefore. Of course... there are a lot of indy labels out there...
"...Pearlman was careful to add, though, that he doesn't see his plan killing off demand for CDs."
*BLANK* CDs maybe.
i mean $.05 x 13 songs = $.65
factor in $.25 for a blank CD and voila, that's still under a dollar. Unless they plan on *severely* reducing the price of retail CDs, I don't quite see that working out.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Don't be fooled. All the risk for CD production and shows rests in the artists, not the label. The artists have to pay for these and hope that sells cover their costs.
I would pay 5 cents for a song of decent quality. 24.119.169.210 spammemchs@hotmail.com
Yes I would. In fact he might be dead on with this. If each track was only 5 cents and anything I was looking for was there, I would gladly give up filesharing any music at all. Right now I've given up alot of it and have turned to the iTunes store for alot of my music downloads. The problem is when I'm looking for something a little more obscure that I can't get through iTunes. I tend to listen to alot of Industrial/EBM/Darkwave and I find alot of the times when I go to iTunes I simply can not find what I am looking for. So I turn to torrents and the like to find it. This is coming from someone who still buys alot of CD's as well. I don't have the time to sit and rip every CD I'd like to have MP3's of, so I am willing to pay a premium in some cases to have it in that format. But when you have bought so many CD's it becomes harder to justify that 99 cent price tag per track, so yes I am guilty of spending time "pirating" copies of things I own. Make it 5 cents and anything is available and I would gladly stop all my "illegal" downloading.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
hmm, must resist urge....songs buy you for 5 cen....ahhhhhhhhhh
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Hi scheme would help the artists see more royalties. The MPAA works *against* the artist receiving royalties.
The idea of dirt cheap downloads may work; what may work better is to pre-pend advertising. Sure most folks will rip that off the or skip over it. But it's no worse than having people store digitized high quality radio feeds.
Sorry, what is revolutionary about a 1% tax on computers and internet service? Does anyone read the story before they post this crap on slashdot?
Just remove the traditional music industry as a whole. It is outdated. The labels provide mostly packaging and delivery... if you deliver over the internet the label is severely marginalized. Which, in my opinion, is why they fear internet downloads. They say illegal downloads steal money from them, however if it takes off in a legal form it may *legally* wipe them out also.
At 5 cents a song and other fees, most people would probably stop downloading illegally but is it enough for companies like Apple to profit or break even? Apple admittedly does not make much right now at 99 cents a song. While most of that price is royalties, I would think 5 cents would barely cover operating expenses for the massive infrastructure that Apple needs to make their distribution work. At the current rate, there are about 1.25 million songs downloaded a day at the iTunes store. At 5 cents apiece that's about $62,500 to maintain all the infrastructure and bandwidth for 15 countries. Somehow I don't see it as practical.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I wouldnt pay for 50cent songs so why would i pay 5 cents ?
yush
This is anawful idea. This is like corporate socialism. So i buy a server for a cad system and $10 or $20 bucks go to artists? No. If the music industry can not sustain itself, whatever, let it burn. Don't glom onto other industries.
I'd pay 5 cents, considering I pay more at the store (which is still less than iTunes).
But I oppose the concept of a sales tax. That belongs to the States, not the Fed. Make it a service charge, instead.
Here is a site that tries to give more information on our favorable laws
The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Information doesn't want to be cheap. Information wants to be free.
Yeah - it is called "monopoly".
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"Once you get word-of-mouth advertisement happening, then you can start making your money from playing live shows. Cut out the big 5 altogether goddammit!!! All they are is a marketing machine. BFD. The Internet allows for better, more effective mass-marketing anyway if you know how to use it effectively. "
All those freelance web comic strips prove that just because you put it on the internet, doesn't mean that people will beat a path to your door.
Magnatune is an excellent example of where it can be. Free try before you buy. Pay what you like if you like it. HALF the money goes to the artists. Some of the music is outstanding and a lot of it easily equals the crap on the radio. --- Personally, given the millions of songs and the effectively zero cost of media (.10 for a dvd which would hold 6 CD's worth of songs) I think the correct answer is a subscription service where you pay say $30 a month and just listen to anything you want. I also think if you buy a song for .99 then they should be required to remember you bought it and let you replace it when your media goes bad.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Much like the scheme presented in the article, please remember that the "free" file sharing networks requires a broad base of participants to make them run. The utility of the "free" networks improves or deteriorates based on the numbers of people engaged in the activity of sharing freely:
even at US$.99, I would bet there has been an affect on the quality/quantity/availability of music on the "free" sharing networks. Presumably, that would deteriorate further if "legitimate" online services appealed to an even broader audience (as some or all of that broader audience would likely participate less in the "free" networks).
Isn't this the same Sandy Pearlman who was in Blue Oyster Cult in the '70's? I believe he was the model for the Christopher Walken character in the now-infamous SNL parody.
All of which begs the question--would you pay 5 cents for MORE COWBELL???
I heard many, many different variations. And most of them were sung in the style of Doris Day's version (giddy and happy and making me want to slap the singer). There were some versions that came close, but I couldn't decide whether that was what I wanted or not. Ultimately at the $1 price per song I didn't download any of my "candidates" since I didn't hear enough to convince me before the sale that that was the type I was looking for. Had the price been $0.05 per song I probably would have downloaded most of the candidates and not given the price much thought.
While this wouldn't help sell the big name artists at all, it would get the casual music listener like me. Whether there are enough of my type around is a completely different question and one that I can't begin to answer.
(As an aside, I never found the right version of Que Sera, Sera and in general that isn't the type of music I listen to. Just something that struck a nerve at that particular moment.)
I tried to read the article. I really did. But when I got to the end of the second paragraph, my natural aversion to incredibly bad writing kicked in and my mouse-hand clicked the window's close box without my conscious intent.
Peering out from under his de rigueur cap, music-industry veteran Sandy Pearlman, a former producer of the Clash and now a visiting scholar at McGill, spoke with a kind of nervous glee while describing his idea at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto last week.
Awful, vapid writing? You're soaking in it.
They get like maybe 1$ per cd. They've always made money from touring. The rule has been the record companies get the money from the sales and the artist gets the money from touring.
Now the greedy record companies want a piece of artists touring money as well. The folks killing music right now are the record labels not the downloaders.
This is a great idea, a band could pay thier own studio costs, put the music directly up for download and then who needs the record companies??
I don't mind right now paying $.88 a song, I do have a problem that very little of that actully goes to the musicans.
People need to face the facts record labels are as relevent in the digital age as say manufacturers of long bows, chain maille armour and broadswords.
The people I'm referring to are of course the folks working at the record label. In this age of oursourceing, downsizing and cost cutting there is no room left for record labels that suck up 90% of the cash from music sales and then complain that they don't get enough.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I think you are wrong here. 1) Is it free if it takes me 3 days of waiting to download it off emule, winmx, etc.? 2) Is it free if the first three versions I download are mangled, clipped, or not the version I want? 3) Is it free if the only version available is 128kbps bitrate and I want to play it on my top of the stereo where it will play like mushy crap? --- I think .99 is too high. But the owners of this music CAN provide value which justifies paying a certain price.
1) Immediately available when I want it- no waiting.
2) Highquality encoding or even lossless encoding.
3) Remembering what I have purchased and allowing me to redownload it so I can replace it if my hard drive/CD/DVD goes bad.
---
Your time and my time has value. My time is worth $30 per hour. Your time may be worth even more. A lawyers time might be worth $300 per hour. Structured correctly online music can have a reasonable non-free price. .99 a song is not a reasonable price when you consider how many songs there are (hundreds of thousands).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You forgot to take the $0.30 it costs Apple to actually be able to charge customers.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I think that problems with the music industry are mostly related to the poor quality of their products. I seldom hear new music that I'd have any desire to own, much less pay any money for. Most of the cookie cutter pap put out by the major labels isn't worth a nickle. For the occasional piece that I really do like, I'll spring for the price of the CD.
"In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists."
Most of their revenue wouldn't be coming from the songs, it would come from the tax this would create.
there's a slight problem with this business model.. theoretically, charging 5 cents a song should exponentially increase sales, but honestly, are there that many more songs you'd buy for 5 cents that you wouldn't for 99? I, for one, would probably just continue to ignore the crap that floods the music industry these days. A worthless song isn't worth 5 cents, no matter how little 5 cents actually is.
I listen to a lot of music... I have over 800 CDs. I just bought 8 CDs, and the first thing I did was bring them to work and rip them in the background. I rip in OGG and MP3 formats, MP3 for my players, and OGG for home stereo. There is NO way I'm going to pay a buck a song. When I buy a CD I can rip the song in any format/bitrate I want, and as many times as I want. $0.25USD is about the point that I would give up that flexibility to buy in a fixed (MP3) format. And there is NO way that I would buy a DRMed song. I've got too many places (car, home, work, several portables) that I want to play music for it to be limited to one location.
Tom.
It is pointless trying to find enough bandaids to fix the "intellectual property" system. It just fundamentally doesn't work, whatever your permutation of it, and that's been obvious for a long, long time now. There is only one possible way to fix the situation, and it's the obvious one (obvious unless you're blinkered by the current system like the fool in the article). Remove the "intellectual property" obstacles and let the market find the best way to fund creative labour.
Look, when I download something online, it is out of convenience more than simply because it is free. If you ask me, the music and movie industries have made their products inferior to that of the so-called "pirates". That is, if I purchase a movie from the store I have much less freedom with it than if I downloaded the same film via bittorrent. I'm not trying to rip anyone off. I have a subscription to netflix, I purchase DVDs and CDs regularly. I will buy music and movies because I feel bad not supporting artists. However, if I want something that is gonna play on a handheld media player, or keep me from having to change disks repeatedly and skip through advertisements, I would much prefer a "pirate version" to a legit copy. At this point, I think 99 cents is a bit much for a per-track fee. 5 cents certainly sounds reasonable. Compare 99 cents for a DRM protected copy that is still restricted to 0 cents for a copy that I can play whenever I want on any device. Which would you choose???
Again, the music an movie industries are peddling inferior products compared to that of pirates, that is why they are losing this battle.
.99 for songs newer than 1 year
.50 for songs 1 to 3 years old
.10 for songs older than 3 years old
If they want to further their profits - limit downloads. Instead, set up databases in record stores. People browse the store for movies, clothes, posters, etc. They pick the songs they want from kiosks or PCs, or maybe order them over the net. You can have the songs burned to a CD/DVD as MP3s or burn CDs as audio CDs. Give discounts for 100+ songs. Give 10 free tracks for every 100 you buy. Offer pre-set compliations people can order (100 number one songs of the 90s - ala the Value Meal concept) Have user voted compilations. Get FRIGGIN creative! If they offered this as an in-store only thing, they would get people into the stores again. If I could compile my list of 1000 songs online, buy it online, and have it shipped to me it would be sweet. How long would it take you to find and download that many songs?
It is a goldmine that the record companies are missing. Not only that, but artists who are no longer in the spotlight would love it. I am sure there are lots of bands who aren't selling any CDs anymore, especially since once a CD is 3 weeks old the price is jacked up to $18. It would benefit the artists, would increase the volume of sales, and would get people interested in music again. Now people are just interested in what is hot today. It would revitalize the music industry! They have such a huge catalog of music that is just collecting dust.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It was just a reference to the technical distribution system.
There's the breakdown of why iTunes tunes cost 99c that knocks about, somebody'll have already posted it in this topic I'm sure. I was merely trying to point out that if we exclude payments to the copyright holder for a moment, it can be done much cheaper/better.
In an ideal world allofmp3 would charge a bit more and pay the artist&label - and I'd happily pay it. Unfortunately it's not possible as the labels dogmatically stick to the view that the piece of data should cost approximately the same as a physical CD.
www.bmgmusic.com
I just bought 7 albums last week for $56 shipped to my door.
Oh, and that puts me 4/5's of the way towards a "free" CD (cost is $2.50 shipping).
I also buy used from Amazon for $5 plus $3 shipping.
There are a lot of ways to get good music relatively cheaply.
If the "suppliers" thought that they could make more money by selling songs cheaper then _they would_! The trick here is that all companies try to maximize their profit. They pick a price that will cause people to buy an amount that makes them the most money. They don't set their price artificially high just to screw consumers. CDs cost $16-$20 dollors because people buy them at that price. Period. Sure more people would buy songs at $0.05 per song, but not enough to cover the bandwidth overhead and make more money than they would at $0.99 per song. Or whatever price point they choose. And its not as if they are just afriad to try it. Its really easy, all they would have to do is slowly modify their price and carefully observe consumer response. This is basic econ 101. To simply suggest that $0.05 per song is a magic price point that will please both consumers and maximize companies' profits doesn't make any sense unless you have data to back it up. I know, why don't we sell $10,000 cars for $1 each. That should cause us to sell 10,000x as many units as we normally do!
5 cents a song... a cd's worth would cost you around $1. Most new cd's only have a few songs worth owning anyways, so really your paying for what you like. As an added bonus you also force music too be a higher quality. As mentioned, it would probably force bands to release songs or sets of songs instead of entire cd's. The overall quality of music would rise and the discontent of the people would lower. Of course try explaining that too the RIAA. They see dollar signs, not happiness.
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
Let's imagine one could use P2P to *legally* download whatever music he wants if he was paying "membership" fee to a consortium of content providers.
It's already been solved by Napster To Go (http://www.napster.com/ntg.html) - it allows you download "all you can eat" music as long as you pay the membership.
The catch, some say, is that you can't keep the songs (they won't play if your membership isn't active). Actually it's possible to convert Napster content to MP3s that can be played later, but at the right price, would anyone bother with that? Probably not.
There is no conceptual difference in Napster's approach and legalized P2P sharing - as long as your subscription is active, you can have any and all music you want.
Napster, and not Apple, has the distribution model of tomorrow. Napster may not be the winnerm, but their model will be.
Ahh, nothing like the sound of a million lazy asses finally having to do some work rather than hitch rides from artists. Yes, the Internet is a good thing, yes, let's all repeat that.
HAD
He makes it sound like its Apple that wants to keep the price at 99 cents to keep it high. They are fighting to keep it low. Its the damn RIAA that wants it to go higher.
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If it works, then they could probably corner the music market. If not, well then it'd only be the death of a few RIAA members - no big loss...
You guys don't understand how the sales tax would work. CNet describes how it works in Canada:
"The regulators cited a long-standing rule in Canada, in which most copying for personal use was allowed. To repay artists and record labels for revenue lost by this activity, the government imposes a fee on blank tapes, CDs and even hard disk-based MP3 players such as Apple Computer's iPod, and distributes that revenue to copyright holders."
Far from forcing DRM on unsuspecting PC-buyers, this policy means that in Canada, unrestricted p2p file sharing is 100% legal.
Personally, I see the music industry as very similar to that other enterprise of freely-sharable information, academia. Federal and state governments pay scientists and other academics to publish information that then becomes freely available to anyone with access to a library. (Undergraduate students pay too, but the point is still the same: no individuals would ever pay directly for that information.)
So what's wrong with the federal government also funding musicians? Certainly, far more people listen to even obscure artists than read most academic journals. And there's nothing stopping bands from continuing to release CDs, or from touring. It's just stupid that something as obviously unstoppable as p2p music downloading should be illegal or even immoral, when there's a better solution, that has already been implemented, and works great.
Apple's cut on a song by song basis is variable really. if you use 1-click, or buy one song at a time then each song at 99 is another charge on your credit card (unless you use gift cards or PayPal). from Apple's cut they lost a certain amount to the credit card company.
where you heard that Apple makes 1/song is probably a guestimate after the above mentioned credit card usage fees, server fees, and all their overhead (lawyers to keep the iTMS open etc).
that would explain why the store is barely profitable even after something like 300 million songs are sold. if this theoretical method is insanely simple, it might lower Apple's costs significantly.
i would guess Apple would be fine with giving up the iTMS as it is if this new system would work with the iPod. Apple has said the iTMS is there to sell iPods. which can be taken a few ways, but one is that nobody else seemed to have a valid music store with music that worked on the iPod, and was easy to use. they HAD to make their own music store, since nobody else was capable of doing one right that worked with iPods and Macs.
unlike napster2 etc, Apple's store can barely break even and it will be ok because it supports the incredibly profitable iPod division. some business using the store AS their main business would be on this ice with these profit margins.
You bet your ass I would. At $0.05 per song, I'd never illegally download another song again, guaranteed. Unless it was something that simply wasn't offered for sale (rare/obscure).
Even at $0.10, and possibly at $0.25 per song.
Have you heard the crap the music industry has been feeding the masses lately? The production costs are apparently less than the suggested retail price!
Not completely true. Raising prices to a certain point raises profits. Raising beyond that point lowers sales faster than profits rise. Say for your example that you have 10 buyers at a nickel (.50) and you lose one buyer for every nickle you raise the price. laying out a table... 0.50 at .05 with 10 buyers.
0.90 at .10 with 9 buyers.
1.20 at .15 with 8 buyers.
1.40 at .20 with 7 buyers.
1.50 at .25 with 6 buyers.
1.50 at .30 with 5 buyers.
1.40 at .35 with 4 buyers.
So your best price as a business person is .25 per song even though you cut out half your market. You might argue that .20 is a better price for the long term since you keep 70% of your buyers involved while keeping most of your profits.
A business can't know the best price so they raise it and lower it until they find that point.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Folk / rock singer Janis Ian proposed a very similar model (her ideology was a quarter a song) in a great article from 2002. Her original piece (linked at top) is a good read as well and gives a good view from an "insider's" point of view about the (then) state of the music industry.
you moron. goat.cx is down!
I used bold instead of break. Sorry. You can delete that previous message. Not completely true. Raising prices to a certain point raises profits. Raising beyond that point lowers sales faster than profits rise. .05 with 10 buyers. .10 with 9 buyers. .15 with 8 buyers. .20 with 7 buyers. .25 with 6 buyers. .30 with 5 buyers. .35 with 4 buyers. .40 with 3 buyers. .25 per song even though you cut out half your market. .20 is a better price for the long term since you keep 70% of your buyers involved while keeping most of your profits.
Say for your example that you have 10 buyers at a nickel (.50) and you lose one buyer for every nickle you raise the price.
laying out a table...
0.50 at
0.90 at
1.20 at
1.40 at
1.50 at
1.50 at
1.40 at
1.20 at
So your best price as a business person is
You might argue that
A business can't know the best price so they raise it and lower it until they find that point.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Could you post a link to the site? I know if appeared on Slashdot a long time ago, but I've since lost it. I wanted to check it out again and see if its worth it. I take it from your post you haven't had any problems. I'm pretty leary of this kind of overseas stuff.
thx in advance,
jeff
Illegal downloads of music is mainly there for us to have music 'on demand' in our preference as we like to hear it. The fact of the matter is, that unless the music industry can start charging us say, $10 a month for unlimited downloads, free music will always win out.
The $.99 they charge now is pretty much the equivalent of a CD. I can go buy a CD with cover art and all for $12 bucks... if there are 15 tracks on it (some of the BETTER bands have that many), you win out by BUYING THE CD!!
That's why I subscribe to Yahoo's Launchcast service. I can listen to what I want, skip songs, and it's cheap ($35 a year). It learns my preferences and finds me new music.
If they could roll that into portalble devices as well as internet service (with better quality than Launch provides..) it would be a killer service.
Besides, artists don't make money from record sales unless they suck (ala nSync or Backdoor Boys), it's from prolonged touring.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
If the music was in a plain mp3 format this would work out as far as I'm concerned. I don't buy online music, And my CD purchases are low, 2 a year. But at a nickle a song I can see myself spending 5-10 dollars a month on music. So as far as I am concerned the the music industry would be going from like 22 to 120 dollars a year from me. I would personaly spend as much (buyling less songs) for a dime a song. However at 25 cents a song my buying would drop to 1-2 dollars a month.
On another point From TFA:
And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts, Pfohl said.
and exactly how would a plan that required selling more songs cause record companies to want to produce less?
Yeah, but right now that's 5 cents spent in vain. The Russian RIAA-equivalent has already shut down several russian music sites. You're paying 5 cents for unlicensed music.
...can we have this plan also eliminate all the crappy music that they put out too?
I am not sure that there is any "modern" music worth 5 cents per album.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Wow, this is exactly what I've been advocating for years. Five cents may be a bit high. For three cents a song I'd never bother buying (or copying) another recording again. But then I'm a light listener. I can see how people who habitually listen to dozens of songs a day might not agree that this is a good deal.
Insert witty sig here.
In the music industry there are standards. When there is such and such hit artist, they will notably get 20x the exposure through popular tv shows (atleast popular with the teenage sheep mass).
Being that this is the target audience of 60% of trendy music, they will be the ones plugging away their nickels.
But don't you want to get that hit song early?
Well don't wait until next week, you can buy 50 Cent - Candy Shop now for $0.99!
This is when this whole idea turns to complete shit. Record companies don't give a shit how the system works as long as they're making a lot of money. They're making a lot of money, they don't give a shit.
They just want to squeeze every last dollar out of us in any way possible. Any time there is some kind of revenue that falls under intellectual property rights, you will always see this kind of behavior. Sueing for unauthorized duplication of a product/idea. Some I agree with, some I disagree with. But it's overall procedure for lawyers especially to always do as much as they can for their client, again capitalist world, can't blame them for doing their job well, but they are pissing off a lot of people.
In the long run they need to get an effective way of targeting said audience for piracy but offering attractive alternatives to music, such as iTunes which was a huge success. It's been a long time since the record industry has done something for the people who buy the music, except sue them.
[cx]
So for 5cents, I'd buy twice as much music!
Aggies
....is it is NEVER as cheap as free.
Not true at all. You forgot to factor in laziness (or convenience as marketing will rename it).
I used to buy CDs and kazaa for the rest.
Now I buy CDs and allofmp3 for the rest.
Why? - Because I can't be arsed trawling through page after page, wasting hour after hour to get the music I'm after - which will undoubtedly be the wrong format or poor quality or some such quibble.
Convenience has a price, that's why people are still buying CDs and DVDs - they don't have the ability/inclination to download and I assure you it's just out of respect for copyright law.
The price of convenience differs from person to person. Student is time and ability rich, but cash poor. Middle management is time and ability (well usually) poor, but cash rich. Hence one downloads whilst the other buys.
What the industry has to do is shift the price point to a position where it maximises their profits - I suspect it's downwards, but 5c does seem a little 'plucked from the air'.
One way to look at it might be printed media. Books, magazines, newspapers - all words on pages, but orders of magnitude different in price. The newspaper has the largest staff, the most tight deadline on distribution, the highest costs in general - yet it's by order of magnitude the cheapest thing to buy. Why? Because it sells millions of copies and does so repeatedly every day. Price is so low you just buy it without reading it fist. People don't think about it. Don't look in their wallet and realise it's empty because they bought a newspaper.
That's what we need from music.
Yes really. I'm Deaf, why should I have to pay extra for my computer gear to finance other people's music habits?
Yes, not only would I buy songs for .05, I'd buy a lot of them at once. Instead of doing my exploring on various online sources (I said nothing about illegal copying) I'd do it on whatever service was setup. I tend to grab about 100 to 200 (legal to download) songs at a whack so my average purchase would be about $5 to $10. Call it .10 a song, I'd still buy 100 to 200 at a time, so $10 to $20.
The alternative, for me, is to buy nothing, not less. I've long thought that the right price for a digital copy of an album is less than $1.00.
I can rent movies six at a time for $6.66 at the local video store and keep them for six days. I can copy the ones I like. Don't bother to tell me I shouldn't, that's not the point. The point is you can't really track that any more than you can track people videotaping a tv show. Whether or not it's fair use, people consider it so.
Now, I don't copy many videos. I copy a few that I might want to watch again. But, the point is, I can gain access to a video for about a buck.
I want access to a cd for less than a buck. I will copy a few more of those, but again, not all of them. When that happens, maybe I'll put $20 to $30 a month into the music industry like I do the movie industry, until then, they get $0.
Generally speaking, most major-label musicians *don't* make money from touring. The reason we tour is to recoup the cost of making the album.
That's right, all that money the record company provides to record the album comes out of the artist's paycheck, *before* they even begin to see revenue from royalty payments...
have you been seen on slash?
Everything you say is right on the money, but, people like the RIAA have power... not only huge legal teams but huge PR teams, and on the consumer end, old habits die hard.
Could you post a link to the site?
Sure: www.allofmp3.com.
Enjoy!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Isnt this just the same idea as micro-payments with an ITMS interface tacked on? Speaking of which, has anyone heard or seen of micro payments in the last 3 years? There was a ton of hoopla, but the concept seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
And why not carry this a step further? Software piracy is at least as common as music piracy. Why not tax every PC sold for $200 or so, giving most of the money to Microsoft?
This tax is the sort of stupidly unfair idea that Canadians and French often come up with. We need a way to force the music industry to change, not a scheme that punishes the innocent to enrich a few media monguls.
--MIke Perry, Seattle
This view of supply and demand is covered in the MONOPOLY MARKET section of my Microeconomics 101 text.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Of the 10-15 songs on a CD, unless it's a "Greatest Hits" album, most of those songs are going to be filler, anyway. It's rare that an artist produces an album that, if you had to buy all of the songs individually, you would pay 99 cents for each one of them. iTMS gives you the option of buying the best songs and leaving the dross.
Maybe I'm just getting old (I'm only 36), but I'm not at all impressed with the crap that passes as music these days.
That stupid 'everybody needs a hero' that accompanied the ending credits of the spiderman movie a few years back is an example of some boyband wanna-be that has no talent making or singing. The first time I heard it, I wanted to rupture my eardrums with icepicks. They think it's cool to 'make music' by starting every bar with the same note. Where will that band be in 10 years?
Maybe the decline in CDs is not the fact that more people illegally download music but because there is less of a selection of good music worth buying. My CD collection now contains about 90% of music that's at least 10 years old (led zeppelin, queen, van halen, metallica, ozzy, aerosmith, etc). What I think is good stuff is something I find worth paying regular CD prices for.
I'm more inclined toward heavy metal for most of my listening, but depending on my mood, I'll go for all kinds even some easy listening stuff. For example, I find metallica's "call of ktulu" becomes repetitive, but the transitions between styles, the harmonies and other aspects to be very enjoyable. All the crap that's out nowadays sounds about the same on fast forward (you can't tell what part of the song you're at because it all sounds the same throughout the entire song, and the harmonies etc, suck).
Those plans work or may work for some countries but they still forget about two things 1- Third world countries will still find free alternatives. Payment methods and culture (or lack of culture) are a limit. Culturally talking this is partally influenced by first world countries. 2- More music for more people means more work and more production for the music industry since they will need to innovate faster and create more crappy (but over produced videos and marketing).
http://www.quasarcr.com/
I really think this will force some people to recalculate their bottom line. I would like to see though, would revenue still be the same?
should be "out" not "our"
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
There are songs where I think that 5 cents is 5 cents too expensive.
On the other hand. I'm already paying 99 cents per song on iTunes. I would probably pay several times that for _some_ songs. At least if my principles doesn't get the better of me.
Today they are sellings songs for 99 cents per song, or the entire album for a cost which is lower than the number of songs times their individual price. They are doing this to encourage you to buy an entire album.
However, the concept of the album might be losing ground. Maybe it'll go away completely. This is probably good because artists, bless their hearts, will no longer have filler songs. All songs they sell will have to justify their worth on an individual basis.
So maybe the future is that we'll pay $5 for hit songs and 5 cents for the fillers, and anywhere between for semi good songs.
Now, you say that $5 is too much for a single song. But in all earnest, I've bought albums for $15 for one song only. So obviously, to me, that song was worth $15. Only difference is that it is easier to justify, because I get more songs. Never mind that they are crap that I won't listen to a second time.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
They get like maybe 1$ per cd.
If only that were true. Artists generally make $.05-$.12 a CD. If you want more info about the industry and contracts, etc., I highly recommend This Business of Music. It's chock full of interesting details like formulas used to determine artist royalties. For instance, did you know the labels still take money for R&D costs on the "new technology" of the Compact Disc? Or that many still take out $$ to cover "breakage", which is a hold over from distribution of albums on vinyl?
Oy.
Despite conventional wisdom, I've discovered you can blame a guy for trying. It's called "attempted murder".
"Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?" That is why the music industry will forever be plagued by people stealing their products. They simply are too greedy and refuse to cater to the demand of their consumers.... "we want cheaper music!"
Starmen.net
1. I had a way to pay that *I* considered safe and secure, and didnt end up with the seller 'taking' money from me, as the current credit card and 'electronic check' payment methods do. I think selling pre-paid cards in retail stores (the way prepaid phone cards are) in various denominations would work great. (Buy with cash, redeem for music, no bank or ID needed)
2. No proprietary software required. Id only be able to use it if it was entirely web-based, with standards compliant HTML, that worked in any modern browser on any OS platform.
3. No proprietary music file format, no DRM. MP3 or OGG or some other format that the mere playing of (or conversion to other format) doesnt require software that has to pay royalties on a patent. I'd expect to be able to copy the music to any format or device I wanted to use it on - portable player, CD for car, etc.
I predict that nothing like that will ever exist, however, and I'd be surprised if it met *any* of those conditions. I'm sure anything that is released will expect payment by credit card only; will require proprietary software, available for 'proprietary' OS platforms only; and will only provide music in a proprietary format with extensive 'DRM' involved that restricts playing to only the computer it was originally downloaded on.
First of all, it's not like the record companies need to be saved.
Look at the numbers, they aren't losing any profit due to file downloads.
I am merely pointing out that for what they charge, they can catalogue and distribute music. /32.5)*100 = $0.0612
I believe their current rate is $0.02 a meg.
Apple I believe gets 30-35% of the 99c paid for a tune.
So ($0.02
So if allofmp3.com paid the same % royalty as iTunes, then I could have music for 6cents a meg.
The reason this is never going to happen, is because the music industry doesn't believe I'll download 10x more music at that price.
The issue is really the oldies, the past, the "when-they-were-good" times, and the (ilegal) downloads are nothing more than the comodity of digging up and finding the first album of your favorite band, or the whole discography of some artist that you just recently heard for the first time. As "incredible" as it may sound to the record companies, not everyone knows the same artists at the same time, and an artist that came and went in the 70's or 80's or whatever, can be the "next big thing" for a lot of people that never heard of him. The thing is that the record companies try to capitalize on that by issuing those "Best of something-something" albuns, instead of (like someone mentioned) printing a CD by demand with that really old, really hard to find album from your favorite band.
If they "open up" their backcatalogs, if they turn it into a "comodity", they will really have to invest in new acts, instead of reashing old stuff (i.e. no more bitchy-but-inocent-looking-britney-type "artists", no more generic-heavy-metal-band, no more "hey-this-is-the-same-stuff-from-last-year-but-wit h-a-diferent-face!")
In a nutshell, the record companies argument of having to invest in new acts falls short when we get stuffed with reashes of old things and re-re-re-edits (now! the songs that so-and-so wrote when he was 5!) and "unreleased" tracks. They might argue "hey! people like it and want another britney-type-o-girl!", but if that's really the truth why not let people get the "old" britney stuff easelly, instead of hiding it all away after just a couple of years from the inicial CD launch and comming up with a "new" (cof-reash-cof) artist that looks just like britney....
PS - I use the britney example because it's probably the most visible face of the kind of "new artists" that the record companies come up with. Madonna was a bitchy-naughty-but-sometimes-inocent-girl even before Britney was in dippers :D
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
... a plan similar to this one, but without the %1 tax on hardware or OS, just might work.
The low price point is key: digital music just isn't
worth all that much in the first place.
for 50 cent
Of course the "head of the British music industry" wants a 1% tax on all computers (whatever exactly that means - car alarms, too?) to pay "the artists". Right now, BMI, ASCAP and a host of tiny rights "administrators" all collect fees for airplay and other performances of songs. THEY DON'T PAY THE ARTISTS! All of these fee collections are scams. The first "reform" would be in paying the artists the money the current laws and contracts "guarantee" them. But that would cut out all the theft these record companies and organizations have built their empires on. They don't care one bit about "paying the artists". But float any scheme that will skim money from the masses, to be "administered" by these thieves, and they will stand up and applaud.
--
make install -not war
You think the artists are getting screwed now? At 5 cents a song, the artists will be lucky to see a full cent, and even that would actually be a doubling of artists current royalties. But ok, the claim is that sales will skyrocket. Lets do the math.
Lets say I write a single and start selling it online. Lets say that single goes Multi-Platinum, which the RIAA currently defines as 400,000 downloads, according to their new digital sales awards guidlines (for reference, there was only one artist who was eligible for that last year, Outkast for "Hey Ya!"). Lets say I had some leverage when signing my contract and get a full cent from each 5 cent download. From this Multi-Platinum album, I'm now entitled to $4000. Not a bad McWage, but not really enough to say, raise a family or own a home, and that's assuming you can write a Multi-Platinum single evry month. Of course, that's also assuming that the recording/promotion costs are being absorbed by the record company...which isn't currently the case, and therefore probably won't be in the future.
Lets say, in a more likely scenario, that I am responsible for paying back the record company for costs incurred. Lets say I manage to record a hit single for $10,000 in recording costs, and maybe another $10,000 for promotion, for a total of $20,000 (which is really, really, realy cheap). With my one cent per album royalties, I'd need to sell 2,000,000 songs before I saw a single dime. Some perspective: evey single person who owns an iPod today would have to purchase my song before I see any royalties.
From the artist standpoint, this would be mega-lame. The market just isn't that big. You'd have to be a super-star just to earn a wage above the poverty line.
This too, will end.
"An academic at McGill University has a simple plan"
To answer your question, no, I would not pay $.05 for a song by a shitty mall punk from a band whose lyrics read like the bottom of the LiveJournal barrel. I fucking hate A Simple Plan.
Well, since everyone is bitching about the CherryOS code getting "stolen" and their rights "violated," I guess Slashdot has now taken the position that P2P piracy is wrong. Suddenly, they see what it's like when someone's material is copyright infringed, and they don't like it. They're even talking about suing them...just like the RIAA does with individual infringers.
So I guess the answer is yes, Slashdotters would pay five cents for a song rather than pirate music. Unless they are either hypocrites, or extremely cheap. But it seems suddenly Slashdotters' positions have changed overnight on copyright infringement, all because instead of a faceless corporation that has contracts with starving artists who don't get paid when you rip off their music, it's some GPL project.
The hypocrisy here is sickening. Posting anon because I have a feeling this could get modded down for speaking out...but I just had to speak my mind. Thanks.
...and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening... and Apple *c*omputers, [...], *are* listening
Once you get word-of-mouth advertisement happening, then you can start making your money from playing live shows. Cut out the big 5 altogether goddammit!!! All they are is a marketing machine. BFD.
Frankly, with today's quality of music, I think the Big 5 are being overworked trying to make crap sound good. I'm not sure what the solution to *that* problem is, but I doubt iTunes is it.
--trb
"Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?"
Hey, why not charge $1.00 instead of 5 cents, and get 20 times the revenue?!
Oh, wait...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I thought lots of people were downloading 50 cents.. oh, wait, it's downloading /for 5/ cents... oops.
Unlimited sharing via p2p. The file transfer program collects stats on what was downloaded so that the royalty portion of my $5 can be allocated proportionally to the copyright holders based on what was downloaded. The copyright holders don't need to know what I downloaded, they simply need to know that 30 million subscribers paid $5 each this month for a total of $150,000,000. Of the songs downloaded, 0.00015% of them were Billy Joel/Pressure. Mr. Joel, his record company, and the RIAA somehow divide $225 among themselves and life goes on. Most of this money is NOT going to be paid to ANYONE if the status quo is maintained. If Mr. Joel is unhappy with $225 for the month, he has to somehow increase his market share above 0.00015%.
I already own as much music as I really need. I have the ability to simply pay $0 and keep what I have (which is what I do now). By accepting my proposition, they get $60/yr more from me than they get now. By using a fixed rate and keeping it low, the incentive to disrupt the statistics is eliminated. The copyright industry is in it's own version of the Vietnam war. They can stay on the battlefield and fight as long as they want, but real victory remains elusive. It's hard to find the enemy. When they are found, each individual can easily be beaten. However, the resources needed to hunt and kill all of them is far more than the benefits of winning the war.
For the sake of argument, let's say I have a line of products with zero marginal cost. There is some initial cost to make the first copy, but the actual production cost of each additional copy is inconsequential. I can get 15% of the US population to give me $60/yr but they want an "all you can eat" pricing plan. It is very easy to copy and redistribute my product. So easy, that the biggest threat is unauthorized/unpaid copies. Ill-advised attempts to maximize revenue have eroded the customer base to the point there the customers are getting very good at copying the product without my assistance. If the problem gets much worse, there will be no products to distribute, because nobody wants to pay for them -- at least not on a per-product basis. Given the nominal cost of copying (which could be reduced to zero if the customers do the work themselves), it is more important to get paid by everyone who has interest in the product, regardless of how many products they have (remember: cost of production is $0/unit for P2P). We still need to keep track of which models of my product are popular, so that I can compensate the people who made the original products based on the success of the work they did.
Our friends in the music industry seem to be locked in on the concept of getting paid for every song. The are missing the opportunity of getting a larger amount of money that would come from collecting a nominal amount from a huge customer base. All they have to do is work out an equitable distribution system on their own.
...went to the artist, I would...
The black death was a plague. Homophobia is a plague. But DOWNLOADING MUSIC?
Screw off, you have no idea what you're talking about.
CD Baby has a great Digital Distribution system that is very musician friendly. I worked with a group, Pig Farmers of the Apocalypse, who have done this very thing. For us to publish it cost $35 to set up with CD Baby, $20 for a UPC label, and the costs of manufacturing disks. CD Baby sends it to most of the online distribution companies by clicking a link, and giving a couple more sentances worth of information. Of the $.10 and $.55 that would usually go to artist and label, CD Baby calls it $.65 and takes 9%, only 7 cents, per track. If your music is good, and it sounds like it is, than you really shouldn't overlook this opportunity. Any income to help pay for the costs involved with the album are welcome, plus they can help get the word out to a larger audience as well. If you market yourself well, this can end up being a way better system than using a major label.
Shawn's Tech Articles
The subject line is facetious; I listed to a couple of tracks and they sounded pretty good. If you were playing my local club I wouldn't suddenly feel compelled to go outside for a smoke.
But I wouldn't call the marketing machine a BFD. It's the difference between you doing this for kicks on evenings and weekends and becoming a multi-zillionaire, making videos, playing stadiums, getting a heroin habit, and eventually your own biography on E!.
Seriously, it's a matter of to-each-his-own. You wanna make music, go for it. You don't care about the RIAA, and they don't give a rat's ass about you. But it appears that an awful lot of people listen to the marketing, and buy the music. They get rich; you get to have a day job.
Yeah, most of 'em lose. I'm in the same boat: I'm a part-time actor and I don't want to participate in the Hollywood machine that could make me famous and give me all the parts I want (.0001%) or suck my soul and leave me waiting tables (99.9999%). But Vin Diesel gets to work with Judi Dench and I played a house with 4 people the other night.
So don't dis the marketing machine. It's not that they'll come down on you. They'll do worse: they'll ignore you. If you like it that way, more power to ya.
Me? I like club music in clubs. No matter how good a band is it doesn't have any energy on a stereo, no matter how much you spend on it. So if you make it to Nation in DC, I'll see ya. If not, keep on it.
After several people I know got their credit card number stolen through iTunes I am more sure than ever: Music is here to share! If we need any changes it is better filesharing software.
They also spam.
Or rather, send out marketing e-mails after you've specifically made sure to uncheck the 'send me newsletters' checkboxes.
ok, we'd be paying a hell of a lot more than 5 cents per song. I pay nearly 10k/mo for my "Internet Service" which would be taxed at 1% under this plan so I'd be paying $100/mo to the music industry because I have a ds3 for my business... and we don't download any music. my company also buys 150-200 computers per year at around 1500 each... thats 2250-3000 more per year, so in the end I'd be paying more per year for "music" than I've spent in the last 10 years combined. This is about the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
Yahoo sells streaming music for $3 a month. If you don't care if you physically have the music on your computer or exact song selection (You rate artists/songs/albumns/genres and it plays a mix of your rated music) then it's a great deal. I have my station playing about 8 hours a day at work and at least 3 hours after I get home. With about 8 hours total for the weekend that works out to:
$36 yearly cost / (11*5*52 + 8*52) yearly hrs =~ $00.011 per hour. With an average song lasting about 3 minutes thats $00.000549 a song for me. (You do pay it each time you listen but come on! We're talking in 1x10^-4)
P.S. You can always capture the stream if you want.
How in the world did this statement warrant an "insightful"? It has nothing to do with the statement it was in response to. The guy was talking about finding the right price/sales volume ratio not monopolizing marketshare.
Some people miss an important aspect to reading... comprehension of the content.
Your argument pretty much justifies the things that I have been saying for years. Most bands don't make hardly any money off CD sales in the first place, they make their money through live shows and merch. So, I never understood why all these big bands/performers complained so much about us downloading their songs...
;) I always "try before I buy" with my music these days. If you make good music, you have nothing to lose. If you are a no talent, one hit wonder pop star, then you don't deserve to be in the music industry in the first place. My current favorite band, Celldweller, has no record label and distributes the majority of their music from the web.
But, then you also have to take into consideration musicians who only produce studio work and never play live. There are quite a few people, especially in electronica, who only record music and never set foot on a stage.
I say a mixture is in order. Release all your songs online in a lossy format, with a slightly sub par bitrate, and allow them to be distributed freely (96k mp3 or even better, a Q0(~64k) Ogg). Then charge people for the "full quality" CDs or Lossless (FLAC,etc) files. I wouldn't mind paying $1 for each song if I got to download a "decent", full length version of it for free and try it out for a while first. And of course, no DRM encumbered formats would be used
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
- I own a PC, games are £39 and people claim that if they were cheaper, piracy would be less rampant.
- I used to own an Amiga, games were £19 and people claimed that if they were cheaper, piracy would be less rampant.
- I also used to own a ZX Spectrum, games were £3 and people claimed that if they were cheaper, piracy would be less rampant.
You have a face the fact that a lot of people just aren't prepared to pay, whatever the price.Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Wow, this is the worst idea yet. Who is going to collect this tax and how are they going to determine which artist it should go to? Let me guess, the kind hearted RIAA will. Any guesses on just how much of this tax will go to the expenses involved in running such a system? Any guesses as to how many artists would actually see a return from such a beast?
Bad idea. Sell the songs individually for $.99. It's easy to track what songs sell and compensate the appropriate artist. I'm actually willing to pay that much.
Taxes will just create more government bloat and the artist still won't see any money.
There has always been piracy and copyright theft no matter what price you charge for something. Until we find an economic model where everything is free, there always will be.
No industry has a right to profit. If their business model isn't working they need to change it or die. I think Apple's idea works pretty well.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
makes a profit charging 2cents per megabyte(figure $0.6/song on avg). Now, a cd will have about 15 songs, and an artist gets about $1 per cd, or $.07 per song. A fair price, in my opinion, would be about $.20 a song. $.07 to the artist, $.06 to the distributor, and $.07 to whoever took the risk, and fronted the money for the artist to record his album.
A song that the music industry values at 5 cents is basically worthless. There is something to be said about value. If songs cost .99 and you steal 10 songs people will feel worse than if the songs are worth .05 and they steal 10 songs. Theft will actually increase with the decrease in price, because more and more people will think "Oh, its just a nickle, they won't miss it."
Would you pay a penny for a song? Or a penny for 10 songs? Or would you just say, Forget it, its just easier to download it for free than to waste time paying a few cents.
"Once you get word-of-mouth advertisement happening, then you can start making your money from playing live shows." Well, as someone who has toured . . . . . Very few acts make money on the road. For most acts, the cost of travel, shipping gear, tour busses, crew etc far exceeds the revenues from performance. In fact, the majority of concerts you see are there because the record label pumps in money in what is known as 'tour support'. You are 100% dead on when you say the cost of putting a demo or CD together is expensive. However, for most musicians their income will come from CD sales, and radio licence fees. Performance, except for the ULTRA huge acts, generally costs money. BTW - I think the 5/c per song idea is *great* as long as that money goes to the MUSICIANS and not some record label. Come on you guys, you can't possibly say that *FIVE CENTS* to download a CD quality file is 'too much'. You would be able to download 100 full length songs at CD quality for FIVE BUCKS!!! Dude, that's less than two Latte's!!.
I just can't see paying for music so long as the RIAA is involved. Must I list their sins again? - Illegal price fixing (screwing over their customers) - attacking reasonable copyright - Rotten contract terms with artists Why would ANYONE support this? If you are going to pay money for music while the RIAA is around, you'd might has well just send in an affidavit denying any constitutional rights that interfere with Record Company Profits.
Since then, I haven't. I have a decent collection from before, and anytime I want to hear anything new, I check out the radio, or even better, I check out the independant music sites out there.
Before anyone asks, I would be using Apple's music store, but it isn't operating in my part of the world, so no dice there yet.
So when I hear an idea like this one, I instantly get excited. 5 cents a song is a GREAT idea, hell, even 25 cents a song... ANYTHING to keep from buying an entire CD full of crap for one or two catchy singles, or even a couple of brilliantly written songs. You know what I mean.
So great idea from Mr. Pearlman so far. Except... as so many people have already mentioned... "In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers"...
What?! No no and again NO!
I do NOT steal music, and I would absolutely refuse to pay for those who do!
Who modded you Insightful, and how do we kill them?
Monopolies are a concept ENTIRELY orthogonal to the issue of price elasticity (finding the right price that maximizes profit). You, and surely the moderators, cannot be that stupid.
Great! Another couple of new pages of credit card numbers are posted on various russian hacker sites - courtesy of iTunes. Folks who still submit their credit card info on iTunes shouldn't be surprised anymore. If you don't want to be in for this type of surprises always pay by money order or simply download your stuff.
The problem with allofmp3 is that the artists are getting absolutely no money from it. It's no better than piracy; It is just higher quality piracy. It is still illegal to use in most non Russian countries including the US, which is what the recent law suite was all about.
I used allofmp3 for about $10 worth before realizing this and vowing to only use it to sample music I'm interested in actually buying in a method that gives the artists some amount of money.
I'm not saying 'you' should stop using it, just that you should realize what you are actually doing.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I would love to see an idea like this work. Widely available music at a low price has always been something I longed for (I am a musician, and tracking down rare old recordings and paying out the nose for them has always been a chore). However, as much as I hate to say it, this or any other "pay to play" service will not end music piracy by itself. Think about it, why are so many people willing to shell out $1-$2 for a cellular ringtone (which is about 10 seconds of mediocre midi), but there is still such a large population not willing to spend $1 for something off of Itunes? Because with cell-phones, there is no free alternative. With music, people have gotten used to leeching the newest pop hit off of Kazaa, no strings attached. It will take the eradication of the easily accessible pirate networks to make pay services the default source for online music.
That's right, I read at +2 and post at +1. Not even I care what I have to say.
A friend who is a Jazz band-leader used to get CDs privately made for 1000 GBP for 1000 discs (dunno what the unit price was for other quantities). This price includes the fee to translate to audio-CD format from the studio master tapes. He used to sell them for 10 GBP each at gigs...and they did sell. Do the maths: if the band can sell 100 discs, which isn't that hard, then they cover the cost of the production.
However, the cost of the actual recording isn't included in those figures.
Academics usually have simple plans since they don't live in the realworld. Theories mean jack once they are out in the open.
Ok, I live in Canada.
It would be interesting, but pointless to try that here.
Specifically, THERE IS NO UNAUTHORIZED DOWNLOADING here.
Yes, there may be penalties for (say) putting a song on a "BBS", but there is *no* problem downloading.
Since there is no such thing as "unauthorized download of music" in Canada, I wonder what kind of crack is being smoked at this conference. 5 cents a song? I pay a surcharge on blank media already. It probably amounts to "5 cents a song", so you are NOT getting it again.
You (the record industry) LIKED getting a surcharge on media put into the Copyright Law here in Canada; I am serious when I say you are NOT getting another automatic fee.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
"Do the maths: if the band can sell 100 discs, which isn't that hard, then they cover the cost of the production." - Yes, but not the costs of recording. The recording costs can easly amount to 100 times the mechanical reproduction costs.
I'll part with 5 cents, under one condition. It's lossless.
Some people miss an important aspect to reading... comprehension of the content.
And I guess some people are very shallow thinkers.
The point was that the "sweet spot" to maximizing profit is to obtain a monopoly on the market. That is what the RIAA has achieved in the music industry - there is no other viable game in town. They charge what they want for CDs and music because they can.
Jeez, it is like trying to explain a joke to your grandma.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Pearlman said that Pfohl misunderstood the idea. Then again, another record-industry type, casually speaking to Pearlman after the talk, had perhaps the most succinct counter suggestion. Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?
This is funny and proves my point. It is called competition, man.
If I don't use, I don't want to pay.
If I choose to purchase then I pay.
Take your Tax and go fuck yourself. I don't care if it is 1 cent per computer. I aint paying shit unless I am using it. If I am buying something fine, I will choose to pay then. That is how the world goes round.
I don't want some mutually funded music service. That is like the Government funding the arts. See how well that works.
Get real.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
"...it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it..."
where do i sign up?
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
If you're a rock pop jazz etc. act of a certain profile, playing live can generate some revenue. More often, tours are break-even or money losing enterprises, designed to sell CDs, shirts etc.
Other genres don't fit the play-live-to-make-money model well at all. Think some electronic music styles.
But here's the bigger issue: There are many CDs / AAC files etc in my collection from bands I've never seen live, and honestly, probably wouldn't enjoy seeing live given the hassles of many shows (parking, bad seats, annoying other fans, etc).
Further, with the consolidation of live music venues under the Clear Channel umbrella, the proliferation of dance music / cover bands vs original act venues, etc., the available 'space' for a live band to generate revenue in is severely constrained (vs, say 15 years ago).
So - don't rationalize stealing music that might take me 3 years to make in a studio by saying you might come see me live, IF I happen to drive all the way to your town and play your local club.
AND - as a musician, I want to be able to (potentially) sell to a global market - not just my local, logistically reachable live music patrons.
Complain about the big bad music companies all you want. But why shouldn't _I_ - the creator - be able to sell my material at any price I set, without having it 'liberated' by some fool who thinks they are doing me a favor with 'free publicity'?
They can make 5 cents from me a whole buncha times, or they can be broke. I gave up buying CDs because digital music is a better alternative. I quit downloading legit music because if you lose the one copy you have, in most cases (well, Apple's case, since i own an iPod) i'm not guarenteed rights to re-download that music, even though i 'own' it.
Give me 5 cent songs, with the RIGHTS to those songs, to do whatever i want with them, if i want to put them on my iPod, or my Lyra, or my PDA, or a couple of CDRs for the car or an MP3CD to play in my DVD player or on any of the several PCs i have scattered about, and you'll have a customer.
They're going to have to make it cheap enough to make the convienence worth it to casual pirates. Those who pirate the new britney spears album just so they can listen to it for a week before throwing it out. The hardcore pirates are never going to buy music again. But there are those too lazy to use bittorrent, or XXX or XXXXXX to download music, and they'd pay 5cents just to have a song.
The last CD i bought had the FBI Anti-Piracy logo deal on teh back and i haven't even looked down the CD aisles since. I have enough music right now to keep me happy for a while, long after the RIAA goes bankrupt with lawyers fees and lawsuits and broke business models.
I have said it before and i'll say it again, put control of the music in the hands of the artists. Let them determine how much their music is worth, and let them market it directly. Piss on paying for mix artists who work for $300/hr and Studio execs whose yearly salaries are more than i'll make in a decade, who have nothing to do with music but promotion. It sickens me to think that the $1000-2000 in CDs i have at home helped to sue some poor sole so they could take him for 5000 or 10,000 more because they have the market monopolized. Even worse that the government that is in place to serve and protect me is entertaining that monopoly.
People need to face the facts record labels are as relevent in the digital age as say manufacturers of long bows, chain maille armour and broadswords.
This sounds like an uninformed Slashdot opinion. Have you actually worked in the recording industry to know this? There is a lot more involved in making and distributing a major album than most people think. Changing distribution models could reduce the cost, but it never goes away. And, many of the "new distribution models" don't provide any reliable way to pay for the remaining costs.
I do think that the RIAA needs to learn some humility. They, like many companies, need to learn that it is far better to have happy customers and employees who like working with your business than it is to have people who only work with you out of lack of choice, and don't think they are getting a good deal. They also, like so many Americans, need to think about working for a decent living, instead of trying to get rich for as little work as possible.
This is exactly why I vehemently oppose cannabis legalisation. Look what it does to Canadians.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I would pay the 5 cents per song, but I would not pay a 1 percent tax on internet services or computers. Although drastically reducing the price of a product usually does not make sense, it does in this case. I'm sure the music industry would make a lot more money than they are now... then they can sue people for $150,000 because they illegally downloaded $50 in music.
Although computers are used to illegaly download music doesn't mean that we need to tax them to help offset the loss to the music industry. By this reasoning, we should be charging a sales tax on vehicles because they may be used in robberies as a getaway car and send all the proceeds to banks. We should also tax copiers because they may be used to duplicate books.
We really do not need any taxes like this. The music industry does not need an automatic subsidy. What they need is a additude adjustment.
The point is that the RIAA aren't a monopoly any more. They are competing with "free" downloads.
The other points are that "free" downloads are not free. You need to spend time searching for songs, wading through the crap, learning new tools as the RIAA fight the old ones, and there is a risk of getting caught, etc.
The final point of the article is that legal music distributors can regain the advantage if they offer a cheap, quality service as a competition to the eDonkeys of the world.
Hence there is competition going on, and as long as the RIAA doesn't understand it at that level, the situation will not improve for them.
That's yet to be seen of AllOfMp3. I'm pretty sure they're paying all the necessary dues that are required in Russia. If not then a civil suit will shut them down pretty soon.
Of course I would pay 5 c for a song. For that price you can't even buy a whistle. A guitar costs fortunes, and anyway, my voice sucks big time.
It's an interesting idea, maybe even applicable to other areas as well.
I know I'm going to get a lot of "hippie commie shitheat" comments, but it would be a wonderful thing if we could get this money thing behind us. It's a great way to barter, it's so universal one could almost believe it's pre-wired like language, it beats having to kick your neighbour out of the tree to keep your bananas (like our close cousins do...) but after so many thousands of years of social and technical evolution it would be great to find a meaningful way to feed the tribe without all this money and poverty stuff.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
The cat is out of the bag. Pandora's box has been open. Pick any cliche, because when the average Joe can simply "point and click" to get music for free, I bet Joe wouldn't pay a penny. There is too much overhead in paying for goods and services (music) on the internet, while there is little to no overhead in downloading it for free with some P2P client. Any scheme to recover costs from the consumer (in the context of music) can never outcompete the cost of zero cents.
I don't know what the giants like Google and Apple pay for bandwidth, but assume it's way better than what you and I pay, and maybe it's 50 cents a gig. OK, a song is 50 megs ... do the math and just letting someone download it costs the company 5 cents. Bang goes your 5 cent model.
Assume their bandwith costs are half that. You're still paying out half your revenue before even starting to cover any of your other costs. Insane.
Now, if you built the model right into a peer-to-peer sharing network that would still collect the cash, you'd spread the cost of downloads onto a diffuse group of users/clients, and therefore maybe be a little more do-able. But then, of course, you introduce all kinds of new issues with security, payment, etc. etc.
Again, the model is not crazy. The price is.
John Koetsier
http://gilgamesh.ca/
"In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists."
Where the heck did THIS come from? How have ISPs or computer manufacturers profited from file-sharing in the least? Is the profit margin on high-speed internet access somehow higher than that of dialup access? Has anyone ever purchased a newer model computer because they could "download files better with a faster CPU"?
s/profited enormously from/made it possible to participate in/
#DeleteChrome
They've been given it away for free for years on the radio. I can go over to my friend's place and listen to his music for free. Plus the whole concept of receiving payment for recordings of music was unheard of, prior to the advent of recording technology. Prior to that, musicians got paid when they played...to an audience. Now the ability to mass replicate digital media across a shared network has rendered the "payment for recordings" model obsolete, which had in turn made obsolete a different model. How does guilt even enter into the picture? There is no guilt. "Guilt" in this instance is an artifical construct of the record industry, trying to stave off obsolescence.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I think it's great with backcatalogs (or "the Long Tail" if you want to use the term from Wired) are coming online.
/ com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/viewPlayLi stsPage?fcId=28034491&pageType=playlists&id=12
Beyond Techno, there's also the Verve Vault on iTMS with old jazz recordings:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa
I would be willing to pay $0.25 per song.
There are those who believe that it should be free, but when you drop the price low enough the people who will not pay drops down to the 'noise' level.
What the RIAA doesn't understand is this: they can either make a small profit or no profit. Price the product too high and they won't make any profit.
Just my $0.02 worth.
I refuse to pay ROYALTIES on HARDWARE and INTERNET SERVICE simply because the equipment is capable of rendering music and movies. It's as silly as being forced to buy "music" branded CD-R media to run in a dedicated audio CD recorder simply because the machine is capable of recording something that I may not have original rights to.
We should be turning our attention instead to finding ways to reverse the legislative abuses placed by the industry. The greater issue is how the Industry is abusing society with unreasonable copyright and distribution dominance.
Not only are theoretical and applied research being destroyed in the name of profit, but also our creativity in art. This is not a legacy that will perpetuate society over the long term.
These laws are, quite simply unsustainable.
While I realize the suggestion of 5-cents a song sure sounds better than 99-cents, the problem with this and the current music industry as a whole, is that it treats music as a commodity. While it certainly can be sold that way, it is art (or should be at least) and needs to be recognized as such. No one says "Hey, lets sell every painting in the Louvre for $99.99!"
By treating it as a commodity, the music industry robs music of whatever merit it might have and puts everything at the same level. Why should a song by Milli Vanilli cost the same as one by Jimi Hendrix?
The best marriage of technology and music is not the 99-cent song (or 5-cent song), it would be to have a free market for the musicians actually making the music to distribute their songs directly over the Internet, and sell them for whatever the market feels like paying. Let's see good musicians get more money and bad ones get less!
In the current system, all we have is everyone subsidizing the industry fat cats, all of whom choose what music to ram down our throats based on what will get them a bigger bonus instead of what music is actually "good." And I wouldn't trust them to choose for me anyway.
Let the market choose what has merit and what doesn't and how much it should cost. If Iraq can have a democratic system of government, certainly the music industry should be able to manage it.
And some people dont think at all. I maintain that your response to the QUOTED post was out of the blue. If you wanted to ramble about monopolies you could have found one that it would have even remotely applied to or started your own thread.
Not that I dont believe the RIAA is on crack, money hungry, and using financial leverage to basically force laws into the system that will protect their archaic and no longer sustainable business model. They are, and its got to be stopped.
I firmly believe we should be free to share media with one another. No restrictions. I think society would be better off. Don't ask me to explain that philosophy, please I'm damned tired of pointing out that sharing art, music, and other kinds of ideas without restrictions is what freedom should mean if our societies are going to progress.
Anyway, the minute I can't get free music/movies, through radio,tv, filesharing or other... Guess what? I won't listen to music or watch movies. Maybe you don't believe I can, but I do it most of the time anyway. It's what primitive man did before they invented chanting or drums. Even if I were to get tired of living a music-free life, I could make my own. I've got a lot of pots and pans and a big wooden spoon. Hell, I'd even make my pots and pans spoon band's music and videos available for free to download and share.
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That's why when you buy gas in the states, the price is always $x.x9 9/10 per gallon. The average person doesn't see that 9/10ths and the trailing nine makes the price seem lower ("hey, it is only $2.29 - that's WAAAYY better than $2.30!!!")
Most purchasing rates fall into a bell curve. As you approach the sweet spot, you get the most rise. Raise the price beyond that too much and your sales drop like a rock.
Unfortunately, most (large) companies are too afraid of tinkering with the price to find the sweet spot (it can also vary greatly depending upon the time of the year, the weather, and---of course---the geographical location), so they usually stick to the same old thing. This is why lower-quality, no physical product, on-line songs are $0.99US, when the same songs, better quality, on a CD are about... $0.99US. Heavens to Betsy they lower the price and lose money. Best to do nothing and wait for the reorg.
Yeah, right.
perhaps instead of threatening allofmp3.com out of existence, they might consider using it as a model. they've already got the right idea (and double the price of this guy's idea.)
Looking at my CD's, there are typically between 15 and 20 songs on them. One of them by ABBA I picked up for $5 in the get rid of bin and it has 19 songs on it, another one that is contemporary I paid $19 for 15 songs. So we are paying around $1 a track now for new pop cd's, even for tracks that we never listen to.
Tracks that are newer than some threshold (5 years say) and genre should be charged more than other genre's and older ones. Pop music sells better than say Bach. The ABBA, Beatles, etc should be say 1-10 cents/track. The newer ones I'd go as far as $1/track. HOWEVER when I buy it, it is mine. I own it and I may put it on whatever I choose in the future. I can also put it on Ebay and sell it there, transfer the rights to someone else. A virtual track if you will.
This will stop me from having to pay for songs over and over again as the medium changes. Most of the money doesn't even go to the artist, the record companies get it. If I buy a CD or track by mistake, I can get rid of it.
Lets also address the high prices of using a piece of work in something you produce. Say you want to make a multi-media presentation or show and use tracks from an artist/studio. They should be required to allow you to use the work and be compensated accordingly. Right now they require minimums by statute essentially making it cost prohibited to do it. Syncronization, mechanical and other licenses should be fast, cheap and easy to get.
I realize a lot of you will probably think $1 is a lot of money for a track. You only have to buy the tracks you like, probably only 2 out of the whole CD. I have a closet full of CD's from the past 20 years. I don't want to even think how much I spent on them and how many of those tracks I paid for that I never listen to.
There is also an impact to state governments that get sales tax on CD's. They should welcome this but I don't think they will see it that way.
Perhaps I should further clarify my initial response to your post. My primary issue with it was not so much the fact that it quoted someone then went on to make a single liner that had nothing to do with the quoted section. What really got me going was the fact that people actually modded it "insightful", when it was anything but insightful.
There are a couple very important factors which I believe are the magical "sweet-spot" for this whole situation (and no, record labels right now don't get it... but there's a good reason why they don't).
First, comes price. Sell songs at $0.25 each and I will buy hundreds. Sell them at $0.99 each and I may buy dozens.
Why is this? Because of value and the risk. While it's true you can preview songs with most services, I'd still be more willing to take a chance on some "B" grade tracks if the price was worth it. $0.99 is only worth it for "A" grade tracks. So right there, the market is limited.
Next, is convenience. We're reaching a point where 20 somethings and under are used to having video games, cellphones, IM and other conveniences. They take this for granted. Downloading songs is a convenience. Until the 40 and 50 years olds that head up record labels retire, there will be resistence to the "new model".
BUT there is a very good reason to resist the new model. For too long record labels have had the luxury of manufacturing a pop star, giving him/her 1 well-polished catchy "hit", and then ripping us off by making us buy a CD with 10 tracks (1 hit song, + 9 crappy songs). So you can see, if we have the choice of only purchasing individual tracks, suddenly the record labels aren't selling those 9 crappy tracks. THIS is why it is not worth it to them! They would rather you spend $12 on 10 tracks than $1 on only 1 track!!
Artists would simply say "I want to be paid X dollars for my new work. Please donate to this paypal account. Each one of you can donate freely, or not donate at all. When, and if, the overall donation reaches X, I will release my work for free".
The author of Mute (a file sharing application) is doing this.
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Heck, you can record all the streams you want with Replay-Radio. It was good enough that I bought it. Then I was finally convinced to shell out $10/month for a subscription to Rhapsody. Now I can record everything I want from Rhapsody. And I was a HARD CORE file sharer before. So there is indeed a price-point at which I'm willing to pay for music.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
1) There is the basic money you're paying your ISP every month.
2) There is the time you're taking to search for and download a song. Don't forget the exponential time it would take to get an entire album- the most popular tracks are always easier to get and few people share albums as one file.
3) There is the extra time you're taking when the song you downloaded has bad tags/is shitty quality/is fake/etc. (i.e., zero quality control)
4) There is the cost in bandwidth while you are downloading (I can't fire up World of Warcraft, for example, due to higher latency, and in some cases my Vonage connection may be shitty). Don't forget that most p2p apps (especially Bittorrent) credit you when you share out your own stuff, adding to the bandwidth cost. Also don't forget that a movie download takes forever and hogs your connection for that entire time.
5) There is the management overhead in managing a music/media library and making it more accessible, etc.
So basically, if your time is worth more than shit (and mine is), you will usually consider an online music-store purchase. I have a huge amount of media I've accumulated (some purchased, some painstakingly pieced together) and I would say that the effort it takes me to manage it is also huge- but I love doing it, I love music and movies. And so, even though I have Acquisition, Bittorrent, etc. at the ready, what usually ends up happening is this:
1) either I purchase something from the iTunes store after initial frustration at being unable to find a decent-quality version of it, and then decrypt it with JHymn so I can access it from my Roku Soundbridge (did I mention I love music?), or
2) I hop on Netflix and order up a movie that I can't find online or that would hog my bandwidth for too long. Movie shows up in 2 days or so.
In either of the latter cases, I "caved" into the legal procurement model! How about that!
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All contries can and do impose restrictions on what you can buy and where. If you are an American citizen you can't legally buy anything from Cuba (or produced in Cuba, for that matter - even if you buy it from a third or fourth part), Syria, Iran etc. There are also import taxes to be paid on most products you can legally buy from other countries. I wouldn't be surprised of one or more of the recent laws regarding digital content had some disposition about buying music and DVDs elsewhere.
We have yet to receive SPAM from them. However I personally have not purchased an item through them at this time, and can't account for that.
Derek, the guy who started CD Baby, actually seems to really care about customer service. I am sure if you have been a customer or client, and this has happened to you that 1) it is accidental, and 2) if you contact them they will fix it.
Mind you I don't work for CD Baby, I am just a client. Some of my associates and friends are CD Baby customers, and I haven't heard any complaints from them. If you haven't already tried to contact CD Baby with your problem, I'm sure they would be receptive to helping you.
Shawn's Tech Articles
More to the point, this game of finding the most profitable price point, it's all well and good so long as you view your business as a purely mathematical entity. However, I think sometimes the perception of this practice can be a PR problem, which can hurt profitability of your business. If the public impression of your company is that it's willing to forsake half its customers because it believes it can get away with screwing over the other half by charging more than twice as much, it might be that you end up with no customers at all.
Musicians get paid too much anyway. It's time for a nerf.
Stop listening to the radio, and maybe today's music wouldn't be referred to as crap by you; or maybe you just have shitty taste in music.
The Big 5 aren't busy making "Crap sound good", they're busy *creating* crap and then convincing you that it's fucking brilliant and you need to buy 3 copies on CD for $16.99 each, take 4 people to the concert at $60 a ticket, spend $40 on food/drinks, and another $100 on merch.
Musicians taking back the distribution channels IS the answer. I say this as an artist and a musician. Let the public decide what is good music to them (and at free to low cost), not some marketing fuck deciding what music is good or not by potential sales numbers.
You don't seem to have a problem with any type of corporate abuse if you're buying your music for $0.88 a song.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Perhaps it's time to give up the idea that possesion of the media provides an unlimited right to play/listen/view/. Suppose if the industry provided a mechanism such that there is a cost for each time a song is played. What are the advantages? - Musicians could get compensated for the popularity of their intellectual property, as determined by the consumers. - Consumers wouldn't get stuck with a $18 CD that they don't actually enjoy and never listen to. OK, before the flames start, suppose this were essentially cost-neutral to the consumer? How much do you spend on music now? $x/month? Wouldn't it be more interesting to spend that same $x/month and have access to much more music? Challenges - would need to build something to measure music usage into every device that plays music. Not likely to happen anytime soon... And, as many have pointed out, free will always win. (There will be mechnaisms to play for free.) But, if it's cheap and convenient, the majority of users won't defeat the metering, because they understand that the revenue more directly compensates the musicians, and keeps the music happening.
I do not mind purchasing music online. I have done it through iTunes and MSN. BUT, what I don't like is the don't sell you the song--they sell you a facsimile of the song. Even an mp3 encoded at 320kbps, I can still tell the difference between that and the CD audio. For 99, I was CD audio quality. So, why not sell songs in WMA lossless format? That way, they can keep their beloved DRM, and we can still have songs that are truly CD quality. Personally, I would prefer no DRM for the fact that sometimes I like to turn my songs into mp3s, burn them to a CD-R or CD-RW, and take them on the road with me. But that is neither here, nor there. The issue is that they are selling a facsimile of the song--not the actual song. Ah, there. I've finally gotten it off my chest!
"Care about people's opinions and you will be their prisoner." ~~Tao Te Ching~~
Yours is a very simplistic analysis. It is illegal to violate copywrite laws and that comes with a potential penalty. The calculation to determine how much theft will occur has to include the cost of the songs as well as the severity of the punishment.
We've had people working hard on making the punishment more severe, it seems to me that a little pressure on the other side of the equation should be welcomed, not dismissed out of hand.
I'd have no problem paying $.99/song if I could just get the goddamn songs I want without the stupid DRM crap that keeps me from playing them on my linux box, my CD player, and/or my Nomad Zen.
Paying $18 (CD price) for the song is out of the question.
Therefore, there's only one option open to me.
They're also big on customer service. I order from them a lot for my music site and my experience is that their customer service is great. If you're still getting emails from them, email them and let them know.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
At 5 cents, certainly someone will still be stealing it. But the fact is, it's already plenty possible to steal music. I'm sure there are a ton of people who routinely strip the DRM off every song they buy from iTMS, because it's too much of a pain to worry about if apple will properly authorize a given computer to play a given song -- scary! And frankly, that's half the reason I'm hesitant to buy stuff off iTMS. The other day I was eyeing the U2 "box set" on itunes. Hundreds of songs, like $100 or more. I wanted to buy it - even though I own several U2 albums already and have ripped a number of them into mp3 for myself... but the DRM basically decided me not to. After all, if I want some latest hit for $.99, fine. But when I'm going to drop hundreds on this mega-set, I don't want it to be GONE because I forget to de-authorize a computer (or, like my iBook, it just craps out without a chance to deauth it, and it would cost more to fix than it is worth).
Net result: far less buying. I'm fairly certain that even if iTunes remained $.99 and the DRM was just gone, I think their sales would go up dramatically.
As a matter of fact, that is the brightest future for digial music: $.99 or less... maybe way less... full previews, no DRM (except maybe on the previews), and lossless encoding. There are plenty of good lossless codecs now, and bandwidth is pretty cheap for something you want to have forever.
The fact is, people like music. The fact is, music is damn easy to copy and the Internet made it really easy. You can sue people and keep a lid on it to some extent, but people will keep finding new ways. Rather than fight the tide, sell to those who are willing to pay, because I think we're the majority. Give us everything we want, and watch the money just POUR in.
The "man" is promoting quantity instead of quality - Where is the SACD??? When I buy a CD I'm stuck with technology from the 80's - here we are in 2005 and you want me to pay 5C for an even lousier format?
I can see where you are going but where ITH did you come from!!!!????
why not have a program in place that based on the populartity of the music versus its current price adjusts the cost of the music. Thus music which is popular costs more. You could have a min and a max so that it doesn't get out of hand either way. Here truly you would be letting market forces decide what costs what.
This isn't much different than other plans such as those proposed by the EFF. They're taxing computer equipment to pay the music industry, and then using the 5 cent contribution to decide how to divide up the loot. The problem is that not all computer users download songs. These people are stuck paying for your music if you are downloading more than the average amount of songs for 5 cents each. It's just another socialist solution that should be rejected.
Vote for Pedro
Step 1. Put all music ever recorded in a centralized location.
Step 2. Sell songs for 5c each.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
From the Slashdot summary:
And from the first paragraph of the article: Therefore, irikar must be Guy Dixon, the author of the article, right?Slashdot, you were doing so well recently, and then you just had to fall back into the old pattern of directly lifting paragraphs from the article for use as a summary. For shame!
How appropriate, since Slashdot keeps plagiarizing articles over and over again.
Nice of some anon. coward to question whether or not I've worked in the recording industry? I haven't! Neither have I worked for manufacters of Long bows, Chain maille and broadswords, Telegraph equipment, rotary telephones .......
But they are all obviously obsolete,as are record companies.... One does not have to work in a particular industry to see it's decline.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Metallica have it's own record label? I can't find any good info on it, but I seem to remember something....
Anyway, it seems like a lot of the musicians who've made tried to create a public outcry about file sharing either run their own record label or are big enough names to have negotiated very favorable contracts so that they actually make money from CD sales. Otherwise, I've heard a number of musicians who've said something along the lines of, "Meh, we don't make money from sales anyway. We make our money from live shows."
Well, I don't know about you, but my perception is that the music industry is way over to the right of the "sweet spot" on the sales-against-price graph. I hardly ever buy CDs these days, because I hardly ever see them for a price I'm willing to pay.
When Mute Records released a sizeable chunk of their back-catalog for under $10, I sent in a $150 order--as opposed to a $0 order while the prices were $15 and up.
As I wrote to a record store owner who was wondering how he could stay in business: I could easily put together a list of ten CDs I'd buy tomorrow if they were $10 or less. But they're not, so I spend $0 and wait for a sale.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I think the answer (though not really clarified) is, the taxes are supposed to cover the difference and keep it profitable.
He suggested levying a 1% tax on all new computer sales.
He didn't seem to explain how much revenue that was going to equate to, or how it would be distributed afterwards though.
Personally, I dislike that part of his plan. I think I'd much rather pay 10 or 15 cents per song than pay 5 cents, but have a new tax on all my future computer hardware purchases. Taxing people is inherently unfair - because not everyone buying a new PC plans to use it for downloading/listening to music. Some people are stuck paying for something they never take part in, while others might skirt paying the tax at all by only buying and using pre-owned equipment, yet engage in LOTS of music downloading.
In any case, this whole thing really just boils down to the recording industry needing to re-evaluate the most efficient pricing scheme for digital music. It's pretty clear to me that the 99 cents per song model currently used by Apple is only acceptable to maybe about half of the potential customers. The rest opt for illegal, free downloads instead at those prices. Is 5 cents or 10 cents the magic price-point? I dunno... But I will say, I think discounts need to be given for buying in bulk. If I want to purchase 25 songs at a time, I should get some sort of discount over the person who just signs in to get 1 particular song. (Saying there's a discount for buying an entire album doesn't cut it - because that takes away my option to pick and choose exactly what I want. In that case, why even do the digital music thing at all? I'm still being pushed towards buying a "package" of one artist's songs, good or bad, just to get a few tracks I know I want. Might not be such a deal at all....)
My ears don't care about licensing
IT Director: "I just bought 1,000 computers for my enterprise at $1,500 each. We don't allow any music files on our machines, yet I just paid the music industry $15,000."
I hate the low and varying quality of people's online collection.
...then fuck them.
If I could get a file at 256-320bit mp3, or lossless flac encoded for $0.05 per song, and my eccentric tastes for rare underground music could be satiated. Then I'm in. I'd also do the subscription model. DRM is a deal breaker. If they don't trust my judgement,
I just found a new download that I liked enough that I must have an original copy (since the download was only at 128). Total cost including the international shipping is over $30 for a "slightly scratched" [*crosses fingers* plays fine?] used CD. I don't give a hoot about most mainstream music so the major labels still won't get my money...
...this yet?
Andy Armstrong
Nice to hear from someone in the musician community who also understands the web. The core issue is that there doesn't really need to be a "music industry" as we know it. One more line from the article bears comment:
The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs...
The key phrase is "those who own the publishing rights" -- in other words, record companies. Most musicians will get nothing from this 5 cents per song, because their contracts allow the record companies not to pay them royalties until all the expenses of producing a CD have been covered. That includes production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, every penny put into selling the CDs. Most musicians never see any of these royalties because of all the costs of moving and hyping the plastic.
Record companies justify their contract practices by whining that most CDs lose money. Big deal. 90% of all startups go out of business in the first year. In the rest of the business world this is called "investing." Record companies are essentially venture capitalists who demand 100% of profits until they recoup their entire investment, plus control of all rights and a share of all future profits. Would you finance a startup that way? I wouldn't. The only reason it works for them is that (with all due respect to the poster) musicians don't tend to be all that business savvy. Most see a recording contract as the Holy Grail, because it leads to fame and high-paying gigs, which is where they are going to make their money.
As more musicians realize that they can get the exposure online without actually producing pieces of plastic and giving their rights away to record companies, THAT's what will change the music industry as we know it.
If you can't see how having a monopoly can affect price elasticity I would hesitate to call others stupid.
... on AllOfMP3.com - those crazy Ruskies and their funny unique version of copyright law. How many rubles is it to a dollar these days?
The fact is that the music industry has things so locked up with contracts and specialized legislation that the absolute last thing they want to do is to lose their cash cow. All these proposed, alternate methods of distribution and compensation really ARE good ideas, especially for the artists, except that it means that the music industry has to taks a monetary hit. Like THAT's going to happen any time soon.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
OK, that's probably the last thing that the /. crowd wants to hear, but how about drafting new legislation that exclusively ties all copyrights to individuals, instead of corporations?
You write a song, then you are the owner. You then have say as to what happens to it. Music companies can "get in on the action" by providing you services, but no contract would legally give them the exclusive ownership or rights to distribution or performance.
Pie-in-the-sky? Probably. Short-sighted? Probably. But the current system obviously doesn't work, and unless there are real consequenses, nothing will change.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
So, instead of measuring the number of albums sold and using terms like Gold, single, double, triple, or other varients of Platinum, etc, would they instead measure the number of downloads and say that the artist has gone Silicon or Mega/Giga of some term?
For instance, did you know the labels still take money for R&D costs on the "new technology" of the Compact Disc?
Well, they have to pay for all those complex copy-protection schemes for the latest CDs, the ones that you just hold the ***** key to defeat.
"If you are a no talent, one hit wonder pop star, then you don't deserve to be in the music industry in the first place."
Says you? And who are you to make that judgement? But of course that doesn't matter since they are a 1-hit talent, and people like you can simply download and keep that single hit, instead of buying it.
I don't care if you are a musician or a toilet-cleaner. You can't dictate who is "deserving" based on your opinions.
That's a key part of this whole internet thing. You will not get word-of-mouth without being good and loved.
I can think back to bands from my youth - The Sisters of Mercy, The Cure, The Cult, Spear of Destiny. All off-beat, and mostly I didn't hear about them because of the radio. It was friends telling other friends about them.
However, back in the early 1980s, how would I have converted that into a sale, except through a record shop. Bands could not easily sell music. Mail order wasn't really practical for records.
The split that may occur in the music industry is a split between the talented and the hyped. TV presenters turned popstars need the hype, grooming and videos. They have to make more media noise than the next TV presenter turned popstar. They also can't exist in their own way because they basically aren't songwriters, can do nothing much else but sing (averagely - and pitch tuned later) and so need record companies to help them through.
From TFA: "In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers"
I don't care about downloaded music. I don't bother with it. I shouldn't have to pay a sales tax to the RIAA for product I am not using. My company has hundreds of computers and CERTAINLY shouldn't have to pay the F*ing music industry for their workstations!
Can you imagine telling Citibank, Exxon, Chase, IBM, etc. they have to pay the RIAA a tax for every desk?!
This is the stupidest idea since... well since paying a tax on every blank CD sold.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Why can't this service be offered in conjuction with the already established music mediums?
From TFA: "music companies need to get used to the idea of selling more music to more people more often, but for less money"
"The recording industry is against Pearlman's plan"
They don't ALL have to use the idea. If just ONE label did this, they could prove the method works by making more profit than the other labels.
They could dynamically price music in real time based on demand so the most recent manufactured boy-band brainwash hit of the day would be more expensive than that old Andreas Vollenweider electronic harp piece you've been looking for.
They could try different pricing algorithms to find the ones that maximize profits across their entire collection.
Or they would wither away and die. But I don't think so.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
2. Economy SCALES. I would by 100's if not 1,000's of songs at .05/.10 each & i would buy BIGGER MP3 players, BIGGER hard drivers and FASTER internet connections because of the demand i'm putting on my existing infrastructure.
Yes, the provider would have to scale but don't forget this is assuming 4-5 market players providing said services who already scale for other types of service fairly well.
Byron Miller for Congress.
"It's chock full of interesting details like formulas used to determine artist royalties. For instance, did you know the labels still take money for R&D costs on the "new technology" of the Compact Disc?"
So you're saying CD technology is stagnent?
"Or that many still take out $$ to cover "breakage", which is a hold over from distribution of albums on vinyl?"
Wow! Indestructable CD's. Just imagine what that does to the "I broke my CD, so I'll download a copy off the internet" argument.
You really can't get more than a cult following on the Internet. For the all the thousands (tens of thousands?) of bands on MP3.com and similar sites, I can't think of one that got big without jumping to a major record label.
A lot of these bands have expert representation before they sign anything. If you're a musician with a day job, making your own CDs and self-promotion works fine. If you harbor dreams of getting *big*, major record labels are the only game in town, which is why people still sign to them.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
If you spend a few million on videos and a huge amount on publicity, that's going to eat in too.
Interesting... This is pretty much what Canada does already... They tax the media (CD-R's) to support the music industry (sorry way to jaded to say the musicians) and don't go after people who download MP3's.
...Four cents is my magic price point.
Bummer for me.
That's definitely the most insightful comment I have heard since, well, since the 80s. :)
No I would not pay 5cents a song if it meant putting taxes on computer equipment.
I am perfectly happy with Magnatune and other free music. I even pay for some of it.
==
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
==
By that logic they should give most of the taxes to the porn industry.
And why should computer users be forced to pay taxes to the industry the promotes DMCA, DRM, eternal copyright etc?
It's been so obvious all along; Apple started the ball rolling with the 99 cent song. I always thought that was too high, especially when I could get a lot of songs for nothing but a bunch of screwing around. Now I'm starting to screw around with BitTorrent. So the question becomes, how much screwing around do I want to go through, and what'll it get me versus paying money? I have money but won't give it to them because of all the offenses they've committed against people these last 25 years (starting when they promised us CDs would start out expensive, then get cheaper than records as production costs came down). That bullshit got me to be a life copier, and the only thing that would break that habit would be to price songs at SO CHEAP as to make it better than the screwing around I have to do to get that same song off Limewire or BitTorrent. For me, that's a quarter or less.
The higher the price, the less the purchases.
ergo, The lower the price, the more the purchases.
Put this into a math expression:
# of purchases N = k / price.
Let's generalize this a bit more.
N=f(price)=(k1/price)^k2;
k1,k2 are unknown.
Profit P = price*N = price*(k1/price)^k2;
(I'd like to do a full study on this. Anyone into statistics to develop a more accurate model? Like adding the popularity)
If we take into account social distribution, we find that there are MANY MORE people with VERY FEW money, and VERY FEW people with MUCH MORE money.
Multiply both, and you get an interesting curve. Apparently, the record labels are WAY TOO MUCH to the left of the curve (purchases=very low, price= very high). No wonder they're so worried about profits. Because the file sharers are on the OPPOSITE side (purchases=very high, price=0).
Move more to the middle, gentlemen. Lower your prices.
"Pearlman proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine -- Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work -- and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
The assumption is that if songs cost only 5 cents, people would download exponentially more music. Daniel Levitin, a McGill professor also associated with the project, said that a simple computer program, such as those already in use on Internet retail sites, could track people's purchases and help them to dig through what would become a massive repository of music on the Web."
So he is going to tax computers and internet services in adition to the five cent fee. Nope! No way! First, taxes never go away. They just get bigger and bigger. Second, who is going to recieve this revenue? The music industry? How do you decide who to distribute it to? Third taxes on an industry always get passed to the consumer. The cost of everything computer related would go up The real question should be, "Would you allow the entire computer industry to be taxed to support the music industry?" My answer is, "No!"
Insert Generic Sig Here:
" The point is that the RIAA aren't a monopoly any more. They are competing with "free" downloads."
So Microsoft isn't a monopoly and never was, because they were/are competing with "free" downloads?
I don't see how this stops the effects of supply and demand. If we were talking about a necessity here (food, water, etc) then yea they could charge anything they want. The RIAA may be a monopoly but they can't charge "what they want". At some price people will stop buying CD's. They CAN however charge more they they would if the music industry was truely competitive.
"And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts"
When the above is the only argument against it that holds any water, one suspects what they truly fear is...
"And it would destroy record companies"
nuffsaid!
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm all for paying, but FUCK a whole bunch of DRM. I'll be fucked if I'm going to buy a song, and be able to only listen to it on one fucking device. Being a musician myself, I think the whole industry has lost it's god-damned mind. We're not even truly rewarding the artists that make this music. We're lining the pockets of fat-back pigfuckers at the corporate offices of . Fuck the RIAA, fuck buying music....unless they allow me to download music, and easily play it in my car stereo...
I'm not going to screw around with trying to circumvent copy protection. Most of the music the recording industry is putting out isn't worth the time it takes to rip it.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
Now I've been telling my friends this for a while. Instead of $1 songs, we need $1 CDs. Afterall, Britney Spears isn't worth a dollar a song. Hell it's not even worth five cents a song.
If we had a dollar download service for an entire CD, both you and the record industry would be getting a good deal
Seconded.
In a competitive market, increasing your price above a certain point will kill demand (unless you can differentiate your product but that's another issue).
In a monopoly, consumers have no choice (unless they want to abandon your product), so they'll demand the product even if they have to pay way more than it's worth (making it very inelastic).
Here's a quick experiment: You need a widget. There are dozens of competing companies trying to sell you a widget. Think they're going to try to keep their price low to keep competetive? Ok, now there's only one company who will sell you a widget. How much do you think they're going to charge? Good, now start modding that grandparent up and that parent down.
(...Well back down to 1 anyway)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
(I meant great-grandparent and grandparent, respectively). You know, the one who said the sweet spot is monopoly = up, the one who said he was stupid = down. Sorry.)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Getting music is only "free" if your time and effort are worthless
Or if the time/effort required to do so approaches zero. Which it certainly can do.
The way I generally download music is to have it connected to half a dozen P2P networks, put in the name/artist of a song or album I want, tell it to download those items. Walk away for a few days.
When I return, it's gotten a lot of stuff. Usually most of it is obviously crap, which I delete. This takes about 5 minutes, tops. Deleting anything 128kbps and under usually does the trick.
The good copies get stripped, retagged, renamed, and moved into the music collection. This is semi-automated by batch files and such, and takes no more than 30 seconds per album.
Total time personally spent dealing with any given album: Max: 10 minutes, average: 3 minutes. Download time might be days or weeks, depending, but I don't actually sit there waiting for it.
Usually the P2P App is busy downloading one of dozens of things at a time, and I only have to deal with the finished download.
Okay, so this system took some time and effort to set up, but that was fairly enjoyable in and of itself, really. I don't consider it to be time poorly spent.
A very good point.
This is true to an extent.
If music cost $49,999,999.95 / song, from the RIAA Music Store, and nobody else sold music, the demand would be 0. Or damn close.
On the other hand, if the RIAA Music Store was the only gig in town and sold CDs at $29.95, there would be some demand. But still much less than if the store sold their CDs for $7.95.
Demand for music is very elastic, because most people don't need particularly large music collections. They would prefer them, but have a maximum price they are willing to pay.
Your analysis would be correct, but only for those people that *need* however-many CDs (or songs)
Although it's true w/ impulse buys and such that buy lowering the price from 99cents to 5cents will help the industry grow exponentially, but that will only be initially, because there's usually only a set amount of music released a week or month. Once a user has gotten all the music he wants, the impulse buys on the new music will not compensate for the price decrease.
In other words, outta the new songs that come out each week, for every one new song I buy now, I'd have to buy 20 new songs under the new pricing scheme which I don't really see happening.
HD Trailers
I don't know about you, but if it's gonna take me an hour to download the song that I want, after taking 15 minutes to find it on P2P, of course, I'd much rather pay the dollar.
Granted, the time/ease of P2P is only slightly worse then iTunes (and generally only worth about $.25 of my time) but at a certain point you've got to be willing to just pay instead of do it yourself. That's how the fast food industry thrives. You could make it yourself, but they do it faster, and for a price you're willing to cope with for the ease it brings.
They should have done this years ago, cut napster and that sort of thing off totally by offering something similar just priced to reflect the savings that advanced tech obviously allows.. They even got asked,they got warned, yet the "industry" refused, they wanted to (still do really) monopolise digital technology. They would have sold billions more with a hundred songs on a CD for 3 dollars, rather than 10 songs for 15$. And I think it's because to the high level execs who make these decision, 15$ is chump change, they have no personal basis in reality how much 15$ really is to most people. They even resisted 99 cents a song, to them that is already close to "free". It gives them the feinting fantoids to think of something less than that.
No idea if 5 cents is a real answer, but I would think exactly doubling actual distribution cost would leave plenty of profit to go around and it would be cheap as all get out compared to what it is now. Say it costs a few pennies to distribute it on the net, double that, whatever it actually is as a price there. If tech improves so that transmitting it gets cheaper, then they can actually drop the price again, but keep the same margins.
Really,and I'm glad this professor was swinging the clue stick hard at that conference, I hope he cracked some heads with it, because a market works best when both parties are very very happy with the exchange. If only one party is very happy and the other one is merely reluctantly content or actually annoyed, that particular market is not efficient enough yet.
It's obvious there's a huge entertainment market, the demand is there, it just needs to be cheap enough to keep the demand side happy so they are content to actually make the exchange for their money. That leaves it on the producers and distributors side, what could make them happy? So far it looks like they are being beyond unreasonable in pricing and in transfer modality, hence, so called "piracy" took off. Instead of making their customers happy, they pissed them off, year after year, now they wonder why they have problems. A nickle a song and a dollar a movie (whatever) would go a long ways to alleviate that.
Your entire argument is predicated on the WRONG notion that entertainment is something people have to pay professionals for. People have lived together in communities for thousands of years and provided free entertainment to each other FREE OF CHARGE for that entire time. Professional entertainers aren't the norm for human society, and are one of the worst things to come out of technology. The technology of entertainment allows people to sit alone, separate from the communities they live in, quietly going mad.
A friend of mine goes to west africa and lives in a desperately impoverished village for three months every year. The people there can't afford schools or medical/dental care, and getting a bad tooth can kill a person, when getting it pulled for $20 is far beyond the means of anyone in the village. But those people are constantly surrounded by beautiful music, for free, and they're loved and cherished by each other. None of them ever is dissatisfied with their life either.
How many people in our society can even sign a song worth a shit? Or play a musical instrument? Songs people hear now are written by and for professionals with professional range and training. People used to sit around in groups drinking, socializing, and singing normal songs with accoustic instruments. Folk music, the music of the folks, regular people, is no longer seen as acceptable, so people have worked their way into a corner. The death of the music/entertainment industry would be a huge boon for society at large. I'd personally like to see a ban on electronic entertainment of any kind for two or three hours one night a week. No TV, close the movie theaters. Couldn't really stop people from watching their own movies in their houses, but if enough neighborhoods had obvious social gatherings, people would turn off their own movie players and go outside. Maybe even start dancing!
Oh, and BTW, books are cheaper than CDs.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Agent 84078, you sir are a goddamn genius!
Seriously I couldn't have said it better..
they can just keep charging $0.99 for the exact same thing and make even more money, yea!
Not only do they deliver for $.05c per song (less or more depending). But they also re-encode at your desired quality level.
So yes $0.02c is more than enough. Avg song is 3mb, while a server with 1000GB goes for $100. You do the math...
>The point is that the market will not increase substantially to make up for a 94% price drop.
.99 is too much money to pay.
What market on earth wouldn't increase _exponentially_ if there wasn't a 94% price drop? I know I'd be on that nickel-a-song bandwagon in no time. There are literally TONS of people who currently don't buy online music because
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
So, you putting out a CD or what? I'll buy one...
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
The only thing that doesn't make me too interested in this idea [from the article] is that I can see no way that _all_ the music could ever be sold/bought this way. I mean, I don't even buy and/or download about 90% of today's fashionable pop crap, which I suppose would make up most of such available music contents. Also, just think how few publishers sell music today on the net. The music I mostly buy (jazz genres, blues, oldschool rock, etc., contemporary and from the last 30+ years) I will always buy, and I would be reasonably happy to see much of these genres widely available also in music netshops.
Shortly put, for me it's not the 5 cents that would make such an option most appealing, but much more the content, for which I would gladly pay more than 0.05 of whatever currency.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
My point is that it is not obvious to me. I see that many musicians want to be musicians full time, and therefore need a steady income from their music. Many like to get advances, so that they can put time into the album before they actually sell the album. I see that good albums need quality musicians, instruments, recording studios, sound engineers, producers, and mastering. I see that many people hear about bands through some form of advertising. I see that many people still like to purchase CDs at the local store, as opposed to downloading an MP3.
My guess is that many of these things benefit from having professionals in the music industry doing them. If so, then maybe the recording industry is not obsolete, huh? Like I said, it is due for a big change, but if it can adapt then it could be just as important as ever.
Hi. I'm a songwriter and recording artist.
/hard enough to make a living already
Do I still get my 6 cents every time my song is played commercially? Since this 5 cent price applies to "private" downloads, then I'm guessing it's probably just regular sales royalties that are "affected" (and by that I mean "wiped out").
Anybody know?
Pearlman is on to something. Though, his plan will effectively create a monopoly, a single system for distribution of music. He even proposes that the major music labels should be bought by computer manufacturers.
I believe I have a better plan. It is a simple add-on to the Creative Commons NC-license which says something like: "You may use this commercially if you pay X % in royalties to the copyright holder trough the Open Music Service". The Open Music Service collects royalties worldwide and gives it to the copyright owners.
The goal is that anyone may start their own online music store and sell music at whatever price they seem like (royalties always beeing in percentages). A completly free market for music distribution in which the artists gets paid. Likewise, artists would simply have to make a contract with the Open Music Service and "click" you are distributed world wide.
Q: Why would people pay for music they may download for free? (AKA "competing with free")
A: Because it is more convient to go to a site dedicated to music you like and pay 5 cents for a download than to search trough the p2p networks. The dedicated site may even help you find new music you like, something the p2p networks can't do on their own.
I also believe this to be more realistic than Pearlmans suggestion as you don't need the major labels to start with. Just get the self-distributing artists and some indie labels to sign on (they would definetly get more income with this system) and you have an established alternative.
That's the barebones. As I've been working on this idea for over a year, there is of course more.
Actually, I've been meaning to start a company based on the idea, but haven't gotten very far. If you want to get involved, please drop me a line.
Evolution is just a scientific theory. Creationism is not.
What do you want to do with your life?
If I remember right, the reason Metallica cared so much about downloading was that they are one of the few acts that actually own their own songs, as opposed to the record labels, so they are losing more money when their albums aren't selling. Of course, that has as much to do with quality of music (St. Anger anyone?) as with illegal downloading.
I may have a position with a very, very large music distributor in the near future, so I figured I'd throw this question out: What's the ideal way to make an online music service? Most if not all people reading this will have obtained music online, either through legit channels or not, and I'm sure every slashdotter has an opinion on what problems there are with the availible systems. Hit me back.
An approach like that is the way music should be done. And I like your music. Keep up the good work - I'd come and see you play maybe if I was 800 miles close!
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
I used Napster for exactly the reason that I downloaded music that I didn't think was worth buying. I downloaded litterally hundreds of songs for a theme party. I personally wouldn't want to purchase the singles or albums but I would've paid $.05-$.10 for each download of those songs, because that is about what I thought they were worth to me. I buy CD's of music I like and rip them to put on my iPod and then download music that I don't feel is worth the asking price.
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This could actually be done using existing economic theory. It is called two part pricing. Most of us have probably gone to a bar where there was a cover charge to get in, but they had $1 pitchers or $0.25 drafts. The bar makes money because most people are not going to gorge themselves to the point where the bar loses money. Most people feel like they are getting a better deal even though they end up paying about the same either way.
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Well, some people are retarded like that, but plenty are not (including myself :D). There's a station I fill up along my commute route that typically has the lowest price (within 5 or 10 cents). But not always. It's right on my commute route, so it's an easy routine to get into by always filling up at this station when I'm low. Sometimes I'll see them at like 1.80 and notice another station somewhere else at 1.70 or something. But I don't go to the other station, because it'll be 5 minutes out of my way when I'm ready to fill up. And .10 for 15 gallons is only $1.50 - I've got better things to do with my time, even if that includes sitting on my ass playing video games. Now when I look at prices, I do just drop the 9/10 off because EVERYBODY has the 9/10. So for comparison, 1.80 & 9/10 versus 1.70 & 9/10 is nearly the same thing as 1.80 versus 1.70.
Having said that, if I noticed another station along my commute route that consistently had lower prices than the current station I go to, I would change over. I'm not loyal to any one station or anything, heh.
I really have a hard time understanding the attraction that many people seem to feel towards commercial songs and movies.
OTOH, I also have a passionate hate of the way the RIAA and MPAA have corrupted the copyright laws. Anything that anyone does which hurts them, and doesn't injure innocent bystanders, parking lot attendants, etc., seems justified.
If I thought that Apple's approach would injure the RIAA, then I'd sign up for it in a flash. And download several songs per week (as long as I wasn't forced to listen to them).
I don't. Like the illegal downloaders, I don't see this doing the RIAA any damage. Unlike the illegal downloaders, I don't think there's even a trace of an intent to do them damage. So I see no reason to support it at all.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
For lovers of already-recorded music (which the obvious majority of music always logically is) I have a solution: Napster To Go, even just the free trial. After the trial ends, the fee is only $14.95 for unlimited monthly downloads that you "can't burn to cd." We slashdot readers all know that what you "can't burn to cd," well, you can always burn to cd. In a month I've "purchased" nearly 40gb of music that I (and my girlfriend, friends, parents, and friends' parents) always wanted but could never buy. That's about 10,000 songs for $0. Paying the monthly fee only raises the price to $.001495/song, and even I'm willing to pay that. But only for a while - if the industry doesn't move quickly, the majority of my lifetime music needs will have already been fulfilled. This is not to say that I won't want more music in the future, but only that I will probably never be interested in buying any new Beatles releases, for instance. So while the RIAA dawdles around and continues to ignore this idea that "pre-existing libraries of music are a commodity and should economically be treated as such," the very value of those libraries is, for me at least, dropping exponentially.
I thought the new Napster wasn't a pay per song service, and that it was about $15 a month... in theory, aren't there people using that service who might be paying less than 5 cents per song? It only takes 300 songs/month to get to that point. Any comments?
Exactly. If I wanted their crappy music, I'd buy it. I shouldn't be forced to pay for something I don't use. Just like the M$ tax.
Well, I went to check out celldweller's web site. As soon as I hit their site it took over my browser and resized it to full-screen. No, thanks. I closed the window. I still don't know what they sound like. Too bad. When will people learn.
Wait - I thought free downloads didn't adversely affect the music sales? If that is true, then the RIAA does still hold a monopoly on music sales.
Even pay download sites couldn't really be considered "competition" for the RIAA
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
After downloading music for the past 8 years, I find it a much better way to get my music, & apparently most of the world seems to think so too.
.com revolution.
The RIAA lost its Monopoly of its industry, they spend a good 4 years writing off music downloads saying it wouldn't work because not one of the idiots thought about inventing a new buisness model to adapt to the changing technology, their current buisness model didn't fit so they decided to write it off.
They were so blind in doing so I don't understand for how much those guys must pay their strategic planners they completley failed to miss the
Move ahead to now & they are still trying to work it out, their own stupidity in trying to maintain a monopoly they no longer have is effecting their music sales, not Illegal downloads.
People no longer care about particular songs, music is the new fast food, u listen to it, get bored of it, chuck it out & get something new. WHen will the RIAA realise that, if they make songs 5c each people would dowload many, constantly, thats what the P2P netoworks do, no one is downloading music going "hehe sucked into the RIAA", they are downlading it because its a service that gives them what they need.
The IPod is proving that theory with people not concerned about what songs they put on there just as long as they can fill it up & with the IPpod shuffle now out playing completley random tracks it just show's that people don't really care what they listen too, they just want a lot of music.
The RIAA needs to wake up to themselves, they have lost the battle, its time to accept defeat & start re-inventing themselves
I'm soo sick of going on ares/bitorrent/irc and finding improperly named songs, of poor quality, from some completely different band, i'd pay five cents just for the convience of the songs being organized and propperly named!
Itunes is nice anyways
Your skill in reading has increased by one point!
Which is what I truly don't understand.....how much, exactly, does it take to produce a CD from A to Z? How much money do they have to recover? Does it really take several million dollars to launch a new CD, regardless of the artist? If so, it would seem that not only their business model is out of date but they're taking lessons from the MPAA as well. Makes sense though.
I still can't get the screen shots of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple IIe out of my head.
The only job the Labels should have is distrobution of the CD's. The demand for a permanant media is there. Take for example, the CD audio quality is 96KB (that's Kilo BYTES ) per second and a high end MP3 or OGG is only 320Kb (that's Kilo bits ) per second.
There is NO reason for the Labels to own the music that the artists write and create. Think of it as if MS owned all software that ran on their OS. I just don't make sense.
GIVE THE MUSIC BACK TO THE ARTISTS, then watch what they do with it. Much like when the record label didn't like Wilco's album and cancelled the contract. They released the album online, and people paid Wilco directly.
I hope this is the way it all goes in the end.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
A few months ago I had suggested a price of 25 US cents per song as being a good estimate of the "real" market value of CD tracks. 5 cents seems a bit low, but a dollar still seems outrageously high.
Now we will here the record companies cry out and rend their clothing at how unreasonable it is to actually abide by market forces.
I wish oil worked like this (as in Econ 101)!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
make the cost of the music download proportionately equal to the amount of downloads. say, anywhere from a nickel to a dollar per song. they could update the totals in realtime so you dont have 10000 people getting the song at a nickel for 6 hours then the rest having to pay a quarter, and so on. the industry wins this way, the more people download the music, the more expensive it becomes. plus we win by only paying top dollar for popluar songs and paying lower prices for indie tunes or the less popular songs on the same album as the hit single your paying the dollars for.
I don't bother looking for a song on any free service if iTunes has it. It's just not worth my time. If I can't afford the iTunes song, maybe. The supply vs. demand curve should always prove to raise ammount purchased, if and ONLY if scarcity proves true. Once there is enough, no one cares. For example, there's plenty of my scribbles on the back of my notebooks, so no matter how much or how little I charge, no one wants it. I think that this is a valid allegory to the music industry since the Backstreet Boys. This 5 cent plan will probably not work simply because there isn't enough good music out there. I don't know who these people are that download hundreds of song per month, but seriously people, find a new hobby. 95% of what you are downloading totally sucks balls. Your iPod does not have to be absolutely full for you to use it. Stop filling it with crap. Doku
I'd pay 5 cents to download a song. I'd probably download way more songs than I would have otherwise because it's so cheap. I'd try out more artists and get interested in far more groups.
Ever since the crackdown on Napster and other file transfer services, I've stopped finding new bands to listen to. CDs are expensive, so I don't buy them without knowing what's on them, and I can't find that online anymore (except for a short clip now and then, which doesn't do much good). Singles are still rather pricey. I'm not going to try out a new band if I have to pay a buck to download one of their songs. If I'm only paying a nickel, then I'd be very likely to try out a few new bands. I could try out 2 songs from 5 different bands for only a buck.
Sounds great to me. Maybe Apple will listen. They have the power to change the market.
That is a whole separate discussion, one which is probably as interminable as it is subtle, nuanced, and paradoxical. The gist, I think, is that human civilization occurred in concert with the dissemination of official, received culture. The core elements of that culture were 1) absolute authority of the keepers of the culture, 2) largely unquestioned acceptance of the cultural artefacts themselves, 3) ensuring that group practice and sharing of the artefacts was ingrained as a set of traditions that must be passed down generation to generation, and 4) associating the violation of the cultural practices with either divine punishment or severe punishment by the prevailing political regime. The cultural artefacts entailed absolute truths, and the purveyors of culture held absolute authority.
Sound like irrelevant babbling? Pop culture has replaced traditional religious and patriotic cultural artefacts with music, TV, movies, video games, porn, recreational mind-altering substance use, and the like. For a huge and ever-growing portion of society in the US and around the world, saints and deities, war heroes and great kings have been replaced by pop-media celebrities. The keepers of official culture have always exploited the general public, and have always fought to the death to defend their wealth and stranglehold on power.
To some extent, this is the price to be paid for a secular society that cherishes personal freedom and responsibility. There will always be suckers, however, and for them there is TV, iPods, gangsta culture, crappy pop music, etc. etc.
The alleged "clash of civilizations" some people believe is behind the "War on Terror" in part boils down to two cultural regimes that are incompatible with each other. Each regime perceives the other as a threat to its power, wealth, and influence, so they have both embarked on a vast campaign to destroy each other. As usual, we the exploitees on both sides of the fence are the losers.
The pr0n could stand some improvement, though...
Now the greedy record companies want a piece of artists touring money as well.
This was covered well by David Crosby in a Frontline presentation.
gewg_
but I would pay 50-Cent for a song!
not really.
If you could listen to any song you wanted to, in the world, at the exact instant you typed it in or selected it from a list, for only 5 cents, would you even bother to store it on your hard disk?
Music to listen to at work under this model would cost me approximately $5/day. At a price like that, I'm not sure I'd ever save and manage anything locally. I'd gladly pay it to avoid the annoyance of babysitting soulseek all day.
Now, I'd probably want some kind of recently-listened-to cache so that I won't be re-charged for listening to something that I wanted to hear again, but there's no reason to fill my disks up with hundreds of gigs of music when it's so darn cheap. Heck, at that rate, why would you even bother to share it? The for-pay version has a reason to give you fast, direct, convenient as possible access to the music whereas some P2P app is going to suck by comparisen.
Plus, under this model, it'd be so easy to directly compensate the artists that are listened to. And since everyone can put their music out there, the playing field levels. Sure, you'll still have pop icons that are well marketed and popular, but their segment of the market will narrow as choice explodes.
With such unlimited music out there, the problem isn't one of getting what you want to listen to, but figuring out what you want to hear next. Maybe you'd subscribe to playlists. People would become famous just because they can keep an interesting set of music coming through your speakers. Fuck the radio.
> Would You Pay 5 Cents For a Song?
Nope.
The reason is because I have to give up my privacy to pay for it.
If there was some way I could magically and anonymously deposit a nickle somewhere, I would do it.
It doesn't matter if you lower the price to 0.005 cents per song. It makes all the difference in the world if I have to go through the trouble of setting up an account and giving out my credit-card number, etc.
under certain conditions.
License them CC BY-SA. I will gladly pay 10 cents per song for all songs I want. Further, to earm more money from me on the same music, at my request, track my purchases and I will pay you to custom burn CDs for me from the songs I have already purchased via download as a flac file.
I think I would buy an awful lot of music under those conditions. As it is, I have almost stopped buying music from the standard players once again. I am trying to send more money to local bands who play live.
As a matter of fact, I will buy a thousand dollars of music that I want in the first month such a plan is available to me. Believe me, the big boys have more than enough in their catalogues to set me back that thousand. I am not saying that I will buy a thousand dollars of their no good stuff under such terms though.
At those prices, I would even re-buy a lot of music that I once had but have had stolen and destroyed in a hurricane. As it is, I really want some of that music again, but I am going to do without rather than feeling ripped off by the big boys.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Shows that songs are overpriced as I said on this forum before here.
...
"average cd collection" = 50 cd's
50 x $30 = $1500
iPod = (what?) 5000 songs? 10000? say 5k
so, to fill up your iPod $1500/5000 = $0.30
I think this stuff will really take off when songs are 10cents or less, because capacity is only going to get huger and huger.
There is a limited amount of dosh that ppl will spend on music.
No, Metallica are whores. Speaking as a musician.
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It's an artist's site. Let them express themselves in a creative way.
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Wait, before you mod this redundant, hear me out. I'm not talking about the same old nonsense, I'm talking about NEW nonsense!
If every label (and I mean EVERY label) made EVERY song available for download, IN ITS ENTIRETY, at a low bitrate like 128K, then the kids could get their rocks off saying they got free music and the enthusiasts could completely preview the item.
Yeah, I download. So sue me. Again. But the fact is, I buy WAAAY more CDs than most people do each year, and I'm willing to make scientific my estimate that a good 85% of my purchases were because I pulled Whatever That Release Is from My Favorite Download Hole, listened to it in my car (I have an Alpine CDA9807 CD/MP3-CD player) a couple times, and that was that--I wanted the quality.
It works both ways too. If I don't like something, I don't buy it, but if that determination was made after downloading from a labels website, they've actually kept me from contributing to the P2P/USENET/Sitez traffic they hate so much.
The less people need to download their stuff illegally to find what they want, the harder it will be to run, populate and promote an illegal download facility. Any self-respecting record label should LOVE that idea: let the swappers divide and conquer themselves.
grunt work?
less than a minute of clicking if you know what you are doing. and you can have an almost exact copy for free of a cd you cant buy for less than $15.
Music, linernotes, and cover art. And with something like a label printer or lightscribe. You can make a cd that is 99.99% of what you buy.
All in all it takes about 5 minutes to produce your own COMPLETE high quality audio cd. For free.
Far less work and time than getting in the car and going to a store staffed by mostly clueless people.
Far far less work than ordering online and hoping it shows up someday unbroken. And that your account and credit information stay secure.
i'd pay 5 cents to cut out the searching and drop the time needed to produce a quality complete cd down to 3 minutes of "grunt work"
he fails to see the greed factor. The fact is much of the music being swapped on file sharing services goes to people who already own the music in a different form, cassette tape, LP etc... this is a fact that RIAA always hides because it exposes them for what they truely are - greedy blood suckers. What they want is to kill the CD and make us all re-buy our music all over again in their new DRM format just like they did when the cassette replaced the LP and the CD replaced the cassette - and that (according to a recent Frontline report even) is what happend to the music industry profits - they had hit the plateau of people finally replacing their music AGAIN. So now they introduce a way to get us to go through the same damn cycle all over again.
you also have to realize the great impact the iPod and other mp3 players and computers have had. Now people people have the option of carrying vast amounts of music with them, so instead of having just one cd at a time, people can carry with them every song they ever wanted to hear. Before I got an iPod, I barely listened to music on the go. I only listened to it on my computer. However, this huge increase in the demand for songs has one problem. Price. At the current rate, to fill the space on a 20GB iPod would cost you
5000 songs x $1/song = $5000
if we pretend that all your music is downloaded from iTunes. That is ridiculous. Even if you got only 20% of you tunes from iTunes, you would still be paying over three times the cost of the iPod. Now at $.05 a song, a person would spend
5000 x $.05/song = $250
which is almost the cost of the iPod itself. This is still pretty damn high, even though a person could easily spend this over a great length of time. However, I'm not sure you'd spend that much over the lifetime of the iPod, whose batteries die after about 18 months. Getting 20% of your songs from iTunes would cost you $50. This is much more reasonable. But then you have the issue of paying everyone. Something completely different has to be thought up, because the current model is not going to hold up.
It should be mentioned for those who don't know, McGill is an english university in Montreal. As it's primarily a research university, it is mentioned in the international news more than the other english university in Montreal, Concordia.
> But illegal downloading far outstrips legal downloading. What the article is really talking about is what would it take to get nearly everyone downloading music legally.
NOT IN CANADA!!! In Canada, we pay the recordable media/devices taxing levy, which allows anyone to LEGALLY download music for personal use. We already have this. Why the fuck do we have to pay anymore for hardware just to subsidize the music industry?
This proposal is nothing but a quick money scam just like the recordable media/devices levy. The music industry already polluted major P2P networks with fakes and junk, not to mention the DRM in their paid music.
Don't believe everything these bastards are saying. Music sharing and people getting it freely don't have much effect on music sales. Despite all the music sharing that happened for more than half a decade, their industry haven't collapsed, which they should if all of their lies are true.
It's all about distribution, and they want to own the internet and control it. With a 1% or whatever amount tax on hardware going to them, they're basically toll collectors without doing anything.
Right on!! This is what scares the music industry - musicians distributing their own music skipping their recouping "services". The music cartels are trying to prevent this idea from catching on.
record labels are able to promote an album the way most people couldn't
Yeah they can, or not, depending on whether they want to, which depends on how your sales figures are doing that week. When they start to top out, guess what happens? The promotion money dries up like Motley Crue's old hair gel, your phone calls don't get returned, and since you assigned all recording rights to the record company, you can't reissue your own songs on a different label, or even perform them in any venue that's being recorded. Ever.
You also can't record ANY songs for another label, because (in a standard contract) you have a 7 CD deal. Until you record those 7 CDs you belong to that one company. They get to decide which, if any, of your songs are good enough to record, so they can essentially switch off your career like a light bulb whenever they decide your last CD didn't bring in enough money, and reallocate their hype dollars to the next new hotness. If you want to switch labels your alternative is to start a new band, and you can't bill yourself as "formerly blah blah." If you're a soloist you can't even record under your own name anymore.
Incidentally, one of the few musicians who beat his record company at that particular game was Prince. He didn't change his name to a symbol because he was weird, he did because his contract wouldn't allow him to record as Prince on his own. Rather than change his name and drop into obscurity like most guys in his situation, he changed it to a symbol that had no pronunciation, so the press and others took to calling him "the artist formerly known as Prince." He wouldn't legally have been able to get away with calling himself that, but the record company couldn't dictate how other people referred to him, so he basically kept his name without using it.
Prince, while he released some terrible self-released CDs, got big with a big record label promoting him. He wasn't selling "Purple Rain" from the back of a van.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
NO WAY MAN 5 CENTZ IZ 2 MUCH! 4 CENTZ IZ THA MAGIK NUMBEER!
A "song" is uncompressed audio, with no DRM. If they sell "songs", then yes, I would pay 5 cents for a song. Itunes does not sell songs.
Why buy a CD when I can buy a DVD with way more content? If I can buy a movie for $10 why can't I buy a CD for $10 or less? CD sales will go down more as DVD sales continue to go up.
I've even seem times where the DVD that contains the album, videos, and other footage sell for less than the CD alone.
Hello, and welcome to Economics 101. Today's dumb comment is the following:
Pearlman proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine -- Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work -- and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
Dear reporter (and possibly Pearlman), you are implying that the industries would pay this tax. Sorry. Taxes on products with low (magnitude) price elasticity of demand end up coming out of the consumer's pocket.
The answer is definitely cheaper prices, even if it's just on physical CD's. There will always be people that will buy the CD's they want no matter what, and there will always be people that will pirate 'till the day they die. The key is making prices attractive enough to the large grey area, those that wouldn't mind paying $5 or $8 for a full album, but shake their heads and fire up the p2p search engines when they see the new album they want is selling for $17.
However, the record industry has always been an industry of greed, so plans like this will never happen. They will stand by screwing over all but the biggest artists on profits, as well as the consumers that buy from them. Even now, they're still pressuring Apple to raise prices last I heard.
The problem is that the record industry doesn't have a clue about the open system business model. Like it or not, they have an impact on the world around them and an image that stems from it. All the profit maximization and bean counting in the world won't save them, if they do nothing but bite the hand that feeds them.
No.
Would I pay zero for a song? No.
Would I download a song if it were free? No.
I gave up wasting my time with music (in the loose sense as practised in the late 80s) in the late 80s, and from the lot I've been subjected to since, I see no reason to waste my money on the shite again.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It costs about $20 to buy a decent disc. Then you can play for hours and hours and get some exercise. You also get to have social interaction, and the best part is, you don't have to give anything to the RIAA.