Napster's Learning Curve

Chabil Ha' writes "CNET News is reporting on Napter's learning curve. There are some interesting revelations about their dealings with the music industry." From the article: "We made one last effort to convince the labels that they should do a deal with us. A little-known underground product called Gnutella had just surfaced. It was a P2P file-sharing program that required no central server and no company to operate it. If the labels didn't do a deal with us, and instead put us out of business, then Gnutella and its derivatives would become unstoppable. If we worked together now we could convert the market to a paid-subscription model. If we didn't do a deal, chaos would ensue. The labels didn't believe us and didn't really understand what this Gnutella threat was."

Comments

Re:Misquote

[trurl7]

Misattribution:

The original quoate is said by Leia to Moff Tarkin.

Re:Frog in the well syndrome

[The Cydonian]

Heh, it's a literal translation of a beautiful Sanskrit expression, kuupasthamanDuukaM.

Essentially, it's an allegory on paradigms that limit your view; just as a frog in a certain well might think that the well is the entire world and makes its decisions on that basis, RIAA companies base their decisions on the assumption that CD's are the only medium that can, or should, survive.

Re:A question for this topic

[DigitalReverend]

You are correct. The Record companies keep the lion's share from CD sales, the artists get diddly squat. I think the current rate depending on the band is anyone from $.02 - $.13 per CD sold. A band, group, artists real income comes from concerts and merchanising.

Re:Pointless

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Cyberdyne jelly, of course.

Re:A question for this topic

[Anonymous Coward]

Better experiment

Re:Power to the indy

[Alioth]

The classic question for bands choosing the DIY vs. record deal route (assuming they have the required talent and luck to make this choice) is "do I want most of a really tiny pie, or a little bit of a potentially very fucking huge pie?". Another way of looking at it is whether you want to sink $10K of your own money into recording, engineering, producing, promoting and selling your CD (and hoping that you sell enough to make back your investment so that you can actually make some cash), or getting a record company to spend $100K of their money (and hoping that they sell enough to make back their investment so you can actually make some cash).

Ah. I see where you've gone wrong, and it probably suckers most artists too. It's actually a choice of sinking $10K of your own money into a recording et al., or getting a record company to sink $100K of your own money into the recording with the hope you make enough cash to actually pay it back. (And you lose your rights to your own work). Record companies don't give you studio time - they lend you money so you can pay for it yourselves, often at an inflated rate. They call it an 'advance', but you still must pay it back, so you probably won't actually start earning money until you've sold over 1 million CDs.