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Digital Music Downloads Too Expensive?
threeofnine writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article written by a copyright and technology lawyer asking if we are paying too much for digital downloads. From the article: 'Parallel imports are unavailable in the Australian digital market, however. Australian consumers cannot purchase downloads from iTunes or Wal-Mart in the US, which are often cheaper than downloads available here, without a US-issued credit card. And restrictive licensing conditions imposed by copyright owners also limit the sale of digital downloads across international borders. For both reasons Australian consumers miss out. And retailers cannot buy downloads from overseas and resell them here, even if it is worthwhile for them to do so. In a recent analysis, the prices of Australian-made CDs of artists such as Bon Jovi, REM and Robbie Williams were compared to those of legal parallel imports. It was found that the local product was as much as 300 per cent more expensive.'"
There are websites like allofmp3.com that sell mp3's in bulk with a set amount per meg.. seems pretty cheap to me, set the bitrate, if you want higher quality music than you can get on limewire or soulseek..
.. but, there are alternatives.
iTunes is too expensive
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
And restrictive licensing conditions imposed by copyright owners also limit the sale of digital downloads across international borders.
Is it any surprise that the Australians are abandoning the commercial ship and are now sailing from the Pirate Bay?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
These digital music stores suck. Paying more for not getting media, cases and artwork is nothing to be missed. Buy your cds in the store or download the mp3s from p2p and usenet. This iTunes and whatever is a big media and Slashdot hypefest. The music distribution monopoly has yet respond to the internet in a meaningful way for consumers. Until they do, you aren't missing out on anything.
It seems that everybody wants everything, and think it should be free.
Are record companies greedy and evil? You betcha.
Are they gouging customers and musicians both? Right-o.
Has everyone's perception of value been altered by p2p downloads, cracked software and other Internet-rendered amenities?
Without a doubt.
-1 Flamebait.
do() || do_not();
I both buy albums, and download music (illegally), and to tell you the truth, from a moral standpoint I feel worse about paying for it.
By paying for music I am propping up an anachronistic distributing chain whose business practices I take issue with. Which, for me, is more of an issue than violating a business friendly law, or depriving the artist of the miniscule cut of the sale he'd be receiving.
For me something that is mutually beneficial would support both the artists and the consumer; paying for music ain't. I'd rather see no one pay for music and watch the record labels go down in flames (artists can still make money touring), so that when I do want to buy an album I can know that the artist is getting a reasonable cut of the sale.
Yes, I'm middle-aged & I tend to listen mainly to classic rock albums with a little blues & soul thrown in. Most of the stuff I listen to, I can get fairly cheaply either second-hand or on eBay/Amazon marketplace - generally, I'll pick up a brand new CD for around £6 ($10). For that money, I get a nice uncompressed shiny CD with some liner notes and a hard case that I can rip at whatever bit rates I want to (I do listen to a lot of MP3-based music when I'm travelling or in the gym).
I don't go near Virgin or HMV record stores in the UK because I simply cannot justify paying anything up to £17 ($28) for a new CD but the prices that I do get my CDs at seem to be as cheap as paying to download each track individually - plus I get something tangible in the process.
I know a lot of people don't want to buy "filler" tracks on CDs and prefer downloading the tracks they want but I still don't get it - I've a collection of about 800 CDs at home and I'd say at least half of those are recordings I consider as "classics" that I can happily listen to from start to finish as completely good albums.
I'm certainly not trying to provoke a "the music of today is rubbish compared to the music of yesterday" argument because I just don't listen to enough modern music to have a valid opinion of it - but I've more than enough great music in CD album format to last me a lifetime now & if the younger generation of today has difficulty finding modern albums that are themselves "classics" in their entirety, then doesn't the "pick and mix music tracks" attitude perhaps make more of a statement about the quality of modern music than music downloads as being "the modern way" of distributing music?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It appears that as long as it is for personal use that importing music from allofmp3.com is not a customs violation. IANAL, etc.
I don't necessarily agree with the term "pirated" either. "obtained from an unauthorized source" is probably more accurate. Every industry loses some profit to "theft". If the "piracy" problem is as bad as the music industry is saying, it tells me that they are determining the price for the market instead of the other way around, which is how it is supposed to work.
now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
"The difference between digital media and other goods is that, for the latter, the price is determined by the cost of production and distribution plus extra which is kept as a profit. "
Not at all. Price is determined by how much people are willing to pay.
In a truly competitive commodity market, price will approach the cost of goods sold, but that is not a result of determining price by tacking on some profit to the COGS -- it is a result of needing to underprice your competition while maintaining profitability.
Note, however, that music is not a commodity good -- and therefore price will not necessarily approach the COGS even if the market were competitive. The determinant of price for music is not-so-simply a maximization of (copies sold)*(price), especially since the COGS of digital music is near zero. In other words, whatever the market will bear.
If five suckers pay $30 for an album, the label profits more than if twenty reasonable people pay $5 for that same album. The real problem, then, is the stupidity of people who willingly pay too much and screw it up for the rest of us.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Very interesting. Thanks! I guess it's not "little known" anymore.
This point should be stressed: "There is no private right of action for violations of customs law." Thus, the RIAA still could not come after an Allofmp3 user directly.
The RIAA is going ballistic over allofmp3. But they are trying to handle it via the governments involved, not directly with the users. Considering that the RIAA has no problem suing customers, I find that very informative.
My guess is that the RIAA does not want to risk an unfavorable ruling regarding 17 U.S.C. 602(a)(2). Can you imagine if that occurred? Suddenly downloaded music from foreign servers, even on P2P, would not be infringement. The shit would really hit the fan.
Thus, the RIAA's first step is to get Russia to shut the site down but pressuring the US government. When and if that fails I'd guess that they'll have Congress amend 17 U.S.C. 602(a)(2) to specify that it does not apply to downloaded music. Heck, their probably already working on that! Once that is amended, then they'll start suing Allofmp3 users.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I lived in Australia for a while in 1989, 1990. At the time Aussie politicos were investigating price fixing of CD's. It looks like the more things change the more they stay the same, but what do inflated prices have to do with rights? Do people have a right to low prices? What a strange concept. Maybe if it is AIDS drugs, a case could be made, but music downloads?
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You don't seem to mind taking advantage of offshoring (allofmp3.com) as long as it benefits you...
Go smack your economics teacher in the head and demand a refund. Tell them to make you listen next time. Demand is measured along a curve, in any market (diamonds, water, there is a maximum that Bill Gates would pay for a single produced item, then as the price declines more and more people are willing to purchase the item, continuing until the last person is so overly satisfied that even they would not pay a fraction penny for an additional unit. Supply and demand are matching in that market place as long as there is even a single transaction.
Now you bring up a second market that sells at a lower price but carries additional risk. Which some users percieve as having less cost than $1. This is the same as saying that because I can buy a DVD player from a crackhead for $20 there is not a market in legitimately traded DVD players. It's still the same market there's just a discount associated with the risk bundled in the grey (or black) market transactions. People can evaluate the risk and potential cost and choose to pay more with no risk or less with an element of risk bundled in. The risk isn't entirely being sued, its also the risk of poor data quality (think if the whole file was just goatse images), which is non-zero.
I think what you meant was that a large portion of music customers price those risks at well below a dollar, but no one really knows what the volume is on pirated sites (I'd be nothing more than guessing that P2P distributes far more songs than iTunes).
Even if the grey market were larger, it seems likely that a very large portion of sub $1 demand is less elastic than you appear to be projecting. The credit card companies probably take at least a dime, and if 90% of the grey market values their downloads at less than a dime (in percieved risk reduction), lowering prices to 11 cents would greatly reduce total revenues due to the price reductions more than offseting the increasing volume.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I download music from Allofmp3. Not a lot, but I've probably spent about 30 bucks (~500 songs).
I normally don't buy music in CD form, it's just not worth the price to me (student) since I don't have a lot of spare cash to throw around. So my alternatives are:
1. Don't buy music. Artists get nothing, I get nothing, and don't acquire a taste for a lot of music.
2. Download music from AllofMp3. Artists get an insignificant amount or nothing, I get music. I also grow to like a lot of bands, and when I'm out of school and making money, I will financially support these bands.
Option 2 is far better from my point of view.
Just yesterday, several prominant Canadian musicians formed a new alliance that opposes the RIAA lawsuits and promotes downloading of their music, although for a fee of course. It's becoming possible to buy music again from mainstream artists if you shop around.
i d=177 and also my blog for a writeup on the new group.
I bought The Arrogant Worms latest album Beige online for less than the CD online price, it was $1CAN a song.
Check out http://www.huntershack.org/nucleus/index.php?item
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I can confirm for a solid fact that this is extremely true. I can have on-demand CD's printed off Lulu for $5.75 a pop. On-demand printing is proportionally 150% or more expensive than mass-produced printing, which I also know by comparing what it costs to print off my book versus what a trade paperback goes for in the store. So imagine what the real per-unit cost of a CD is, factoring in just about everything else (and the fact that the record companies' "advance" to the band usually deducts all of the costs of recording the actual music), it is probably below $3.00, and very likely below $2.00. We're talking a ballpark markup of about 1,000%
My book, podcast
How many years has it been since you last used Linux?
I've done several kernel updates, and there was no recompiling anything. Just a simple apt-get install linux-image-2.6.whatever does the job, and even updates GRUB by adding the appropriate entries for the new kernel.
Granted, a kernel update does indeed require a reboot to take effect. But that's a good idea anyway, just to make sure nothing went wrong. And if it does break something, then I can always select the previous kernel to boot when the GRUB screen comes up.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Okay, mod the parent down please. Its a shame too. Because you had such a good start: $0.99 is WAY to high of a price point for me. I'm not willing to pay $15 for the contents of a CD, sorry. Its just not worth that much to me, and I think a lot of other people probably feel the same way. If they started selling at $0.10 or $0.25 -- then they might have a customer.
Where you got yourself in trouble was mentioning Napster and Metalica. Metalica didn't bring about the downfall of easy P2P (and with the current protocols and clients: uTorrent, eMule, etc), its still not that hard to steal music, if you want too.
Metalica sued because there was unfinished studio recordings being swapped around, and to be honest, its not difficult to see where they're coming from in wanting that material yanked.
Think of it like a sex tape or something else similarly embarassing -- you sure as hell wouldn't want something like that viewable to the world.
It's difficult to find actual data about what the real breakdown of the cost of a CD is, since anything on the internet is either written by rabidly pro- or anti-RIAA people, but one list I found says:
- Profit to label - $0.59
- Pressing album and printing booklet - $0.75
- Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers - $0.85
- Signing act and producing record - $1.08
- Royalties to artist and songwriter - $1.99
- Marketing and promotion - $2.15
- Company overhead, distribution, and shipping - $3.34
- Retail markup - $6.23
Other sources say that the label gets more -- depending on the source, somewhere up to about 25% of the total price. But it certainly is not the 90% that you seem to think it is.