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RIAA Says CDs Should Cost More
EatingSteak writes "The folks over at Techdirt just put up a great story today, with the RIAA claiming the cost of a CD has gone down significantly relative to the consumer price index. The RIAA 'Key Facts' page claims that based on the 1983 price of CDs, the 1996 price should have been $33.86. So naturally, you should feel like you're getting a bargain. Sounds an awful lot like the cable companies saying cable prices are really going down even though they're going up."
Funny (not as in ha ha) because as I recall back in 1983 the record companies acknowledging that CDs *were* expensive but that the price would come down as the number of CD sales went up. Back then a record album ran around $7 US and CDs were anywhere from $13-18 US and I could as a 13 year not afford many CDs, but did I ever load up on all those punk 45s, likely outspending what I would have on CDs over time. What the record companies can not apparently figure out is that if priced affordably, some sales are money in the pocket versus no sales and no money in the pocket. Judging from the precipitous fall in music sales and revenues over the past few years from lousy music, over priced music, DRM and bad will from the RIAA, they obviously just don't get it. Now, if they were smart.... record companies would *give away* music from bands just starting out and from the biggest bands out there and make money from tours. Bands in the middle of the spectrum could be the "middle-class" of the record companies that could provide the most profit after small bands graduate into the middle class and start selling their music, touring as they want.
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bullshite.
If they should cost more, they would! It's simple supply vs demand! I mean, the RIAA are cartel for all intents and purposes. Who are they to be complaining?!
I suppose we should have to pay $1300 for a Commodore 64 nowadays, too?
You don't even want to hear how much the RIAA thinks you should have to pay for a machine capable of a billion calculations per second...
We didn't say you were paranoid, you must have imagined that.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Every single Slashdotter, small and large mind alike, has only been predicting this for HOW LONG?!!?
Seriously, jack them up. That way, when less CDs fly off the shelves, they'll start making some good decisions on how to run the industry and actually attract customers. Throwing us tons of garbage every week for a "good price" doesn't mean they are doing us any favors.
If record companies really wanted to reduce piracy and boost sales, I think a good move would be lowering CD prices. Their downfall will be greed if they increase the prices.
A mature, end-of-life technology is cheaper than it was at its introduction? I'm astounded!
Obviously these people are being given too much money if this is what they're spending it on.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
That's absolutely right, compared to 1983, the relative price is down, early adopters pay a price!
Thats an age old truth.
Now, thanks to economies of scale and lots of hours of research, it's much cheaper to produce the individual cd.
Not only that, due to IT it is also cheaper to produce the individual album.
I'm still waiting for legally downloadable music to be as problem free and cheap as the distribution method should allow.
until then, Happy Mp3.com. (yes i stopped buying cds the first time i got a malware loaded cd).
The distribution is already a lot cheaper, which means that the price has to cover three things: Development of the site, music production and marketing.
Please lower the price and drop the drm.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
why does it seem like every week the riaa has some new, bizarre claim about the cost of music, or some completely inane justification for them to charge us all more money for our cds? i spend a good portion of my life in studios, and while it does cost quite a lot of money to record / produce / master a big commercial release, there's no way that a cd would ever cost $33... but then again, i don't work for the riaa, so i probably don't know the 'real' truth...
now is the winter of our discotheque
I still won't buy them.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
My pirated music collection just tripled in value! I guess it's worth the trouble to back it all up to DVDs now.
"The folks over at Techdirt just put up a great story today, with the RIAA claiming the cost of a CD has gone down significantly relative to the consumer price index.
Since the value has gone down considerably, market forces should cause the price to fall. The industry does not push quality, they push loud (compressed clipped recordings) over dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. They also push DRM further reducing value (CD may hose my computer, won't play in the car, and won't rip to my iPod). The biggie is ther is competition to the disposable dollar in games, DVD's, other toys such as cell phones and broadband internet that take away from CD buying dollars. When I spend $60 a month for broadband, there are fewer entertainment dollars left to spend on CD's. The bang for the buck just isn't there.
Now they think they are under priced? What are they smoking? Hey guys, time for a reality check. A good buggy whip adjusted for inflation should run for about $75.00, but they don't sell very well anymore. Time for a reality check.
The truth shall set you free!
Yes. This is a fundamental intersection between two economic concepts - Inflation and Moore's Law.
Inflation indices imply that prices have risen over the last few decades. However, those numbers are averages across a wide variety of (generally non-technical) goods. There are numerous causes of inflation, and I won't discuss that here.
Moore's Law is not strictly speaking an economic law, but with the benefits of Moore's Law, we see electronics and machines become more affordable. In all likelihood, production costs have plummeted for the actual music, and I assume CD error rate has gone down. As a result, the cost to make a CD, from start to finish has seen the price of its components fall (as measured in utility/cost). Therefore, the price of CDs don't have to rise.
Sadly, because of inflation, you *did* effectively pay $1300 for your C64. That's what a shiny new black MacBook costs now.. and back in the day, my Commie was pretty pimp.
Die!-a-RIAA!
Also, the cost of international phone calls has declined markedly since 1925. Based on inflation, we should now be paying $500/min for international calls. Don't tell the telcos!
Similarly, the cost of motor cars has come down since the Model-T Ford - they should cost $1.5 million each (based on inflation - discounting better performance these days)
Or... perhaps technology and economics has some influence on the price of things too..
It is the ultimate irony. The record industry is trying control information in the form of content, and the US Federal Reserve Bank is trying to control information that refelcts itself in the form of money and markets. So now the Fed is lying to us about the value of our money, and long behold it has the effect of destroying the pricing power for those who are lying to us about "protecting" artists, and branding about other lies such as saying copyrights are "property" rather than a personal regulatory monopoly.
Well, guess what. As society enters the information age, that means that information is becomming commoditized and the service value of information starts to exceed the control value. So liars who control information like Hollywood and the Fed (and Microsoft) are in serious trouble. How ironoc it is that, unlike the service sector, they will have no pricing power as they destroy each other.
Hey, if you have a 52X player that means you should be paying 52X :).
;).
Laugh, but wasn't that sort of thinking seriously being used in one case?
CD costs are definitely lower nowadays. Over here "Pirate" stuff is now half or 1/3 the price it used to be, not even factoring for inflation
Is this cost per second of audio or cost per ounce of talent?
With an RIAA mindset like that, people are becoming fed up with their repeated "cry wolf" on piracy. If the RIAA truly believes that these so-called "inflation-adjusted" prices are realistic for most of the top-40 crap out there then it's truly a wonder there isn't more piracy. sigh... after all this time, they _still_ don't get it. Hey, RIAA! It's a very simple concept - FAIR prices will always sell more music while excessive corporate greed will only breed more piracy.
If they really want to reduce piracy they should lower the prices of CD's even more.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The RIAA 'Key Facts' page claims that based on the 1983 price of CDs, the 1996 price should have been $33.86.
No, because CDs are by far cheaper to mass produce than cassettes or, in all fairness, vinyl. For a small production run of vinyl, i'd expect to spend $1.00 per disc including a paper dust cover. CDs I would expect to spend 1/2 that with a basic sleve for a small production run. Cassette I would expect to spend double that of CD.
Yet for some reason, they sell commercial cassettes for less than a CD.
Not to speak of mastering seems to be done by some yahoo with protools.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
FTFA:
For every album released in a given year, a marketing strategy was developed to make that album stand out among the other releases that hit the market that year. Art must be designed for the CD box, and promotional materials (posters, store displays and music videos) developed and produced. For many artists, a costly concert tour is essential to promote their recordings.How about you all agree to stop marketing the CDs and just let the people choose what they think is good, rather than trying to tell them? We'd all save millions.
They can't be serious. Maybe, instead of "CDs should cost more" it should be "Record execs should cost less".
After all, it's not like manufacturing cost should be an issue. Hell, my great-uncle used to work at a post office... When someone mail-ordered a CD and the address was wrong, the sender of the CD would not pay to have the package forwarded. Instead, they'd just ship another package, because this was apparently cheaper. The post office was told to throw away the CDs and wait for the subsequent re-delivery. Of course, then people began stealing the discs from the garbage, so the post office had to start DESTROYING them (by incineration, iirc) every week instead.
Long story short, when you order a CD online, the finished product cost more to ship than it did to make. The price is still totally unjustified, especially considering that the artist's cut is almost nothing.
People who exploit others for profit are the scum of the earth, and record companies scam pretty much everyone else in the music biz, from the artist all the way down to the consumer. It's disgusting.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
What do we do when people are not buying sh*t? Raise the price and expect them to flock! Hurrah! We're brilliant!
CDs are STILL $13-18 (unless they are at Costco or "on sale", usually), but back in 1983, a decent computer cost $2000 (you can't even buy a computer that bad now, for as little as $299).
Even a nice calculator was about $50 or so (better ones now for under $20). A Color TV (A heavy CRT, 13 channels, click-click tuner) was 2 - 3 times what they cost now (for 121 channels, multi inputs, remote, etc. etc.)
The list goes on and on and gets "worse" (for the RIAA argument) when adjusting for inflation. LOTS of stuff is far cheaper than it has ever been.
Bah.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Quantity 10,000: USD$0.79.
Explain to me again why these fsckers cost $16.00?
Now then, what was the per-unit pressing cost, quantity 10,000, of a CD in 1980? If we calculate MSRP as a percentage multiplier of the raw pressing cost, what should music CDs cost today?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The RIAA 'Key Facts' page claims that Based on the 1983 price of CDs, the 1996 price shoUld have been $33.86. So naturaLLy, you SHould feel lIke you're geTting a bargain.
Ben Woods' argument is correct, if we are talking about a piece of electronics, where, say, 90% of the cost of that piece of electronics is in the production. However, only a very small amount of the cost of the cd (less than 1% if 1c for the CD and 3c for the case/cover) is in the PRODUCTION of the CD.
Most of the cost of a CD is in the marketing and (of course) profits for the record company. Sure there are a few extras, like the pittance they give the artist, but the majority of the cost is MARKETING. This gets more and more expensive as they get more and more ridiculous in their marketing and the cost of marketing increases over time.
Another spin might be that CDs are now more expensive to produce due to all the non-redbook copy prevention measures that they keep trying to put on "CDs" now.
Please don't send a Word document when a text file will do the job.
Me, I tagged the story "overpriced".
Property is theft.
Another reasonable and well thought out claim from the RIAA. Someone inform Intel that a single transistor should still cost about a dollar, they're losing money by the fistful.
All I want to know is:
1) What is the average recording company executive salary compared to the inflation rate?
2) How does that compare to the compensation given to the (poor, trodden-upon-by-the-evil-copyright-infringers) recording artists?
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Good point. I hardly ever buy CDs new nowadays - usually pick them up off of ebay for 1/2 or less the list price - and that seems to be a much more reasonable price than the $15 or so that the new ones cost. If they raised it much further I don't think I'd buy ANY CDs new.
Yeah, let's charge ONE MILLION DOLLAR for a CD, so they can claim they make an even bigger loss by people illegally downloading music from the internet.
This is one of the most laughable things I have ever heard.
CD prices were always higher than the equivalent cassette tape, which was much more complicated to produce and had the same production and marketing costs.
FTA: For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive.
The only thing that gets played on the radio is the latest Britney Spears bubblegum crap-ola. In fact, Mandy Moore recently apologized for making such bad music
So we have to pay for all the payola in getting the radio stations bribed to play the songs on the radio.
And then when a CD gets scratched, broken, or stolen, do we get a free replacement? Oh no, we have to pay the full retail cost all over again even though the RIAA wants us to think that we have somehow "licensed" the music from them.
I am glad that they are sweating, which they must be in order to be trying to play the "victim" game. The days of the Internet are here to stay, and bands can finally distribute their own music without getting shafted.
In the linked article it says that only 10% of all CD's make a profit. The other 90% of CD's put the bands into debt to the record companies, making it a really bad deal to sign a record contract. Courtney Love does the math.
The RIAA sounds desperate, and I hope they are -- it would serve them right.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, what you say about the cost of manufacturing a CD is absolutely correct. What you're not factoring in is the increase in cost of studio time (rent goes up with inflation, as does the price of labor for the guy(s) running the boards), artist payments (in theory, this should also go up with inflation), marketing costs (have you seen the price of a 30s spot during the Super Bowl?), and of course the costs to pay RIAA's troupe of lawyers and executives.
Does it have to be that expensive to produce music? Absolutely not! With modern technology, an aspiring artist can record RIAA-quality (ha!) music at home for a mere fraction of the cost of studio time. Grassroots marketing, word of mouth, and touring can make for both cheap and effective promotion. Cutting out the middle man (RIAA) allows more money to go to the right places (production, artist) while still lowering prices. Will the RIAA ever get their acts together and do the Right Thing (tm)? I doubt it, since they're the quintessential middle man. Like the GEICO commercials, artists need to cut out the middle man and pass the savings on to you.
Just because gas prices are going up (and most everything else of course), then we should also be paying more for CDs which are continuously cheaper to produce...is that the RIAA is telling us?
If the price of a CD should be $33 then the wage for the dude who screws up my burger should be roughly $20. Corporate America created piracy because no one in their right mind is going to walk in to a mall and buy three CDs for a hundred dollars at FYE. Three episodes on a single DVD for Dragon Ball Z for over $20? That's little 14 year old Jimmy's allowance for the rest of the month burned on roughly 60-70 minutes of entertainment. The people who own and run the big media companies are not our friends and do not have our best interests in mind. Flame? No, truth. Besides, I can't even watch the History channel anymore without hearing blatant bias even by the narrator much less swallow the vast majority of stuff that comes out. Plus it's overwhelmingly discriminatory against most people such as myself but most people will never awaken to that because you see it so much you must assume it's normal.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
If you look at most computer or home electronic prices, the trend has been downwards over the past twenty years. Not only downwards when adjusted for inflation, downwards when adjusted for performance, but downwards in absolute prices. I wish I had stronger memories and figures to back this up, but I do remember as a child, (I was born in 1979), people just had a wildly different attitude towards electronics. A VCR, cable television, a microwave oven, color TVs...all of these were important luxury items. This could be just a artifact of me growing up, but a color television set was on par with say, a grand piano as far as how expensive it seemed.
I do have better data for computers. I have a 1994 price guide to computers when bottom line computers, 386s cost around 1500 dollars, twice as much as a midrange new desktop would today.
All of this is stuff most readers here know. (Although I am expecting at least a few people will correct my specifics.)
What I have noticed, however, is that many people have not psychologically adjusted to this, even when they intellectually know it is the case. I have noticed this most at my work at Free Geek, where often people come in, with a Packard-Bell Pentium, and explain at some detail that the quad speed CD Drive works, if you just wiggle it around first. Or that their 14 inch monitor still works, but it might blink off every few minutes. Meanwhile, we get truckloads of P-4 systems every few days.
The point is, I think many people (often older people, but not always that much older), still have a mindset that computer and electronics are rare and valuable, instead of being the mass-produced, quickly obsolete, pieces of junk they are. And I think that many of these people are honestly confused about how valuable their product is. Of course, the RIAA people know that AOL mails out millions of CDs a month (do they still do that?), and that CDs cost "under 1 dollar to make" ( wikipedia on CD manufacturing). Of course they know these things intellectually, but I really do think they have a mindset that they are producing a rare and valuable resource, and that they aren't asking for much in that they haven't raised their prices with inflation.
Post-scarcity takes some getting used to. I consider the entertainment industries inability to come up with a more financing method that doesn't involve creating false scarcity to be one of the less harmful inabilities to adjust to a new paradigm. I consider the fact that the US political and industrial leaders really don't understand (even though they know) that the US has lost textiles 50 years ago, consumer items 40 years ago, vehicle manufacturing 30 years ago, electronic manufacturing 20 years ago and computer manufacturing 10 years ago (numbers somewhat generalized), and that all of those things are now produced overseas for a fraction of a US worker's hourly minimum wage, to be a much more dangerous symptom of the same disease.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Maybe the RIAA doesn't believe in free-market economics, but the price of a product follows the S-curve, and should drop from its introduction price, not stay there forever. Lunacy to expect or whine that a product should remain in the "early adopter" phase of the S-curve for the life of the product.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Rarely do I find music worth even 12 dollars. I decided long ago that I will never spend money to potentially find new music that I'd enjoy listening to. Two reasons - 1. It already cost to much and 2. Is there enough of a risk that I will probably never listen to the artist again. Now there are a three or four bands that I wouldn't mind dishing out 30 bucks for a album but I believe they deserve every penny. I only found out about these bands by I suppose questionably unlawful means. Though as soon as I found a truly special/original/talented band I have purchased everything I've wanted to own of theirs. Everything else has either been deleted or has rarely/never been listened to again. The RIAA really has its or I suppose their head up there asses if they plan to implement this, and how exactly do they expect to sell really anything at all? People will rarely start purchasing music for artists they even like let alone take a risk on an artist they have never even heard. This may be a good thing with the whole down with the RIAA dealy but still the stupidity amazes me.
I buy more DVDs than CDs. I feel DVDs give me more value for my entertainment money.
I'd be surprised to see recording costs increasing. Wage increases tend to be below the rate of inflation, the technological costs of the recording equipment are going down, and with improvements in technology, it's taking less time to do post-production on a recording.
jacking up the price of CDs is ridiculous. think about it: why does the sound track cost $18, but the movie on DVD with all the songs costs $11!???
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quote: "I'm the biggest money whore in the world,' Osbourne told me. "I love it. But it's time to stop."
She said greed was killing the concert business, and the bubble was about to burst, as it did in the music industry.
The record companies need to think out of the box regarding CD sales as well, not claim that they're underpriced...
It's clear that no one would pay $1300 for a C64 these days because computers have gotten so much faster for the money. But what's the comparison with music? You cite an example of how old computers aren't worth much because new computers are so much better, so what are you implying, that old music was worth a lot more because new music isn't anywhere near as good? Is new music so much worse than older music that it's not worth paying that much anymore, and the price had to fall on the new stuff, like prices fall on old computers? Obviously not, because a lot of these CD's being sold now have the same music on them that they had in 1983. The march of technology and Moore's law doesn't really say anything about the price of music over time.
The only reason I expect a CD to be inflation-adjusted cheaper today than in 1983 is that in 1983 they were still selling primarily tapes and some vinyl, and the only people with CD players were mostly audiophiles and early adopters, and the CD players had cost them a fortune and were part of premium stereo systems. No one had CD players in their cars, or portable ones, CD players were big, expensive components for rich high-end audio enthusiasts, who were clearly willing to pay a huge premium for the CD experience. The price of a CD in 1983 should be inflation adjusted and compared with the price of an SACD today. CD's are now the lowest-common-denominator standard format for the masses and should be priced as such. Had the price of CD's not fallen dramatically since the 1983 price, they would never have gotten popular and remained inaccessible, which would be an example of the RIAA companies shooting themselves in the foot, reducing profits trough overly high prices and small unit sales.
So pricing changes since '83 are a silly comparison, because the product's placement in the market changed entirely since '83. CD's have been the de facto audio standard now since at least 2000, I'd like to see what inflation adjusted prices have done from 2000-2007. That would indicate what CD prices have been doing.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' Inflation Calculator (http://minneapolisfed.org/research/data/us/calc/) , $33.86 1996 would be $44.35 in 2007 dollars.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Because I would looooove to see all RIAA people to eat is answer. Literally.
No sig for now.
Uh, wtf? Did you mean "lo and behold"? Seriously, I'm not a grammar or language Nazi, but is the literacy level of Slashdot still declining? Is that even possible?
By that premise a computer in 1983 should cost how much by today's standards?
And an 8-track in the 1970-s should be worth how much today according to said logic?
Not everything appreciates according to inflation. Stick it in your pie hole RIAA. Raise the price to $33 a CD and let's see how fast an exodus from the CD market consumers make.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
A 4.77mhz 8086 with 64kb ram and a 360kb floppy drive maybe cost around $3000 in 1982 (I was a newborn then, so I don't remember the exact numbers).
So today, an equivalent system should cost about $6000, based on the CPI. But since today's desktops are typically 10000 as fast, have 10000x the ram, and hard disks up to over 2 million times the size of a floppy, only the richest people in the world should be able to afford one.
You have to understand corporate math. That math says that if you made 15 million in profit in year one, and 10 million in year 2, then you have taken a 5 million loss in that second year. That thinking convolutes all kinds of statistics.
(...goes to books to make sure it's the right number...)
And that's with my shoddy economies of scale. I can't even imagine where the RIAA gets this kind of thinking, but I guess they gotta do what they gotta do to keep up with the price of cocaine, right? Can't imagine the weak dollar has helped them with their fine imported Columbian stuff.
accused of pricefixing them arbitrarily higher just a few years ago?
What you're not factoring in is the increase in cost of studio time
Sorry, but recording studios can be built for pennies compared to what they cost 20 years ago - generally in the range of $10k when using an existing space. Sure, salaries and equipment rental still cost $$$, but if you're halfway reasonable, that's cheap, too.
marketing costs (have you seen the price of a 30s spot during the Super Bowl?)
who buys superbowl ads for a new band?
the costs to pay RIAA's troupe of lawyers and executives.
Bingo!
Does it have to be that expensive to produce music? Absolutely not! With modern technology, an aspiring artist can record RIAA-quality (ha!) music at home for a mere fraction of the cost of studio time. Grassroots marketing, word of mouth, and touring can make for both cheap and effective promotion.
So you're saying that the RIAA is jacking up their prices because they're less relevant than they were? The only reason the RIAA is still around is that nobody is willing to gut them like a fish, which is what would happen if the government were actually serious about anti-trust. Just try and get significant airtime for a non RIAA artist - when's the last time you heard prince on the radio (stuff from the past 4 years, mind)?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
-RIAA does not manufacture CD's . story over. then again there would be always net stores or orders straight from china.
Dont Judge The situation by the Misfortunate. Goga.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
When I view this story, titled RIAA Says CDs Should Cost More, the "Related Stories" section has a link to a story titled Blockbuster Sued Over Late Fees Claim. Are the Related Stories hand-picked, or does Slashdot have a search engine that uses an algorithm to find stories that it thinks are related?
Usually, the related stories are related in some way, such as the Jobs Favors DRM-Free Music Distribution story listing EU Countries Call Out iTunes DRM as a related story, which makes perfect sense. But how does a story about Blockbuster getting sued over late fees get flagged as being related to the RIAA saying CDs should cost more?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
Just like that POS device 'Tapwave' sells for more than the cost of the actual hardware to pay for the work that went into develop it, CDs allow an artist to earn more while letting more people share the cost.
The difference is, of course, people actually want CDs, as oppose to the Tapwave which sold so well the company went into bankruptcy.
So, let's see here.
How ubiquitous was the CD in 1983? Hardly. It was a bleeding edge product and was high priced, as all bleeding edge products are.
When HDTV was introduced in 1998 prices were around $6,000 - $9,000.
So by that standard, prices should be around $10,000 - $15,000 today.
Oh, the RIAA reminds me that:
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts--for support rather than for illumination." ~Andrew LangWhat would happen if the computer industry priced their products today based on RIAA illogic...
In 1986, My IBM PC 5150 cost $2000 for 4.77MHz of performance.
Adjusted for inflation and applicable linear price increase for the extra MHz:
In 2007, a 2.0GHz computer should cost $1561700.
Yeah, right.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
pissed off, shake your head, blaspheme god/allah/budha/your_own_divinity, shoot your computer monitor, .... or you can vote with your money.
I used to spend quite a bit of money on music, movies and theaters. I recently spent a weekend working out my budget in the last 15 years (wonder why I kept all these shits for all these years), and found out I spent on average 5K per year on those items (before I made my decisions, that is). The biggest chunk goes to CDs and cassette tapes. It's even more than what I spent on food (Unbelievable, I spent less than 50$ per week on food).
Then, in early 2001, I decided not to do that anymore. I haven't bought a CD since then, went to theaters only twice, rented movies less than 10 times. Now, every time I crave for movies, I go out for an excursion in the forest or in the mountain, or get a good book (which cost the same as going to theater but the pleasure of reading certainly lasts longer). Well, all these monies I've saved...
I wish I've done this 20 years earlier. Imagine all the monies saved, with wise investment or accumulated interest, my pension fund would have been much better off.
I'm not saying you should give up all these, but you certainly don't have to pay your "taxes". You can certainly do something about it though, like give less money to those fatty RIAA executives, for once.
Of probable noteworthy addition is.. those prices in 1983, and 1996, led to an anti-trust pricefixing lawsuit brought by 43 states.
http://musiccdsettlement.com/english/default.htm
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Payola.
Exactly, thats why you hear the same song over and over on the radio, it has to be pushed, the record industries put to much money in the artist for a song (on a cd) to tank. Take hollaback girl, they pushed it so hard it sold out of shear volume, even though the song is utter crap.
The record industries could sell music people want, thousands of new artists selling new work, not a handful using writers. Thats why downloadable music scares the crap out of them, they wont be the distributors anymore.
Let's see, record labels were convicted of illegally price-fixing CDs. Now they are complaining that CD prices are too low due to supply/demand economics. What a bunch of sore losers...
(As in "Read The Fucking Article Linked From The Article".)
The RIAA page that's being used as a source doesn't suggest that CDs should cost more than they do now. It argues that, given how the price of CDs has not gone up with inflation with their introduction, how the amount of music in them has gone up, and how convenient they are as a format, CDs at their current price are a good value.
Are you adequate?
This is just from the first link on google searching "dollar value index" that's relevent (http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/compare /result.php), so don't take this too strongly but..
(CD)
In 1983, $33.36 from 1996 is worth:
$21.18 using the Consumer Price Index
$23.18 using the GDP deflator
$22.29 using the unskilled wage
$17.39 using the nominal GDP per capita
$15.09 using the relative share of GDP
(Model T)
In 1996, $890.00 from 1908 is worth:
$15,654.82 using the Consumer Price Index
$12,087.77 using the GDP deflator
$64,267.11 using the unskilled wage
$75,533.01 using the nominal GDP per capita
$229,378.21 using the relative share of GDP
Looks to me like their both overestimating both the relative price of the CD, and also not considereing the general increase in income compared to the rest of the world that we've gone through in the interim, see the model T price.
The stat is completely useless for accurate comparisons.
In 1983, CDs were a brand-new technology just on the market, they were hard to find, the only factories that pressed them were located in Japan and West Germany, and they commanded a substantial premium over the records and tapes that by and large made up the majority of the market at the time.
It's time to give you all a reality check.
The RIAA knows from experience that the following formula holds true:
HIGH_PER_UNIT_PRICE + LOTS_OF_PUSHY_MARKETING = PROFIT!!!
Note that QUALITY_OF_PRODUCT is nowhere to be found in that equation. It doesn't factor in. Completely shitty music yields high profits as long as the industry overprices it and then markets the hell out of it.
This works because most people are stupid, mindless sheep. That's the way it has always been and the way it will continue to be for a very long time. As long as these sheep exist, then pushy brainwashing is all that's necessary to get them to think something is great. These are the same mindless sheep who don't get the joke behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster and who voted for Bush in the last two presidential elections -- in short, complete idiots incapable of critical thinking.
If you're angry at the industry for selling overpriced shit, your anger is misplaced. You should be angry at all the stupid people who fall for it, because the industry is just catering to them. The only solution to the problem is to gather all the stupid people together in one place (preferably by holding some kind of redneck event, such as a rodeo, NASCAR race, or televangelism marathon) and drop a rather large bomb on them.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
YEAH! Why the fuck does Micro$oft charge $600 for software? It probably costs about $5 to make, if you include the box and all the printed material. And don't get me started on such companies like Adobe or Autodesk, who can charge over $2000 for what amounts to a single DVD!
Okay, seriously now. These CDs cost money because they cost money to make. The cost isn't just in the printing, but the whole god damn production. You have to hire a producer, audio engineers, album designers. You must rent time in a recording studio, buy instruments, and (the most important) make enough money so that you can live decently. Maybe $16 is too high. When I buy bands from small bands not signed to a big label, they might cost $9 to $12.
From the manufacturing end of it, the costs have actually come down since the 80,s.
.20 -.30 to make one cd and customer expected 4 color printing and final assembly for that price.
I was in the cd manufacturing industry from mid 80,s to 2000.
In the begining costs to manufacture disc where a very much higher than now.
Equipment costs where huge, 4+ million for mastering and production line.
Cycle times where also high at 7+ seconds with high reject rates 15+ %
Raw material costs also hurt as the supplies fed a limited market.
The only plus side was you could get almost $2 just to make one cd with 1 color printing. not including jewel case and paper.
In the mid 90,s everything dropped.
Mastering and production line could be had for 1 mill.
Cycle times dropped to high 3 to low 4 seconds with reject rates normally sub 1%.
Raw material cost plumeted as suppliers now had new cometitors entering the market.
What hurt was you could only get
Im sure pricing has only gotten worse for the manufacturers since I left in 2000.
Especially the polycarbonate cost with the petroleum market so high.
"Fact: The unit cost of a single CD, silkscreened, in a jewel case, with six-page four-color liner notes,
Quantity 5,000: USD$0.91.
Quantity 10,000: USD$0.79.
Explain to me again why these fsckers cost $16.00?"
It's real simple:
+$16.00
-$12.01 (75% cut for recording label)
-$01.33 (8.33% cut for artist)
-$01.33 (8.33% cut for retailer)
-$01.33 (8.33% cut for manufacturing & distribution)
-------
$0
I currently have around 3000 mp3s on my computer... now to imagine im going to pay 33 USD per cd (of songs I mainly dont want) for that volume is ridiculious. Its only via online distribution I would ever accumulate this much music. The arguments against the current system are extensive.. but things like... 1. With so much music I barely listen to any one song.. its nothing like when I bought discreate amounts of music via cds.. its more like a personal radio station. 2. Id never buy so much music at cd prices but no one ever would, we mainly heard that music for free already via the radio or from a friends collection. Surely if someone told a music exec that most people want more than 1000 songs it would be like winning the lotto. 3. The entire paradigm of music "ownership" has changed, it wasn't what the RIAA wanted but its what happened, they cant expect to keep trying to throw buckets of water out of the sinking ship to save it. It seems as if there is no solution except the death of the current recording industry and a new generation that can tailor to the new markets. They would have to change the entire sale system which would stab in the back all the music retail outlets and staff they have working in the current sales channels. Im like a lot of people.. if I could buy my 3000 songs for even a dollar a song or so I think I probably would, over a number of years. The bottom line is.. that's a lot more money that I ever spent on cds before I ever pirated any. We should get the Japanese on this, the RIAA view it as disaster but it sounds like opportunity to me...
I am beginning to think everybody that consists of the RIAA are dropping acid.
Where are the muscians in all of this nonsense? I think the musicians should speak for the industry and not corporate asstards whose only job is to make money. The funny thing is, is that they are hell bent on screwing the people who make them who they are today. Which leads me to say. Download everything and anything before some morons change society in a very bad way and start making stupid laws.
CDs have had their time and place. It is time for them to move on. As the internet grows and bandwidth becomes bigger, better and available to more people...you will find that cds lose value. Any physical media like discs (not HDDs)will lose value. Why the hell am I going to try to back up my media or documents on a CD or even a DVD or EVEN a HDDVD. Discs are good but not as good as something like flash memory on a stick or wireless connections. I don't see corporations backing their media up on CDs, DVDs, or HD-DVDs. There is no way a CD should cost more than it does. It is just technology and anyone who knows technology knows and understands that the older things get the cheaper they get because something better comes out. RIAA has extremely flawed logic and again I think they are dropping acid.
If CDs weren't so cheap right now, how many new technologies or discoveries would there have been. People often forget how important data rentention and data sharing is. I wonder how many doctors, scientists, teachers, lawyers, law makers, etc. all have burned a CD and how many of them actually used it for their professions. I am sure the number is quite high and it goes to show you how one technology could save the world or advance humanity.
The fact that it this stuff is given to society at a low price is amazing and should stay that way. Ofcourse, any new technology ends up costing a lot in the beginning for many reasons like to recover the costs of R&D with the product and sometimes just to make the most amount of money. Eventually those prices drop and not go up. We know that something better will come along.
One thing I would suggest to the RIAA and MPAA is just to give up and come up with some other business model that pwns everybody. Isn't that what we pay you for anyways? The fact that you guys aren't creative enough to actually come up with a viable business model that is fair and profitable it just astounds me. I don't know about everyone else in the world but I am tired of paying money for an album that has maybe one or two songs that are fairly good and the rest of the album sucks. I am tired of paying for that intern to get your f-ing coffee in the morning. There is no reason why these publicists, or producers, or managers should be getting what they pay. You know where all your money is going from a CD sale? It definately doesn't go to the artist. Artists make so much bank off of concerts and private appearances it is absolutely insane. And yes there is people working behind the scene in a lot of that especially concerts but today I mean if you actually had talent you can record all of your work on a $4,000 PC and have studio quality sound. Not only that but you have things like the internet to promote yourself. Use myspace, youtube, google video, ifilm, etc. Make your own website and advertise the hell out of yourself. This isn't rocket science. If you are good then you should be easy to make gigs, go to concerts, do major venues(yes, I know it costs money to do that).
I would love to see all musicians, actors,actresses, producers, managers,etc. get paid what they earn. I would put it about $80,000 a year and royalties if they sold in their cds, songs, concerts really well. I have this system at work at it drives me to actually work really hard to produce a good quality product to the best of my ability. Try doing 70-80+ weeks for 8 months at a time. 16-19 hour days sometimes. I only get paid what most teachers get paid but I also get a bonus which helps. I don't
Do we have a tag for, "how stupid do they think we are?" yet?
As a recording artist who ISN'T represented by the RIAA, I can't begin to tell you how much I resent these idiots and the credibility-destroying damage they're doing to artist/ fan relations. [/grumble]
If you ask the RIAA to raise the price of a CD to $33.86, you know what will happen. The sales of CDs will fall off. The RIAA will claim that sales have fallen off because of increased piracy. The RIAA will then get Congress to some how tax everyone for the "stolen music" and thereby make up for all the "lost" profit.
Dairy farmers think milk should cost more.
FUCKING DUH!
of course, laughing them off doesn't really work that well.
maybe we should sue the RIAA again for price fixing, again.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I can see that as a way of getting around paying for something twice if in the event the scenarios ever reared their heads. It in theory wouldn't be breaking RIAA laws as you still have in your possession the CD, albiet rooted and non playable, but still in your possession none the less.
People have been talking about 2007 becoming the year that music DRM dies. Well, here's the first phase in the music industry's plan to get rid of DRM. They want to up the price of CDs, so they can recoup the losses they say they'll take when they get rid of DRMed files for online stores. They're not going to give up DRM because they're smart. They're going to do it because they have no other choice. So they'll do everything they can to raise the price on CDs. Then they'll back online stores that use differential pricing, so they can charge $3 for the latest pop diva hit song, and $1 for "My Sharona."
The RIAA: Milking A Dry Teat Since 2001.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I was set to distribute Funny mod points in this topic, but instead felt the need to point somthing out.
The artists are building up tolerance to the drugs they use to come up with the songs, if we, as scientists, simply produce stronger drugs, we should be able to effectively prevent increases in music prices.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Isn't it normal that the price of a CD, a fairly technology back in 1983, was expensive? We pay 33$ for the DVD of an artist, but now we've got the whole tour on TV, along with the album. I don't think you can extrapolate in time the price of a technology...
iTx Technologies: Open source development in Montreal
to the RIAA. The CD, and the music 'business' itself is finished, mister. She's done. Kaput. Finito. Fat lady singing. Over. Its only a matter of time before all the record co.'s are finito as well. Bye bye, idiots. I think CD's should be $1500 each - that will hasten the demise of these wankers.
In todays day and age Music is damn near ubiquitous and supply far exceeds the demand. If the RIAA figures out a mechanism to defeat that natural market force I hope they share the secret.
I have near limitless supply toe jam, ear wax and bodily fluids I'd like to mass distribute. At the price point I choose of course.
So, since, they've been overcharging us massively for CDs for 24 years, every album I buy for the next 24 years will be free, right?
Yeah, didn't think so....
In the linked article it says that only 10% of all CD's make a profit.
Doesn't this mean the CD industry just needs to get better at finding profitable artists?
Small time artists, like myself, are better served my printing our own CDs and selling them at gigs and online, allowing us to keep a larger share of our sales. Now, we've haven't earned enough to quit our day job, but we haven't sent ourselves into the poorhouse either.
How is it a bad thing that the nominal price of a CD is the same now as it was almost 25 years ago? Hint: a $12/hour wage is chump change now, whereas in 1983 it was a lot of money.
Seriously though, TFA is so far off the mark it's not even funny. We all know that the cost of producing the actual CD is only a small portion of the price, so even if the production costs of the physical media have decreased by, say, 75% since 1983, it's only a drop in the bucket compared to everything else that goes into getting an album into your hands.
A real RIAA=great satan economic analysis should go something like this:
"The nominal difference between the price of a CD and the cost of production is not too much greater now than it was in 1983. If we assume that the band and recording staff are receiving about the same percentage of the revenues now as they were in 1983, this necessarily means that in real terms the band makes significantly less per CD in 2003 as they did in 1983. Won't somebody please think of the rock musicians?"
I personally think the Beatles' older material is overrated. But people still listen to it, and their much better later songs, 37 years after they broke up.
Meanwhile the Spice Girls are already yesterday's news, only a decade after their first album.
Now we all know what Mr. Sturgeon said, and surely 90% of the music of the Beatles' era was also crud; but the crud from that era is as forgotten as the Spice Girls. But who from the Spice Girls' era, or from now, will still be on the radio 37 years from now?
Can any of the big labels honestly claim to have released even one single this year with the longevity of "Come Together"?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Of course the prices should rise! They're now including FREE OF CHARGE some DRM just for us LUCKY consumers! Why pay for an internet connection, when you can BUY similar system-crippling virii for a FRACTION of the cost?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Studio-time is trough the floor. It used to be just a few decades ago that a studio capable of producing comercial-quality records cost on the order of a house. These days you get superior signal-handling from gear that costs literally 2-3 orders of magnitude less. Hell, $10K will buy you equipment good enough to win awards with your records, I know because my co-worker across the hall did 2 weeks ago. (Spelemannsprisen, the most prestigious Norwegian music-award)
the price of labor for the guy(s) running the boards), artist payments (in theory, this should also go up with inflation),
Actually, it should go up proportionally to average *salary*-increases in a society, which is *MORE* than inflation if the society is getting richer. This is however in this particular case more than offset by two facts. One, modern equipment is *much* less labour-intensive and two, the lower leads to increased availability, which leads to more people capable of dealing with much of it. Many bands even do a lot themselves. Yes they'll need one or two (preferably good!) sound-technicians for the couple of days the actual recording takes. But let's face it, that works out to paying an engineer for a week. For well-selling records its down in the noise.
Marketing costs whatever you want it to cost. You can spend $100 or $100million promoting a single album. That was always so.
Fact is, the RIAA is just whining. There's nothing whatsoever stopping them from selling an album for $35. I encourage them to try. People are then, offcourse, free to simply not *buy* that. But that's a free market for you. I guess they're too used to monopolies and dictating terms.
Of the $15 a new CD costs, I pay something like $4 to the shop selling it for wages, shelf-space, rent etc. Perhaps $1-$2 for physical distribution, storage, imports etc. Another $1 or so for production, including covers, inlet etc.
All of which is services I have no need for whatsoever, and indeed would hugely prefer if they'd just drop. That leaves about half the price.
I'd also like them to just stop paying for advertising, fire a few dozen lawyers and fat bosses at the RIAA, and basically you're left with money for the band, and those people involved in actually *making* the music. (composers, text-writers, musicians, sound-technicians, etc) and a tiny cost for the distribution.
Yet, online music is overwhelmingly DRM-infected and $0.99/track, largely to avoid cannibalising traditional CD-sales. Of these $0.99 perhaps a tenth goes to the band. It's hugely ineffective.
$0.29/track of which $0.25 goes to those actually making the music would be more along the lines. This would double the income of everyone making music -- but leave RIAA irrelevant.
Don't make any CD's, at least for sale in record stores. CD sales are falling. How you make money is to release a few songs for free download on the internet. Spread hype: get a Myspace page, and get your name out. This will get people hooked on your music. Then offer the majority of your music as either pay for download or pay to have a CD shipped. The artist's biggest problem with this scheme is recording the music in the first place, but if done right, it is possible to become a paid artist without any contracts. Some are already doing this, but the only one I know of is KaW.
So the RIAA says that CDs should cost more, eh? Well, with piracy rates skyrocketing, why should I care? People already pirate music because:
1. Nobody wants to shovel out $25 for a CD with 9 crappy songs we don't want and 1 that we do.
2. We can make out own compilations with the songs we want on them, in the order we want. Nothing is more of a buzzkill than listening to a Van Halen power track, and have the next track be some sappy love ballad, or one we don't like.
3. If we don't like the music, which is sometimes the case, since labels don't usually differentiate different versions of the same song by the same band on different albums, we're stuck with a $25 beer coaster.
4. Why the hell would we want to pony up $25 for the one or two songs we actually want to listen to?
I don't really understand why the RIAA is publicly saying that CDs should cost more. We feel ripped off even at $15 for a CD, let alone $35. Just saying that something should cost more than it actually does isn't gonna make people feel like thy are getting a bargain. Just because the price of diesel dropped from $3.20 a gallon doesn't make me feel thankful for having to pay $2.90 a gallon now.
So, why should I, or anyone else, feel thankful for being overcharged less that the RIAA says they *should* be charging? It's like someone telling you that you should be thankful for 9 spankings instead of 10. Either way, it still sucks. This is just a really bad attempt at making up want to stop pirating because we should be thankful that the are not charging us as much as they *should* be.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a "good record deal." The numbers are so stacked against the people making the music that, as recent Atlantic Records signee David Garza noted, "It only works for the artist if more than a million copies are sold. Period."
The obvious problem with that, of course, is that of the approximate 30,000 albums released every year, less than one percent go platinum (certified sales of one million), meaning there are very few recording artists for whom the record deal is actually working.
This problem is further compounded by the fact that very few musicians know what their record contract actually says. Which is quite understandable; the average Egyptologist had a better shot at deciphering hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone than the average musician today has of making heads or tails out of their recording contract. This turns out to be, perhaps, the worst problem of all since those pages upon pages of tediously rigid terminology, obscure even to the legally trained, hold the financial fate of an artist.
The Cold, Hard Truth About Recording ContractsTurning coffee into code.
How can I possibly pick up a DVD for $10 ?
The fact is, its all about greed. I think other slashdotters have already covered the whole scales of economy so I won't take it any further than that.
I can tell you now that I simply don't think a CD is worth $33. They only think its worth that much because its what they think they can get away with it.
...things cost exactly what they're worth, which is whatever the market will bear.
Unless they're admitting to being a price-fixing monopoly Or admitting they are stupid, and actually could charge more without seeing a reduction in sales.
sig fault
Mark up and other expenses my boy. Why does a green salad cost $5 in a resturant when you can get a full head of lettuce for a $1? If you want to cut out all the middle men and fly to South East Asia to pick up your CD from the factory I'm sure you'd get an impressive discount. The problem is there's an army of people between you and the artist. When I used to work in the prop shop at Disney they paid us roughly 1/5 of what the time was billed for. Where'd the rest go? Overhead and paying for several administrators for everyone in the shop doing the actual work. I guess everyone can potentially find all their music on Myspace and Youtube. The problem is there's a few million people out there that think they are talented and only a handful are right. The system used to filter through those people and promote the handful with talent. Given the quality of music and films that system is broken and obviously most of the talent isn't getting found. I'm not for anarchy which seems to be the direction it's headed in. Personally I'd rather see the artists running the music companies and the rights to the music staying with the artists where it belongs. If that happened twenty years ago we'd have a very different industry but as it is it's probably too late.
I entirely agree with all of that. Record companies used to provide a valuable service by fronting the high costs of recording, copying, distributing, and promoting music. By the very nature of the business, they had to pick and choose between bands and decide which music would be heard. The entire model is obsolete. It's a broken paradigm for information distribution.
But I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion. We were talking about what the RIAA companies have done with the price of CD's. They're claiming they went down, based on invalid data. As you said, the up and coming model of internet distribution has so far, for the most part, been priced about the same as CD's, so it's not a form of competition driving the price down on CD's, yet. I don't see how similarly priced digital music distribution relates to an argument about whether the price of CD's has gone up or down. But you're right that the price of internet downloaded music should sooner or later fall off a cliff, as the studios, who currently get over $0.90 on the dollar of the money, become entirely excluded from the process.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
High fixed costs?
Say it with me: Total Cost = Fixed Cost + Variable Cost
Variable cost is your $/unit.
Fixed cost is the amount it costs to sign artists and record CDs (studio equipment, staff to run that equipment, etc). It is also worth noting that dispite what you might think, the recording industry is exposed to a big risk that they have to cover-- most artists flop, only a few are sucessful, but you can't spot this before you record and attempt to sell a CD. The result-- those large fixed costs are entirely absorbed by the record company. This has to be offset by the few rare sucess stories.
Look, the simple economics of it is that if somebody else could do what the big record companies do, and for cheaper, they would be doing it and making a fortune. It isn't that easy. Like always, the armchair executives completely discount the value that management, entrepeneurship, marketing and investment expertise have. Not everything is about physical units of product.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Yeah... isn't that the whole premise of globalization anyway? That stuff gets cheaper?
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
It's quite amazing that everytime the RIAA trolls the press with sutff like this everybody gets a fit and it's like "can you believe them? bla bla"
Please, don't feed the trolls and lets get on to more interesting subjects.
CDs cost precisely what the RIAA *wants* them to cost. So I honestly don't understand how they, off all people, can complain about the pricing. I think that they cost somewhat to much. But more important to me is that I think downloadable drm-infected music costs *WAAAAY* to much.
Sure, I can choose simply not to buy that. And I do. It's just that it's a pity, because I *DO* want to listen to music and I *DO* want those who make music I like to be rewarded. And I *am* prepared to pay a reasonable price to them. But the option is simply not offered to me. A market failure.
Artists want to sell music to me for like $0.10/track. I'd like to *buy* some of that music, and I would for 2-3 times the price, if I'd get it in an unencumbered format. But that doesn't work out, because the RIAA sits between and says I gotta pay literally ten times the price and then get it drm-infected. (whereafter they'll spend a significant portion of the money I just gave them lobbying *against* my interests) I'm just not prepared to do that.
Don't let it bother you. What the RIAA meant to say is it wishes CDs were more expensive.
Sure...and I wish I could give a pony to every starving child in Africa. Well RIAA, guess what? I don't have a pony to give every starving child in Africa! And the ponies would just get eaten anyway. So, um, maybe the ponies could eat the record company execu... I mean, um, maybe the children could eat CDs...no, that's not it either...oh hell. Never mind.
iron maiden's cds cost like Rs. 495 here in india - that's like 2 packs of DVD-R+s
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
This has happened consistently with bread. Imagine the price of bread today if we applied XII Century's standard and discounted it...
Beautiful reasoning, is it?
RIAAAA.
fuck the RIAA. When does this shit end? How about actually providing value?
Someone should tell the RIAA that the monkeys are supposed to work on Hamlet, not economic theory.
Couldn't I just as easily say that CDs cost way too much twenty years ago? If we're going to ignore market conditions that drive the prices and arbitrarily decide which price level is the right one, why not choose today's? What makes the 1983 price the correct one?
Following that reasoning, have executive compensation packages stayed consistent with inflation over that time period? Why or why not? Which is the correct one?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I wonder what CDs should cost the record companies to manufacture given that they were more expensive to produce in 1985.
I've read that section, but I can't figure out what the fee 17 U.S.C. 115 is for in this case.
"the royalty shall be either two and three-fourths cents, or one-half of one cent per minute of playing time or fraction thereof, whichever amount is larger."
assuming 20 songs on a disc, 55 cents, or 75 minutes, 37.5 cents...
I just bought a rucksack for 50DKK (~ US$ 9). Seems OK. My new vacuum cleaner did cost 250 DKK (~ US$ 45). A new garden table set (table, bench and chairs) was 500 DKK (~ US$ 90).
I doubt I could have purchased any of these items for the same amount 20 years ago.
The rucksack and vacuum cleaner were made in China, the garden table set was made in Vietnam.
An 1983, a CD was an exclusive item, sold only to audiophiles.
Those who didn't have the large disposable income for music that the enthusiasts had, had the option of buying the same music on LP or cassette for $9. CDs started to match cassette sales in 1990. Since substantially before that time, the price has been pretty uch in line with CPI.
Damn right! If you want a real computer, you have to pay for it. Screw your cruddy Core Duos with their fancy-wanky MacOS and Vista. A real man knows how to compute with 64k of RAM, and walks uphill through snow both ways to do it.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Will the RIAAs members be increasing their payments to their artists by the same percentage then?
> this is a classic example of supply and demand.
No, it is only half the supply and demand model. The demand adjusts to the price, the supply does not. The supply and demand model describes an equilibrium price that would happen in a perfect market. Most recordings are covered by copyright, making their production state granted monopolies, which is as far from a perfect market as you can come.
Supply and demand can be used to model what happens with recordings whose copyright has expired.
Haha.. the RIAA's actions have converted me into a pirate with conviction. I used to purchase cd's of my favourite groups, but I am not gonna lie... now I could careless. So what has changed?
Every article I have read in the past 5 years has been about the RIAA scrambling to ensure they treat their customers/market like criminals and/or shitty as humanly possible. So go ahead and jack up CD's to 30 bucks you schmucks.. cause your current actions have ensured I will never buy a CD for even COST (~1.00).
I hope artists continue to find more creative ways to move their music without record companies so that I can once again proceed to support them.
You neanderthal degenerates...
God, we sell plastic discs with art on them and human beings are going to jail because the RIAA doesn't have enough to build their sky-rises out of gold?.
(Of course, that doesn't mean I'll volunteer the $30 if it's marked at $12. In that case it's simply a much better value.)
The new business model they have selected in Canada and Denmark (and probably other nations as well) is to make the state collect money for them through on "blank media", while still suing the ass off anyone who copy their recordings unauthorized, and granting themselves more and more state-like powers.
-$01.33 (8.33% cut for retailer)
I'm not sure if this is common, but I was assistant manager in a bookstore that sold CDs for a few years. Our regular price for them was usually in the $16-$18 range, but most of the CDs we sold were on sale in the $14 range, sometimes as low as $10. However, when we purchased the CDs from the distributor, we paid about $8 for most of them.
I can't say how the percentage works out for the recording label/artist/distributor, but at my retail store we took up to 50% (not 8.33%) of that $16, leaving only $8 to split between everyone else. Of course, take this for what it's worth, as it is just one piece of anecdotal evidence.
Why not just put up the price a modest amount and pay it to the RIAA? It would be a lot cheaper for them than suing people on the "You won't dare defend" basis.
Though most of the time when I'm in the car I listen to NPR.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's like saying that the price of the Pentium 3 CPU has come down significantly since they were introduced. It cost $600 a peice, and that was in year 1999 dollars!
I kinda wonder, does the RIAA think we're too dumb to do economy and math, or are they? I wager the first.
The cost of a CD is quite simply a large lump of fixed cost and a tiny fraction of variable (=per item) cost. In general, you can almost say that it does not matter whether you press one or a billion CDs, the price for the whole lot is almost identical.
Since the CDs sold in the 80s number in thousands, not millions, the manufacturing cost of a CD in the 80s was, even in absolut numbers, not just adjusted for inflation, a lot higher than it is today. So this whole claim is first class prime oxen manure.
BTW, just as food for thought: The first writable CD media costed about 5 to 10 bucks per piece. Today you get (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) at least 50 or 100 of them. So in other words, why does a CD cost more than 13 cents?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The RIAA has just given me one more reason not to buy anything that they are involved in. Here I was thinking that they couldn't make buying content from them any less desirable that it already is.
siener's youtube channel
I think CD prices have fallen a bit in the last few years, but the only reason for that is competition from iTunes
The RIAA treats us like idiots (when it's not like criminals). CD stamping costs only cents in quantities of 10,000+; even in Australia it's only 99c each for a run of 10,000 including a jewel box (ref: www.cdroms.com.au)
"RIAA Says CDs Should Cost More"
Legion303 says the RIAA should get fucked.
I'll have to remember to charge them $375+ an hour for programming jobs in 2007 based on my 1983 rates. I've actually had to drop my rates for several customers (though it is steadily coming back up to a more sensible value). And I'd guess those NTSC plasma displays that were 40 inches will currently have to sell for well over 40,000 dollars as the originals were in the 16K dollar range.
RIAA, you keep using that math. I do not think it means what you think it means.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I love that you have dersive_laughter as a standard header file. I with I'd thought of that. Many of my conversations with people I didn't want to talk to would have been much shorter and simpler.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Does the RIAA seriously need to continue proving to the world that they are shitballs nuts? I mean, their whole big bad scary court cases are already highly entertaining. And in order to be sued by them for pirating it's seriously like winning the lottery if you look at the numbers. So who honestly cares? Especially with all of the claims they make with "losses" and "what should be." Bravo, RIAA, for invoking the "send the white coated men to my house" giggles yet again.
Wrong. You only have a monopoly if there are no alternative products. Last time I looked the music industry was positively overflowing with different artists producing both similar and different styles of music.
If what you're referring to is a monopoly, then every single employee on the planet has both a monopoly of their labour, and on their production. Yet amazingly the labour market shows no signs of being a monopoly.
The rule-of-thumb I've seen is every time something changes hands, the price gets marked up.
For example, I took a pretty picture of something. Showed it to a friend who runs a little shop that sells a few photo prints. He said, "How much do you want for 25 of it?" I said, "What's your usual markup?" He said they doubled the wholesale price and added a buck. So I looked at their other prints, which were selling for about $10-11, figured out they were paying about $4.50-$5.00 each, and went off to find a place where I could get prints of my picture for less than half of that amount, since gosh, if they were going to make 100% profit, I wanted to make 100% profit too!
So my 25 prints wound up costing me $60 or so; my friend paid $120 or so, and at retail, they sold for a total of $250 or so. And everyone was happy, I guess.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The word "should" does not appear anywhere in the original article. Not once. The word "would", however, does. Do I need to explain the difference?
So the Techdirt article is trolling a strawman argument, and this slashdot article is blindly following suit.
Without the cartel, the prices of CDs would likely vary depending on supply / demand of the individual records. Prices are artificially held at a certain price, not because of the monopoly on a single recording, but because of (illegal) price fixing.
Additionally, compared to my parents again, consumer credit has (rightly or wrongly) gone sky-high to the point where a proportion of the population views living with credit card bills as completely the norm.
So whilst an economist might be able to show that in "real" terms, the prices of items have either decreased or increased over the years, in practice, it's more about how much money an individual has that determines how much that person would be "prepared" to pay for an item. And since a lot of us have "more" money than our parents did, the price we'd be prepared to pay for an item would be higher. This has nothing to do with the "value" of an item, just how far you can push the consumer into paying for it.
Here in the UK (and maybe it's the same in the US and the rest of the world), successive governments have slowly but surely piled on additional taxation on we citizens little by little over many years - the logic behind that approach is that the government knows that money is in our pockets and if they add the taxes on in a "stealthy" fashion, they'll get a few whines and moans from us but "they mostly want to be good citizens", we will begrudgingly put up with it.
It should therefore come as no great shock to anyone that big corporations also want a piece of that big "money pie" in the consumer's pockets.
If you're a big monopoly like Microsoft, you can charge just about what you want for your products because you "know" that most people have the ability to find the money to pay the prices you want.
What the RIAA and the music industry is doing here is no different - just trying to get their piece of the pie...
And the solution to this is for a whole lot more of the populace to be a lot more discerning about what they buy - not look at what an item costs as a proportion of the money they have but instead to create fixed ceilings as to how much money they are pay for specific items and to ***NEVER*** go over that price.
Then the RIAA would have to just shut the hell up knowing that the moment the prices of CDs increased, nobody would buy them...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
is, id I recall correctly, 10 tracks.
If there are more than 10 tracks, the standard contract (again, IIRC) those extra ten tracks do not increase the royalties for the artist.
The maths then works out to license the CD will cost at most 27.5 cents.
We should be paying about 4 grand for a new dell?
Let's think of all the things we can that have gotten cheaper over the same period, yet perform the same or better than in the 1980s._ id=5270015
- Your PC - by performance numbers alone, it should cost $50M each.
- Hard disks - i have a 10M Seagate that cost me almost $500, today you get a 1GB USB drive for $20.
- Gasoline - Everyone thinks gas is higher, it isn't if you do the math.
- VHS movies were $79, they are now $5 in the bargain bin. DVDs too.
- High quality audio equipment - you had to spend $10,000 back then to reach the sound quality of a $200 system today
- FM Radio is still free, but FM radios are given away as company schwag - Thanks Business Objects http://www.businessobjects.com/ and Sun http://www.sun.com/!
- DVD players were $500 (I have a Toshiba) and now they are $30 http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product
- T-shirts are still $9-15
- Items that have been outsourced for production are 30%-90% cheaper.
- I'm sorry that you want a raise, RIAA, I'd like a raise too, but haven't had one since 2001.
Ok, so this means that CDs should now cost $1 since manufacturing has been completely outsourced and costs have dropped at least 16x over this same period. Get over it RIAA and wake up to competition. You are confused as to which business you are in. You think you are in the art business, when you are in the magazine business.
on the specific costs that make up the price of a CD..." They DON'T KNOW THE DETAILED COSTS OF THEIR OWN PRODUCTS? Anybody who has ever priced up a product knows that this MUST be a blatant lie.
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
To me this sounds like a bunch of commie whiners that call for artificially higher prices.
CDs were the digital replacement for LPs. At replacement time the cost for making CDs was much higher than for LPs and that is how record companies justified a 100% price increase. When production costs of CDs reduced to even less than, LPs the record companies remained silent. Nowadays production costs of CDs are negligible and the record industry is not quite suffering.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Moore's law is an economical law. It states that the number of transisors (...all that stuf...) doubles eah 18 mouths because the market can't absorb anything faster.
But you really isn't using it here... Technological progress is always underestimated by inflation (all prices that go down are), that is a known problem of measuring inflation.
Rethinking email
No, you don't calculate the MSRP to be a small multiplier of just the material costs. That is being unrealistic in your expectations. For one, that assumes that there is no value or cost in what gets pressed into the media layer.
The price of the product does not reflect the incremental cost of making the product, and I don't think it is reasonable to expect it to be that way. The sales have to pay for the initial costs of producing what is pressed into the CD. The cost of producing the carrier that holds the content is practically immaterial.
I really don't think it does anyone any good to be arguing from an ignorance of that it really costs to operate a functioning business.
Everyone spewing about the cost of technology going down over the past 14 years is correct, the RIAA states that in the beginning of their article!
What they postulate is that all the non-technical/manufacturing costs have gone down, but the cost of advertising, recording, wages, etc. etc. has actually increased (these type of things will increase along with the CPI).
So in effect, the cost of making the CD has gone down. But the cost of making the CD successful by finding new artists, recording the music, advertising, etc. has gone UP!!!
I hate the RIAA, they are despicable. But you're not even reading the articles!
No - I'm not new here
I'm unimpressed by your $7 words and bad analysis. Globalization is not a process, it's the result of a process. Talking about the world economy in terms of globalization is like talking about a body's metabolism in terms of body-heat. The problem is that you have too little information to make a meaningful diagnosis, much less investigation, of how things work. It's ecnomic phrenology! "Globalization" doesn't make things cheaper. Competition doesn't make things cheaper. Intelligent people figure out how to make things cheaper (cheaper raw materials, better engineering, cheaper means of production, etc). Is "Moore's law" a product of globalization? Is it even a law? No, it's the meme of one man, spread throughout much of the computing industry. That's part of, but not the whole shebang of 'globalization', the proliferation of ideas and distinctions applied to production. There are no such things as 'monopoly rights'. Anyhoo, what's this got to do with the R**A?
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. - Thorstein
Two RIAA goons enter a record store.
First Goon: Hey everybody look what I have here it's a shiny quarter
First Goon(to second Goon): Quick take this sharpie here and start writing new prices on the CDs
Second Goon: What? Sorry I was distracted by the shiny quarter
Don't you hate glorious self-promotion? Visit my Blog
What are they smoking?
Almost every newsagent and bookshop has a photocopier. Yet people don't commonly "pirate" books and newspapers. Why? Well, because it's cheaper to buy than to pirate. It's my reckoning that if CDs cost about £3.00 (€4.55 / $5.88) each, then it would not be worth most people's while to go to the effort of copying them. Nor would anyone think twice about buying a CD at that price. The record companies could easily afford to sell CDs at for £3.00 if they didn't spend so much pursuing failed copy-prevention schemes and paying fatcats to do nothing useful. And they'd probably sell enough units to be earning more than they were before. People would be more willing to take a gamble; if it turns out to be shite, it's not such a great loss.
Now I'm going to tell you a story. It's a sad story. About music, and greed, and the Perversity of Human Nature.
There was a bar I used to drink in once. They had a juke box in there. An NSM Prestige, played 45s, 160 selections. 10 pence a song, six for 50p., and it was always playing. Everyone who came into the place used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, drop in a coin and put on a tune.
Actually, the juke box wasn't always playing. For one hour a fortnight, it would be silent, while the man from the amusement machine hire company emptied the coin box, changed the records and cleaned and serviced the machine. And the bar was closed sometimes. But you get the general idea. It was a popular machine. It also played the records in the order they were arranged in the magazine, not the order in which they were selected (that way, it used only 20 bytes of RAM to store all its selections; which is important when your brain is a single-chip micro with just 64 bytes of RAM), and it was quite possible that you'd have to stay awhile to hear your track if there were a lot of selections from the other end of the machine to be played. That meant the bar sold more beer and food, since the Perversity of Human Nature is such that someone who has paid to hear a song will gladly spend a few pounds on refreshments rather than waste ten pence by leaving before the song comes around on the record machine.
All that changed one sunny afternoon. The man from the amusement hire company came round as usual; only this time, as well as merely emptying the coin box, changing the records, cleaning and servicing the machine, he also tweaked the price up to 20 pence a song.
After that, people just used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, and walk away again.
And the moral of the story, if you're really choking for this story to have a moral, is that if you charge too much then people won't pay it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The only way to get competition is to allow every label to produce the same CD from the same artist. Only then will price drop to realistic levels.
Not quite. AMD does not make exact copies of Intel chips. They make same genere chips.
They produce something that is compatible with the X86 instruction set, but from there things are not the same. Remember Tom's Hardware testing Intel's Speed Step technology by removing a heatsink and then doing the same to an AMD chip? Try sticking a current AMD chip in an Intel based motherboard. The two acts are not the same. They both run Windows.
It's more like others are able to make and market Country and Western, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Classical, etc., and can get equal access to radio airtime. The others become noticed as a good act and their prices are lower! Instead of Brittney from an RIAA member, I can get Suzanne instead from an indipendent store. The two acts are not the same. They both put young chick pop music on CD. One is $16.95 and the other is $8.95 side by side at your local retailer. If they both had good radio airtime and sounded a lot alike, which would you buy. (made up names for arguement sake)
With microprocessors, there is competition. But in music, there is no competition.
Pay attention to e-Music and CD Baby. They are the competition.
The truth shall set you free!
The problem with the record companies giving away music is that often people assume that they are getting what they pay for. In other words, if the music is free then people assume that it sucks.
However, if the record companies charge regular price for the music and there is an easy way for people to get the music for free then they will feel like they are pulling one over on the record companies. I think its kind of a union of rebels mentality.
The current problem is that once enough people have gotten it for free, and the music becomes popular, the record companies then take notice that people are getting it for free.
The record companies need to come up with a way to get people to take music for free even though they are charging for it from another location or in another format. Then once it becomes popular the record companies will want to take it away, like with a DRM scheme where songs work for free for a limited amount of time.
Now trouble comes in when people start to notice that DRM sucks, for reasons that I'm sure you are all aware of. Maybe if new songs from unknown artists were released in mp3 format for a limited amount of time, with a tag of the original downloaders name embedded in the file. Of course, that's very easy to get around, just modify the file to have a different name embedded in it.
In short, I have no idea what they should do, but DRM isn't it.
There's one thing that I haven't seen anyone mention in the discussion so far: what fraction of pressed CDs actually get sold? Several people have discussed the manufacturing cost per CD. Someone raised the question of what shops do with CDs that aren't selling. The claim that only a small fraction of CDs released by majors actually "recoup" their costs (I won't go into what's meant by "recoup" since it apparently has little to do with true cost and sale price and more to do with convoluted legal agreements).
Anyway, out of all the CDs that get pressed, how many of them actually get sold? In the past I've spoken to friends in independent bands, and apparently on a small production run of about 1000 CDs about 50% need to be be sold in order to recoup costs - though obviously this is heavily dependent on how much the band decides to sell the CDs for, and of course making a profit isn't the main motive in selling such small numbers of CDs at gigs or whatever.
By nature CD sales are highly unpredictable though. Presumably the majors have some kind of minimum number of CDs for production. What happens if they don't all sell? Do the unsold ones get destroyed? Are they stored by the label or someone else? If so, this costs money. Obviously some end up sitting around in obscure indie record shops for years, but does this happen to all of them? Even fairly consistently big selling artists have flop albums. While I'm sure that the record industry spends a fair amount of money and effort trying to work out how many copies of a CD to press, but there must be a margin of error, which drives up the prices of CDs. Not to mention the cost of shipping, which while probably not that large is not insignificant. I'd be interested to hear how these figures add up. Of course they won't justify a price of over $33 (although this isn't far off the price of retail CDs in the UK), but still...
A few years back there was a class action lawsuit against the labels for price fixing, which I believe also had something to do with the price coming down.
Similar to what others have said, I worked in a record store when CD audio discs came out in full force. Back then, a brand new cassette tape of the latest top 40 cost about $10. When the same CD's came out, they were going for $15. We were told that this extra cost was to offset the cost of setting up the new machinery to produce CD's and in about three years would drop back down to the price of tapes. In fact, it costs far less to produce CD's than tapes, so you'd expect that this would be even cheaper at the relative price of the times. But as greedy people go, once you get used to recieving $15 for a CD, there's no way in hell you're going to drop it down to $10. These days, most discs cost so much and I just think of how I've been lied to by these record companies and thus rarely will buy albums anymore, where I used to buy several each month.
Thank you for that breath of fresh air. Being technically knowledgable does not mean that a person does not understand the complexity and costs of doing business.
Your figures are within line of what I expect, even though I deal with a different industry. I am not a retailer though, I do not envy them.
Retail margins vary by industry. The $1.33 figure assumed by the grandparent is unrealistically low, but that's because said poster doesn't understand the costs of retail. I would expect that a retailer would want a $1.33 net profit per CD to make it worth their time in the long run.
Being technically knowledgable does not mean that a person does not understand the complexity and costs of doing business.
I made a mistake.
Being technically knowledgable does not mean that a person understands the complexity and costs of doing business. Expenses pile up like crazy. I need to either find or write an essay on the many costs that go into running a business, but I'd need to research all the details, so I'd probably just put that off.
The RIAA has a point but what they willfully ignore is that market forces have radically changed since the CD was introduced. Consumers today are literally overloaded when it comes to entertainment options. Hundreds of TV channels via satellite and cable, tons of movies playing in theaters, a huge collection of titles available on DVD, movies on demand, radio, satellite radio, the web, podcasts, video games and the list goes on and on.
So while the RIAA has a point that CD prices would be a lot more today if prices had kept up with the rate of inflation instead of staying relatively stagnant they fail to take into account the fact that the entertainment market has radically changed since the CD was first introduced. Consumers have a hell of a lot more entertainment options than they had even 5 to 10 years ago and CD prices need to reflect that reality.
It's still the macro supply and demand model. The supply curve represents the amount/quantity of product that producers are willing to sell a given price. This supply curve is just a weird shape. Producers in this example are unwilling to sell any product below a given price, so there's a jump down to zero in quantity at that price. So it is varying with price. You can still plot it vs. the demand curve and find the equilibrium (assuming they intersect and any CDs are sold).
I am not a crackpot.
Can you explain to me why a PC game that comes on one of these same pressed CDs costs $50?
Nothing says "I want to purchase that CD" more than higher prices! Sounds to me like they just want to push the CD completely out of the way and move to digital. RIAA admitting a mistake? NAH!
I seem to recall about 5 years ago the RIAA lost a huge government case whereby the government insisted that CD prices (at the time averaging around $20 - $25) were out of line with actual cost. As I recall, the government won that case and CD prices fell to the current $13 - $18 range.
This seems to me a media ploy from the RIAA to "claim" that they have a just reason to raise the price of a CD back to the pre-lawsuit range.
Nevermind the fact that the production costs have plummeted.
Based on my rough calculations (rough = not really doing any research, just making a point), and using the same logic as the RIAA, microwaves should be retailing for about $4000, radios for well over $50,000 and a car should be in the millions.
Nothing beats pirating the music for free though.
Can I bum a sig?
Also:
100%
-75%
-8.33%
-8.33%
-8.33%
------
$0
FOR ANY DOLLAR VALUE.
Unless you were trying to say that there's something special about 12.01 and 1.33 . . .
The problem of course is that there's no real competition in the music publishing industry - you don't see competing companies trying to undersell each other with the latest say Rolling Stones CD - copyright laws essentially create monopolies
Taking inflation into account, the 1996 price for a computer with 64 kB RAM and an 1 MHz 8-bit CPU should be around $7000.
Welcome to total BS.
"The folks over at szrachen just put up a great story today, with szrachen claiming the quality of the music on a CD has gone down significantly relative to the consumer music quality index. The szrachen 'Key Facts' page claims that based on the earlier quality of music on CDs, the 1996 quality should have been a lot better. So naturally, you should feel like you're getting ripped off."
It would seem pretty normal to me, I used to work in HMV and as employees we would only pay the cos price and it was roughly 50% of the price on the actual tag in the store.
That Intel processor timeline link tweaked an old nerve...
Does anyone know of any hi-res (i.e. 1600x1200 or higher) images of modern CPUs? Intel used to publish them as centerfolds in their free monthly magazine. I collect such things and have had no luck using Google Images, nor Intel's marketing pages, of late.
Moore's law applied to cpu images should have produced some multi-megabyte beauties by now but instead they seem to have shrunk in size/detail.
Detailed AMD cpu pictures would be just as cool.
I come here for the love
That comment about CDs being an "incredibly good value" because of all the times you can be re-entertained by it is a joke!
I can say the same thing about any number of paperback books that still have a retail price FAR lower than a music CD. (And I wonder what it says about the "value" of the plastic hula-hoop my mom had as a kid and passed on so my kid could play with it? Heck - with all the re-entertainment value it held over the years, a hula-hoop should easily sell for upwards of $150, right!?!)
Business is business. They should sell for as much as they can get. It will be a cold day in hell before I'd pay that much for the cr@p "music" that comes out today, but that's just me.
Or, is the RIAA just whining that they *could* get $33+ if it weren't for the pirates?
then bitch more about the increase in piracy
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
But let me hack TFA for a moment: Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. So instead of asking artists to get off their ass and actually PERFORM their own music, we're forever expected to pay them majestic royalties for the 6 months of work put into laying down the tracks? In addition to that, we're expected to pay insane ticket prices so we can cover the 100% service charge, AND offset the cost of the tour that you say isn't even making money anyway, AND pay $30 for a hardcopy of the CD?! The White Album is good, but it ain't that good. By all measures, when you consider how long people have the music and how often they can go back and get "re-entertained" CDs truly are an incredible value for the money. Nice. Fair-use rights are perfectly good... so long as the argument requires them. So I can copy my media now in accordance with the law? Funny how you never saw that as a protected right before, Sony.
-dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Using their math, cell phone service should cost about $55 a month for 30 minutes of air time. Or maybe we should apply their math to computer hard drives? How expensive were those 10MB drives when they first came out? $3,495 in 1980 according to one source. (Ok so lets see... the cost for a 300GB drive, including inflation would be about $2,329,031.) Or maybe we should go by the cost of processors... or maybe the cost of just about anything else invented in the last 50 years that has gone DOWN as technology has made it easier to produce. Sorry MAFIAA, you're the odd one out here.
No, if they were keeping pace with the rest of technology CDs should cost about $3 now, but only when they have enough tracks to fill the whole thing.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
A while back, Public Enemy split with long time record label Def Jam over some contractual issues. As a result of the argument and the bad feelings they released a single Swindler's Lust, then eventually recoreded some neew songs, bundled with some remixes and released There's A Poison Going On. For this album, they tried new (and unproven) internet label Atomic Pop. The download was $8, and a full CD, with autographed liner notes was $10. Atomic Pop folded soon and not too long after that I found the CD at Virgin for... 17.95.
I'm not sure how the price jumped 8 bucks for something that had less inherent value (no autograph). I'm sure there's some complexity in the fact A.P. may have underpriced because it's a new label, but also at that point, the production costs were already sunk costs and Virgin probably had a more efficient distribution system.
a richo charge for price fixing by RIAA
Lets all go down and pay $35 and file a small claims action against RIAA
for price fixing and sue them for $10 plus costs.
Lets see if they like 100,000 $45 lawsuits
Let them pay us for a change
I know that they could not afford to defend 100,000 suits, and if they could, can you imagine the paperwork they would have to do just to reply to the courts.
It might actually wake them up.
This is how the people of San Francisco got a runway closed at the SFO airport.
Everyday was a new cause of action, the airport could not afford to defend the cases so they closed the runway.
we use the musicians product!
:)
we pay the distributors to distribute the musics, paying the cost of the media and the logistics associated to get the media to us plus a fair margin of profit.
Since most of us use p2p networks to do the distribution, they dont deserve a dime (we are doing their work better than they are).
The musicians? They must make money, I agree! They must make money by playing their musics at shows... The more people have their mp3, the more pelople will go to the show, making more money to them. So p2p mp3 distribution is good for the musicians.
Now I must go, I think my new discography just finished the download
If you've read the RIAA's argument, they are not arguing that the manufacturing costs have gone up. What they are arguing is the total cost has gone up. For them they are including things like marketing and labor costs which costs more today than in 1983. On the surface that seems like a reasonable argument but if you think about, it's BS.
Except for a few artists, most artists get the scraps left over after the record companies take their share. If anything the share for the artist has gone down in terms of absolute dollars as the record companies cry poverty.
I consider this the biggest lie. First of all, the record companies charge the artist for studio time if the artist uses their studios. This cost is not factored into their royalties. So if an artist has a contract stipulating he/she gets $1 an album, that does not include any studio costs yet. Some artists like TLC have claimed bankruptcy after high album sales because their studio costs exceeded their royalties. If the record companies say the price of the CD covers studio time then they are double dipping. Because of this reason and for more creative control, many artists build/use their own studios. For these artists, the studio cost to the record company is nothing because the studio costs are borne by the artist.
Yes marketing costs money but the subtext here is that the studios seem to admit the payola scheme.
Another case of double dipping. First, the tours are supported by ticket sales. Second, like studio time, concert tours are mostly funded by the artists themselves because they keep all the proceeds. There are tours funded by the record company but those are just another instrument to rip the artist off even more. The company makes more profit off them.
Taking the record companies argument, what is overlooked is not all CDs costs the same to the record company. Manufacturing costs might vary between 100K copies and 1 million but the difference is small comp
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In 1985, a new release on LP as noted above cost about $7.99. In fact, most LPs I bought in that time were generally a bit cheaper, as Jazz and Classical were usually lower.
Using the handy dandy CPI calculator @ the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (guess they have to do something up there to occupy themselves in the cold), $7.99 in 1985 = $15.26 in 2007. So, a little more than what a new release will run you today on CD if you buy it from a discounter and not B&N or some of the other retail scoundrels charging $18.99 for new releases.
Of course, that plastic-coated aluminum disc is probably cheaper to produce today than the vinyl was in 1985.
I say let the record industry try and charge $30 for a CD and watch as their industry crumbles. It might be the best thing that ever happened for independent labels. Of course, the majors might simply then collude with the replication houses to force all prices up...
Just sad that people get paid to sit around in offices dreaming this stuff up. It's called a free market people. Argh.
The Beatles "Yellow Submarine" is a good example. The DVD actually has the isolated musical score available on it, exactly the same music as the orchestral soundtrack CD; it also has the Beatles songs that are on the Yellow Submarine CD. The DVD was $9.99 many places, $20 at most. (It's now out of print.) The CDs are $14 for the songtrack and $15 for the orchestral soundtrack. The DVD had exactly the same music as the two CDs, for a third of the price. How does that make sense? (I bought the DVD and ripped the soundtrack from it instead of buying the CDs.)
Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense" CD is $19 MSRP. The DVD has the entire music content of the CD, plus the movie, plus an alternate studio mix of the entire music content of the CD, for $30. I bought the DVD and ripped it instead of buying the CD.
"South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut". $12 for the soundtrack CD, or $13 for the DVD and rip it yourself. Sure, you miss the 8 songs rerecorded by rap artists etc that weren't in the movie, but I didn't want those anyway; and the CD misses some songs that *were* in the movie.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"Fixed cost is the amount it costs to sign artists and record CDs (studio equipment, staff to run that equipment, etc)"
r .htmla ture1.htmle /resources/article_suit.html
Which the artists themselves pay for. The record companies give them an advance, just as book publishers give some authors an advance, but it must be paid back.
"the recording industry is exposed to a big risk that they have to cover-- most artists flop, only a few are sucessful, but you can't spot this before you record and attempt to sell a CD"
Artists who flop still have to pay back the advances the record company gave them.
"those large fixed costs are entirely absorbed by the record company"
They are actually entirely absorbed by the artists. Check out these links if you doubt this:
http://www.aandronline.com/reading-room/whats_fai
http://weeklywire.com/ww/06-22-98/austin_music_fe
http://www.arielpublicity.com/ariel_publicity_sit
"Look, the simple economics of it is that if somebody else could do what the big record companies do, and for cheaper, they would be doing it and making a fortune."
Unfortunately, any labels that show signs of popularity immediately get absorbed by the big four, who ended up owning a whole slew of previously independent record companies after progressive consolidation by a series of multinationals (not all of whom previously had any history in the music industry, e.g. Sony and what would come to be known as Vivendi). This continues to happen today, as the labels that came out of the "indie resurgence" of the 1990s get absorbed whenever they show signs of popularity, with some (relatively) recent examples being Sinatra's Reprise Records, Herb Alpert's A&M, and Madonna's Maverick records.
Note also that because these multinationals tend to also own things such as TV and radio networks, print media, and even major performance venues, like the Robber Barons of the 19th century, they can erect artificially high barriers for any companies that aren't part of the cartel, either denying them access to these needed publicity resources entirely, or charging much more for them than they do to each-other.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
It's a good time to be an indie artist, definitely.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
To the list of things that are not fundamental human rights, add "Everyone shall not have the right to have their income tied to a price index."
So, by doing nothing about this, the government is basically saying that when the five largest companies in an industry, whose combined marketshare represents the vast majority of that industry, get together and claim that their products should cost more, its neither price collusion nor a massive violation of the anti-trust laws of this country?
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
The RIAA statement has been around since 2003, so I don't think anything new is underway, even though it did get picked up by some "reporters" this month as if it were news. This is what it looked like in December 2003, according to the Web Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20031202021246/http://w ww.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/cost.asp -- I could not see any difference.
Also, note that then and now, the data only goes up to 1996 -- a bit stale even by 2003 standards.
Aire Libre
The cost of CD manufacture has gone down. CDs have always been overpriced anyway. It costs mere pennies to make a CD, yet they retail for many hundreds of times their cost of manufacture. Anyone saying that they cost more is needing some investigation from the regulatory authorities into price fixing.
Wrong. You only have a monopoly if there are no alternative products.
I can buy 100 different kinds of refrigerators, from multiple different brands. How many different manufacturers of the new Madonna CD are there? Compare that to the number of different side-by-side refrigerator/freezers with ice and water dispensers and water filtration systems. Then, explain how there isn't a monopoly on each CD of music.
Learn to love Alaska
Compact Discs are not a good solution for restricting piracy. Online Music stores, required to by the Big4 to be DRM protected is a "better" solution for restricting piracy, (and use). Might be that they're trying to move the "masses" to the online, DRM infected services.
I wish I had some mod points for you.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
You're not accounting for your time spent at all in that "cost". (Common mistake, I might add.) Maybe you're just doing this for fun and don't want/need to make any money, but I'd expect any artist who does this for a living to make at least a decent hourly rate. That does add significantly to the cost of the CD.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
You only have a monopoly if there are no alternative products. Last time I looked the music industry was positively overflowing with different artists producing both similar and different styles of music.
Since you consider all CDs interchangeable, perhaps you'd like to trade your CD collection for the same number of copies of a CD of me singing in the shower? I'll even pay you a small premium over shipping to make up for the difference.
And according to Disco stu and the charts of disco album sales from the 1960's to the 1970's, disco sales are projected to through the roof in 2007...
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
"People are fed up with rotating media."
I find that the only way to enjoy the music, *is* by rotating the media.
Hell, if you stop that, I can't even use my CD's as Frisbees!
If you buy _more_ music, the revenue stream gets diluted. The cost to produce per unit sold becomes a larger part of the total revenue of each unit sold, and they get less profit.
Per Unit.
The question remains: With a lower price point would they sell enough additional units that the increased revenue would more than compensate for the decreased profit per unit.
Demand is still elastic: High prices mean some people who otherwise would have bought do not buy. Perhaps they borrow. Perhaps they borrow and copy. Perhaps they do without. In all three cases the xxAA gets nothing.
There is some price point where the profit is maximized: Lower and you cut your profit per unit more than increased units will compensate for, higher and you cut your sales more than the increased profit per unit will compensate for.
The RIAA and MPAA members seem to have the price point set too high and would no doubt do much better by lowering the price and selling more units. Instead they have chosen to keep it high, and rely on using their trade associations to attempt conversion of SOME of the borrowers to buyers with DRM and some of the copiers to customers with anti-piracy legislation and legal action. The ones that convert to "do without" are meaningless to them - even though a better pricing strategy COULD have turned them into buyers. (But it's hardly surprising that xxAA act that way, since the organizations were explicitly set up to handle the members' copyright-violation policing and diffuse royalty collection, while pricing strategy is the function of the individual members.)
(Interestingly, there may be more than one "hump" in the price curve. This industry got its start with people paying a nickel to play a song on a jukebox - keeping nothing but the experience. (They still do it - at higher prices per play - though part of the value is having the song playing in the place where the jukebox is.) With low enough prices people might very well buy a song over and over - even if they could capture a copy - just because it's more convenient.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
why does it seem like every week the riaa has some new, bizarre claim about the cost of music, or some completely inane justification for them to charge us all more money for our cds?
Because the more they can claim a CD SHOULD sell for (if not for those "darned pirates"), the more they can claim when lobbying congress or asking for damages in court.
This has nothing to do with their future pricing strategy and everything to do with political spin.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The RIAA claim shows (again) either a complete lack of knowledge about basic economics or simply a sociopathic ability to lie. Prices are not justified by the seller's costs - it is market demand that defines the price. Absolutely no company is "owed" a profit or an existence.
The classic example of pricing is the horse buggy whip. At one time when everyone used horses and carriages for transportation there was a common need for buggy whips. This general demand meant there was a "value" for buggy whips, which when compared to other things of value at the time, translated into a relative "expected" or "reasonable" price. Today there is no general need for buggy whips so the demand and thus the "correct" price is zero or less (you have to pay me to take it because I have expenses required to disposed of such a useless item). A small group of people may place higher value than zero value on buggy whips because of a specialized interest or need (collectors or horse lovers) but over the larger population the average consensus value is nearly zero.
Should we feel bad or obligated that no one can demand premium 19th century prices for buggy whips today in the 21st century? Of course not. Such a seller would need to narrow its market focus and refactor its products to adjust to market realities. When push comes to shove, the seller is expendable if they can't achieve the right match between delivered value and offered price. Only monopolist or Marxists could be expected to justify cost-based pricing - not anyone who believes in capitalism and free markets.
In the case of CDs, consumers of CDs determine the value which is compared to other purchase choices to determine what a "correct" price should be. If the buyer consensus price (and thus assessed value) is lower than seller's offered price, buyers will seek substitutes. In general, the RIAA has been consistently overpricing its products when compared to what buyers of the products feel is the consensus value. This is the fundamental trigger for the creation of a black market - a mismatch between buyer-assessed value and seller-offered pricing when licit substitutes are restricted (which comes from monopolistic channel control practices of the RIAA).
A seller's claim that prices "should be" higher (just because we say so) is always 100% wrong - what consumer's do as actions, such as shown by illicit filesharing or iTunes adoption, are necessary and sufficient proof that the RIAA has overpriced CDs. Both of these are simply "substitute seeking" behaviours no different than going to a cheaper competitor. The fact that one is illicit and the other is licit is perfectly arbitrary as an economic matter.
Globalization gets sold as "it will make things cheaper," however that process occurs, and you just listed the ways. Globalizing makes the whole rest of the world available for those intelligent people to use when figuring out how to make things cheaper.
As for what this has to do with the **AA, their cost of production is in a couple areas, mostly staff and equipment costs. Outsourcing the non-musical office work and buying less expensive equipment from overseas, coupled with the economics of scale that they said would kick in, prices should go down.
(By the way, summarizing an argument is not tantamount to ignoring it - it just cuts out the crap that doesn't matter at the time.)
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
Sorry folks, but the cost of every technology decreases with time. CDs should cost less, not more. You could pick pretty much any mature technology for an example, but I'll choose television.
In 1966, a 25 inch colour television was the best you could buy. It cost $3,600 in today's dollars ($580 then). In 2007, you can buy a 25 inch CRT tv for about $200 and you can buy a top of the line TV set for about $2,800 (source)
What does this tell us?
CDs are the "old" technology, the 25" CRT. We should expect CDs to cost less than they did 20 years ago. We should expect any new, higher quality, recording technology to cost more than CDs cost today, but significantly less than CDs originally cost.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
There are tens? hundreds? of thousands more original recorded music CD's in existance today than there were back then.
If a user goes to the store he now has tens/hundreds of thousands more things to choose from. If you say that supply and demand applies to the market, I don't see any good reason to say that the music market shold be exempt.
In fact, it seems to me that if the music market were obeying supply and demand without any monopolistic behavior that the prices would probably be even lower than they are today. They'd probably be down in the $2-3 per CD range.
Rather than complaining about that, consider that AOL was mailing burnt CD's for free (are they still doing that?) for YEARS. They were so plentiful that I even saw artwork made of AOL cd's. Sure, their business model was banking on people isntalling those cd's to pay them, and that's a different business model from the music industry, but AOL wouldn't have done it if those CD's were so expensive to burn.
Anyhow, to rephrase the main argument: If there were hundreds of thousands of bands (each with their own record label) competing for my attention (me, with my limited music budget), under competetive market conditions some of them might break rank and sell their CD's for less; they might obey the "law" of supply and demand. Working through the record houses, though, that free market competition has been suppressed for my entire life. It seems to me that the music industry might have been violating U.S. laws against monopoly.
Supposedly the advantage of a free market system is competition. If I can legally provide a quality good or service for a lower price than somebody else, then I'm bound to attract the interested customers, and sell my good or service at that competetive price. In the case of the music industry, scarcity is artificial, since they've (allegedly) been cornering the market & means of production on music for such a long time.
As somebody already said, computers have made it extremely easy to make your own music at home, and not just lousy music; it's possible to record at studio quality on a shoestring budget.
The music industry has truly lost its corner on the market.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
1. Double the price on already overpriced CDs less and less people are purchasing.
2. ????
3. Profit!
In the 60's and 70's I bought numerous vinyl albums for about the same price (adjusted for inflation) as a CD is going for now. Back then it was not unusual for me to pick up an album and be able to recognize four or five songs on it before I bought it because I'd heard them on the radio. Nowadays, I'll pick up a CD and recognize one or maybe two songs on it. Today's industry paradigm seems to be to pick a hit song, package it with a bunch of fillers and sell it for $15. No wonder the record labels aren't thrilled by $0.99 downloads.
according to their books, Hollywood doesn't make any money!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You. like many /.'ers, took the example too far.
As far as most consumers are consernde AMD and Intel do the same things.
Which one would I buy? whichever one I liked. Who buys music they don't like at any price?
Now Let each record company sell the exact same music(each can chose the format and extras as they see fit) then you will see competition.
eMusic and cdbaby are not competition. A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
...or maybe total cost of development, manufacture, marketing, research, etc, divided by the total number of users > US$0.79 each user? Maybe alot > US$0.79ea?
Historically, greed has always been consider one of the seven deadly sins. But we live in a culture where greed is actually considered a virtue. We are not the first culture to have made this mistake. The only history we have of the island of Atlantis comes from Plato. He was passing on information he had gotten from Egyptian priests. Here is how Plato describes the cause of the downfall of Atlantis: Avarice is a synonym for greed.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I bought my wife a Coolio CD 10 years ago. That may have been the last CD I bought, too. Hmmmm......
Like what I said? You might like my music
It also strikes me as absurd, that I can buy a DVD of a movie in a store for $10-$20, and look over to the left and see a CD of the soundtrack for that movie for $18.
This is capitalism for you, my friend: it's not about value, it's about supply and demand. As long as people buy soundtracks for that price they will sell them for that price. I just wonder how much the 'artist' gets out of every sale. - Especially in this case where the production cost of a CD (and the cover) amounts to, say, 1% of the price the consumer pays.
If you detest software companies and the music and film industry, then go completely open source. Listen to music released by independant labels or perhaps that is released under creative commons licensing. Oh wait, perhaps it's not as polished? Oh well, you have choices.
How many manufacturers of the new Bosch refrigerator are there?
If you simply must have a Madonna CD, then obviously you must buy it from Madonna and her record company. If you simply must have a Bosch refrigerators, then obviously you're going to have to buy it from Bosch. Bosch has a monopoly of Bosch products in the same way that only Madonna can produce Madonna CDs. This is so banally obvious it's hardly worth discussing. But neither have a monopoly in the market. There are other producers of fridges, there are other ageing pop singers. Whether you think the others are comparable is only a matter of opinion and brand loyalty. But neither Madonna nor Bosch have a monopoly.
I was wondering if the RIAA representatives who suggested this would be willing to have their renumeration packages readjusted to 1983 prices, plus inflation. Seems like a fair deal to me!
It's statements like this from the RIAA that mean I'll be downloading a lot more songs from Napster ;-) I buy very few CD's already and I'll probably buy even less in the future if the cost goes up.
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
Bosch has a monopoly of Bosch products in the same way that only Madonna can produce Madonna CDs.
And I disagree with your premise. There is a difference between the two. Madonna songs are not something you can buy Avril Levigne CDs for almost the same experience. If you identify any particular feature (other than the name) you like, I'll name another maker with it. Is it the stainless steel inside? The heating elements to generate the 160 F temperatures for the sanitize cycle? For music, there isn't a checklist that someone can go through for good music, and there aren't substitutes. If that were the case, there would be "like Madonna" bins in the stores. There are dishwasher makers that make Bosch knockoffs.
Learn to love Alaska
First you defended greedy corporations by making an unsubstantiated claim that they have narrow profit margins. When I pointed out the absurdity of this position, you then changed to the opposite tack and now claim they have the right to have absurdly high profit margins.
Your second position is equally absurd as your first. Your reply totally contradicts my assertion that greed is bad, but you have offered no evidence for your claims. Perhaps you didn't even bother to read my second paragraph.
After ignoring the morality of the situation, you now claim Microsoft has a right to charge whatever it wants for its products: "their product, their choice". This might fly in a high school economics class with a dull witted teacher but it wouldn't fly in college and it certainly does not fly in the real world. Microsoft lost the legal right to charge what the market would bear when it became a convicted monopolist.
My previous post explained why they don't have a moral right to charge whatever they want. Without a moral right or a legal right the only other right I can think of that you might be referring to is Catch-22 which is explained as: Thank you for your reply. You aptly demonstrated why greed should once again be considered a vice, not a virtue. You have also demonstrated the absurdity that results when we treat greed as a virtue.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
One has access to Clear Chanel and one is completely locked out. Look to some of the acts gaining popularity on MySpace or Utube. Then check the other outlets and include iTunes. They distribute inde artists. Don't count the lack of listing on Billboard Magazine charts as an indicator of poor quality. Lots of good quality music simply isn't exposed to the masses.
If AMD could not buy any advertising at any price and were always not considered in hardware reviews because they were too obscure and unknown, you would find even if they were good, most people would pass them by. Would you buy AMD if nobody bothered to review them?
Back to my earlier point, If the independants got airtime and had music given airtime with the mainstream pop hits, they would then get on the charts and be noticed. Getting critical mass without a major RIAA label is almost impossible. Utube and MySpace are starting to break that mold. Many popular inde acts without RIAA support are doing well. Most of them are on iTunes. Send your local radio station some promotional CD's for your great local band. See how often you are mentioned or songs played. You will quickly find it's a dead end.
Independant artists face the same problems that OS2, Be OS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc face in the MS world. Apple is the acknowledged #2 player and you can find Apple software at your local retailer. Try finding Turbo Tax for Linux. You won't find Linux apps at your local Best Buy even though it may be a bigger bargan for consumers if it sold next to Vista. Linux is starting to be noticed. By the same token, some artists are gaining notice on MySpace and Utube. Much of their music is not in the local record shop, but at the other outlets.
Getting popular without the distribution/marketing chanel is almost impossible. Not being popular doesn't mean the music isn't good.
The truth shall set you free!
eMusic and cdbaby are not competition. A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
They have not reached critical mass yet with artists and consumers. They are gaining traction.
Artists ripped-off by the cartel have jumped ship to go it their own way are doing fine without Clear Chanel.
Among the artists who can be found at eMusic are Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, who are represented by Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Nettwerk releases are available at eMusic without copy protection at better quality encoding. eMusic is encoded at 192K Variable bitrate while iTunes is encoded at 128K fixed bitrate. eMusic prices are lower. What's there not to like other than limited mainstream selections?
Older music is a little hard to find. Most anything that make it popular was done through the RIAA cartel. Since they are locked in, the content will never make it to e-music in my lifetime since the Sonny Bonno act.
The truth shall set you free!
You wrongly assert that I believe that greed is good. Greed can however be a catalyst for people looking elsewhere for alternatives. All I am saying is that no-one has a right to anyone else's property except under their terms. I use the word "choice" - which we all have. Truly, MS does not have a monopoly in the software business - you can actually choose a Mac, Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc, system. I am all for the over-inflated Microsoft software prices - especially if it prices some people out of that market. That way people will make the switch to Linux, BSD, or similar alternatives. Microsoft has much much more evil going on, than just its pricing.
grolschie said: Again, this is simply not true. The Wikipedia tells us that a court of law, did indeed determine that Microsoft had/has a monopoly in the software business: grolschie said: This thread got started when you said: where you defended Microsoft by claiming Microsoft's prices are not over-inflated. Now you are claiming the opposite: that Microsoft's prices are over-inflated and you are in support of the over-inflation.
Perhaps I was wrong in thinking you were supporting Microsoft's greed. But astroturfing stills seems to be the most logical explanation for you illogical statements.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I think you misunderstand these articles... all they say is that when record companies pay up front expenses on the album, they recoup them before the artist sees any money. Well, yeah. If your band isn't profitable, you don't get paid.
Think of it as financing-- record companies are basically banks specialize in one kind of business: bands. It happens to be a very risky sectors, so interest/profits are high. Just because the loan is revenue backed doesn't mean it isn't a loan.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
"I think you misunderstand these articles... all they say is that when record companies pay up front expenses on the album, they recoup them before the artist sees any money."
It seems to be you who are misunderstanding them, because what they actually say is that _all_ costs, including recording, publicity, producers' "points", cover art, breakages, free promotional materials -- all fixed and many variable costs are deducted from the artist's royalties _before_ the record company deducts even more to pay for any advances that may have been paid. This is in stark contrast to you claimed, i.e.: "Those large fixed costs are entirely absorbed by the record company". The record company _absorbs nothing_, as I said in my previous post.
"Well, yeah. If your band isn't profitable, you don't get paid"
You obviously either did not read those articles, or are deliberately weaving straw men, because they in fact make it quite clear that even CD sales which have made significant profits often end up with the artist owing the record company money after all the deductions have been made.
"Think of it as financing-- record companies are basically banks specialize in one kind of business: bands."
Two points:
(1) How does what you are saying now square with your prior claim that ""Those large fixed costs are entirely absorbed by the record company"? Oh, that's right, it doesn't!
(2) Unlike a bank, record companies are already getting the lion's share of the income from sales of the artist's work. If you'd read those articles, you would know that artists get between 10% and 20% of what the record company sells their works for (i.e. the wholesale price) after variable costs such as pressing, transport, etc. have been deducted. This means that an artist can expect to see an average of 15% of _the net profits_ made from wholesale CD sales, and all the costs you previously claimed were absorbed by the record company are paid from that 15%, including repayments on advances. Put another way, the record company takes 85% of the net income from a recording, and pays none of the costs associated with making or promoting it out of that 85%.
"It happens to be a very risky sectors, so interest/profits are high."
There is actually very little risk for the record company, because artists have to pay back advances and all the other costs that are normally deducted from their royalties one way or the other. Any costs not covered by the sales of one CD will be carried forward to the next one, and so on until the contract expires, at which time the artist will be expected to find some other way of paying them back if they choose not to renew. So yes, it is risky, but nearly all of those risks are assumed by artists rather than their record companies, although one wouldn't know it from reading their press releases (O woe is us, we're so downtrodden and unprofitable, but unlike other multinationals who simply pull out of unprofitable sectors, we keep expanding ours by buying up successful independent labels because we love artists so much that we don't care if it's unprofitable).
"Just because the loan is revenue backed doesn't mean it isn't a loan."
It is not revenue-backed any more than a monthly loan payment that's automatically deducted from your bank account is "revenue backed", because in both cases you are liable to pay the lender back irrespective of whether you have enough income.
NB: your "tell some lies, and then throw out straw men if challenged by one of those annoying types who cite contrary documentary evidence" bear a remarkable similarity to what record company marketing droids do. I wonder if this is more than a mere coincidence?
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Clearly the RIAA is right. I used to pay $15 or so for CDs back in the 90's. Now I pay $10 or so when I buy a CD. Why? Because of competition from downloading and yes, piracy. The monopoly on the distribution of music has been broken. We aren't paying monopolist set prices anymore, so of course it's a lot cheaper.
Maybe MS charge far more than they should and yes the court ruled that MS had a monopoly back in '99. However today things are a little better. We have better alternatives now. I would prefer to see more people ditch MS completely, as we do have other choices in 2007. If MS's greed helps move people to better alternatives, then thats a bonus. To be clear that I am not astro-turfing (although I am unfamiliar with that term) - bloated and buggy MS software and evil practises should be more than enough reason to ditch them for alternatives.
With copyright, you don't have an automatic right to a work until the copyright expires, I believe. I am not sure how that translates to software, but ignoring EULAs, I'd guess the software would be obsolete by the time people have an automatic right to it (if that's even possible).
There are dishwasher makers that make Bosch knockoffs.
r sonator&btnG=Google+Searchm l?c=67325&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=932307&highlight=
Are you implying there are no Madonna knockoffs? There are tons of Elvis Prestly knockoffs.
Hmm Google is your friend...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=madonna+impe
http://pressreleases.cnetnetworks.com/phoenix.zht
"For example, if a Madonna fan visits Madonna's page, they will learn that independent artist Amy Kasio sounds similar to Madonna ultimately introducing them to a new musician they may otherwise have never been turned on to."
The big diffrence is one gets name recognition and airtime publicity and the other doesn't. At a record store you would know who Madonna is. Would you even look at the records from Amy Kasio?
The truth shall set you free!