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Music DRM in Critical Condition?
ianare writes "Universal Music Group, the largest music company on the planet, has announced that the company is going to sell DRM-free music. The test will see UMG offering a portion of its catalog — primarily its most popular content — sold without DRM between August 21 and January 31 of next year. The format will be MP3, and songs will sell for 99 each, with the bitrate to be determined by the stores in question. RealNetwork's Rhapsody service will offer 256kbps tracks, the company said in a separate statement. January 31 is likely more of a fire escape than an end date. If UMG doesn't like what they're seeing, they'll pull the plug. UMG says that it wants to watch how DRM-free music affects piracy rates."
UMG says that it wants to watch how DRM-free music affects piracy rates.
Well they should look back over the last few decades then. They've been selling DRM-free digital music ever since CDs were invented.
Buy, buy, buy! I don't think DRM is in "critical condition" at all, but now is our chance to show these people that we *will* buy their product if they don't treat us all like criminals. We may be able to make a small but important piece of history here.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
If record companies want me to stop downloading music from P2P networks, they need to offer a better-quality product than that available for free. I can get all the 256kbps MP3s I want on P2P. The only way to make me even consider actually paying for a mere audio file (as opposed to a CD which has liner notes etc.) is to offer FLAC.
R.I.P RIAA!!!
Everyone should make a mental note to not download anything illegal until end of Jan 2008, or at least don't get caught doing so.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
UMG says that it wants to watch how DRM-free music affects piracy rates.
Bollocks. I mean look up every "piracy" "statistics", they always talk about this and that much gazillions of good old bucks being lost because of piracy, yet no living human being has ever managed to give a reasonable and acceptable explanation about how those numbers make sense. Now they say they want to see how those numbers change if they sell non-drm-encumbered music ? Well, flip a coin, that'd make more sense to decide to continue or not. A better way would be to actually listen to what those pesky customers want.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Music companies have really just started waking up to why DRM is really bad, and it's nothing to do with their customers.
It has finally dawned on them that DRM - far from protecting them - will take control away from them and hand it to companies like Apple and Microsoft, who become the new gatekeepers since they own the DRM technologies that are popular. It's now dawned on the music companies that it won't be long before the likes of Apple and Microsoft get big enough in the music business to simply cut out the record companies and sign bands directly.
_That's_ why they are starting to drop DRM - they have finally come to the realisation that DRM is the trojan horse that will destroy them. Not piracy.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
yet another "we gave it a shot and it didn't work" plan before it's even out the door.
i really hope no one actually uses real rhapsody anymore..
-- lol pwned
That is hilarious. Universal refuses to sign a contract, and will do business with Apple strictly "at will".
Oh the irony! The music giant that doesn't believe it should have to sign a contract just to get distributed.
My thoughts exactly. To look at how it affects piracy rates, you need some way of measuring piracy. AFAIK they have nothing other than RSITDANTMUFG* numbers for what piracy levels may be. Come on, how can you ever hope to count downloads on the many P2P networks when the whole point of them is that they're decentralised?
* RSITDANTMUFG = Random Stab In The Dark At Number That Make Us Feel Good
Now Universal is telling me where to shop? I use the iTunes Store because it is fast, well organized and works well with my iPod, iPhone, etc. Now these fat record company execs want to force to go to other sources and figure out ways to get their product onto my software of choice. They can go pound sand. I can think of lots-o-artists I can purchase from other labels. What ever happened to serving your consumers wants and needs. Universal, who the hell do you think you are?
It seems like they're about to distort their own stats, by leaving iTunes out of the deal, FTA:
"One reason would be that Universal doesn't like Apple. UMG is the largest music company on the planet, which helps explain why they are trying to ruffle Steve Jobs' feathers. At issue are contract lengths and just who gets to determine pricing. Universal would clearly like to have more control over pricing than Apple is comfortable with. The company has also said that it would like a cut of every iPod sold, similar to a deal they have with Microsoft for the Zune."
So basically, they still want money. They'll try and fail to sell a substantial amount of DRM free music on rhapsody, call it a failure, publish the results and push congress more. just an 0.05 dollar prediction.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Watch the evil companies, dont trust them. They will put tracking software in those non drm songs. Once they are shared on a p2p net, they will track every ip adres and every user. The p2p community will be doomed. Mwhoehahaha.... oh wait I am on the good side of this, so I should be crying.
What does it matter if it is DRM-free or not... The price is still too high... DRM-protection can always be removed. This will is only a cheep way to create poor arguments about why the multi-rich companies wants everybody to feel sorry fore them... Buhuu... noone wants too be fooled by our overprices anymore
The recording industry themselves are entrepreneurs, and now they realise that the software companies are not just another mechanism to enforce their intermediation, but an attempt to introduce a new, and harder to evade, middleman.
All entrepreneurs seek to enforce their control, either legally or through other means (such as owning the channels of distribution, or by monopoly patents.)
Entrepreneurs have a part to play when a resource does not have a market, but they find it very hard to lie down and die when the market is established. We don't yet know who will win this battle for control over the electronic music market, but improved search engines and technology availability could disintermediate the market in a different way - e.g. by sites aggregating direct sales by many small bands, cooperatively owned.
Pining for the fjords
Look, I'm sure the summary meant 99 cents each, but knowing you guys would have international readers all over the world, would it kill you to add a five-letter word just to clarify things?
Better than CD quality damn you. Oh, and a pony, I want a pony!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Vote.
Surprisingly, Universal won't have DRM free music on iTunes
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
(n/t)
just watch, they'll stop selling drm-free tracks after finding one single copy on soulseek.
If I was the music company I'd place some kind of signature in my files and keep a watch on how many of them later appeared on common piracy sites. It would be interesting to see how many, or few, of them leaked out.
You buy if you want. As far as I'm concerned Universal can fuck off.
They're one of the worst. It is they who persuaded Microsoft to let them charge Zune users a Zune-tax. Let them lift that tax first.
They're still playing games. This time round, they are refusing to sell through the iTunes Store. This is an act of revenge. It's because Apple won't open their DRM to other distributors, because Apple doesn't want the hassle of maintaining this DRM (that it doesn't want in the first place and only has to use because companies like Universal insist on it) for every other distributor. IOW, Universal do want the DRM and are blaming Apple for not making it work for them across the whole industry - as if Apple, or anyone else, could.
YOU buy. YOU rush out and buy from these parasites. I shan't.
If I want to buy a download rather than a CD, I'll buy EMI at the iTunes Store or go to Magnatune or Linn records. Universal can go boil its head.
So people will now just buy their music through these online stores other than iTMS, transfer the mp3 to iTunes and then onto their iPod.
It's not going to hurt Apple, it is gonig to hurt consumers. I doubt the user experience of the other stores will compare, though I don't have a problem with every store doing it's best and at least if they are mp3s it solves the 'wont load on my ipod' problem.
I think they will still do quite well, IF people ever hear of them and have a good experience when they DO try to buy something.
This has probably been posted a million times on slashdot, but we must repeat it until at least every slashdot person understands:
l abels may help. I seriously propose not buying in to the Sony, Warner, Universal, et al. game of hiding behind the word RIAA as if it is some, nebulous, vastly distantly related entity. It isn't. Substitute "major music label CEOs" for "RIAA". So for example this headline from Arstechnica:
THERE. IS. NO. RIAA.
Not as such. It is a like shell company so that the major music labels don't get their hands (or label names) dirty whilst suing dead people, stalking 8 year olds, and extorting grandmothers that have never even seen a computer.
Universal IS the RIAA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_
Judge greenlights RIAA to dig into man's past, employers
Should actually read:
Judge greenlights Major Music Label CEOs to dig into man's past, employers
Those CEOs are people. They make the decisions. They are responsible. Normal people can get their heads around that and hold those people responsible for their actions, if they so choose. The RIAA is some faceless acronym, just another brick wall. As it is surely intended to be.
Everyone on slashdot has been whinging about DRM for years now. UMG is offering to sell you music without DRM, so buy it. Sales are what they want to see, not piracy rates, but whether it increases sales. The presume that DRM saves them money, and if sales don't change then they'll keep it, if they sell 30-40% more without DRM they'll keep not using it.
6 months back, he himself spoke against the negative effects of DRM and how Apple was implementing DRM only to comply with the wishes of the recording industry. Now fear of an Apple monopoly on DRM has finally forced Universal (for starters) to think about selling unencumbered music. So we have him to thank for scaring the recording companies into removing DRM! (hoping that they eventually will)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
or check if piracy goes down. If they leave out the largest [with about 80%+ of the online market] online retailer of songs, the only way this could only have a significant effect if another online retailer suddenly became the market leader because of this. They might then be able to register the sub 1% decrease in "illegal" downloads.
I can only see a move like this as a way to see if people who purchase music will move off iTunes to get DRM-free songs, at any price. If successful, they get to backdoor their variable-pricing plan under the guise of giving out DRM-free music and they can try to use it to pressure iTunes into a variable pricing scheme.
Because a song you heard is good via marketing is worth more than a good song...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Copyright laws include fair use rights. If companies want the protection of copyright laws and should not try to prevent the exercise of fair rights use with DRM. If they instead want to use purely technological means to protect their content, then they shouldn't be making use of copyright laws and government courts while trying to also prevent the exercise of the fair use rights included in those same laws.
Software Inventor
I've always said, if there's a music store that sells good music without limitations, that's the place where I'll buy. Ok. The limitation part is gone. Now, let's talk about "good music"...
I predict there will be little if any change. We will certainly not see more piracy. Simple reason: DRM has not and will not stop someone from copying, so whoever wanted to copy already did and probably will continue to do so. An increase, because there is no DRM, makes no sense.
We might see more songs sold, though, since some people (like me) will turn to buying music online when there is no restriction on it anymore that limits my use in various devices of my choice. Goods I cannot use in the way I deem necessary have no value to me. If I cannot use it in my car CD player or on my MP3 player, the item is not what I want, and what I do not want I do not buy. This, though, the music without restriction, is what I want. So I will buy now when (and here's the catch) I find music that I would like to listen to. Sorry, but I don't buy the latest American Idol hypecrap just because I can media shift it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
DRM impacts my natural right to control hardware that I own. Besides, where else would you put it?
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
Does the current trend towards less DRM means the end of motherboards with built-in TPM chips in the future?
You just got troll'd!
$.99 is just wrong. I have mp3 music on a dvd. At 5MB/song, I can fit 9.6GB/5MB ~=2000 songs. I would be happy to pay $25 for disks like this, but no way I pay alomst $2k for a disk.
I notice also that in markets that sells pirated music they come as MP3 on CD's and contain over 100 songs for $1. The lagal CDs next to them costs $10, and contains 10 songs.
The legal product is certainly inferior. Unless the music industry can deliver a superior product, they can not win this.
"Fix it"
They're still holding tightly to their fantasy about P2P downloaders costing them millions and billions - but they have noticed that their introduction of DRM technologies has received an almost totally negative response from their former customers. So they'll back off on this a little and "see if the piracy rate goes up". That's not what they'll be looking at at all, that's just some spin for the media. What they're looking for is some kind of upward bump to their profits; when they added DRM their income went down - so let's remove the DRM and see if our income goes back up.
What they still can't see through their pride is that DRM doesn't reduce piracy in any meaningful way; all it does is cause inconvenience to their paying customers. It's driven more than a few customers away; buy one CD that won't play in your player and it's quite natural to avoid any CDs from that company in the future. What they also can't see is that those lost customers won't be coming back just because of some mealy-mouthed PR statement about removing DRM from some music for a short period - they've been fooled once already.
"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is an interesting thing - it only happens with items that can be duplicated and sold at a price substantially below the price of the original product. If the record companies sold CDs for 69 cents each then the "pirates" wouldn't bother with music CDs. The record companies would never willingly reveal their cost of production - but you can safely assume that it's much less than a dollar. When they over-price the finished product at 20 dollars they create their own piracy problem.
Will they ever see this simple truth? "Pirates" are a fact of life; eliminate one or a dozen and a hundred more will take their place. As long as there's easy money to be made then people will be lined up to get their share. There is nothing that the music companies, their lobbying lapdogs, the government, the courts, or anyone else can do to prevent it. As long as the product is priced far in excess of its production cost, there's going to be a "piracy" problem.
Even the folks who just "want to get it for free" would become paying customers if the price was RIGHT. But the music industry keeps turning out formula junk with one or two good tunes per CD and then asking 20 bucks for it - and then they wonder why people aren't buying it. This is the root cause of their decline - expecting top dollar for bargain basement material.
But they weren't satisfied with shooting themselves in that foot - they decided to start up their "legal" extortion racket and run people over the coals for thousands of dollars - for downloading a song that has a market value of less than a dollar. They even decided to sue some dead people, children, disabled seniors, etc. just to make sure that they offended everyone. This bone-headed plan is pure public relations poison - but they just can't stop. This turns a bunch more customers into former customers and the sales drop off even faster.
Having shot themselves in both feet, they turned to their kneecaps with DRM and rootkits. While it's tempting, I won't belabor the point about what a bad idea this was. Now they suggest that they'll remove the DRM from a subset of their catalog - provisionally, for a short period of time. It almost sounds as if they believe they're dealing from a position of strength.
What a bunch of closed-minded fools. Their doom is upon them and they act as if they're in control of the situation...
...and I'll say it until I stop getting modded Insightful/Informative/Funny for it. Piracy is an economic indicator that you are not letting the market balance itself. Specifically, piracy is caused by artificially fixing prices too high. People refuse to buy the good since it is too expensive, but still demand the good, so they steal/copy it in order to obtain it. The only way to discourage piracy is to lower your price to the point that people would rather buy "the real deal" than a cheap knockoff. Perhaps if CDs were not pegged at $20 each, and were sold at the more reasonable $5 each, the public would find it more preferable to go to the music store instead of the torrent search engine.
~ C.
UMG says that it wants to watch how DRM-free music affects piracy rates.
Whats piracy rates to them? They should look at their sales, nothing else. If they sell three times as much, but the piracy rate (whatever is that, anyway) multiply by ten, why should they care? Should they suppose that they are losing that sales, even if the sales data tells them that they would never have done a but a third of them in the DRM-way? That would be really short-sight... oops, music-industry executives you said?. Then forget it all, short-sightedness is a part of the required CV there, to all external appearances.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him in all his glory
what would you ask if you had just one question?
Yeah, Yeah, DRM is great
Yeah, Yeah, DRM is good
Yeah Yeah yeah yeah yeah To the traditional version for consumers: If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him in all his glory
what would you ask if you had just one question?
Yeah, Yeah, God is great
Yeah, Yeah, God is good
Yeah Yeah yeah yeah yeah I think we can agree which version is better.
My apologies to Alanis Morissette.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
WTF? What's with the pony craze on slashdot?
God damn, now I want one too!
Of piracy's affect on music sales
http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/strumpfoldpapers.htm
Bleep seems to have got the mix right, they have FLAC and MP3, the prices are good, and just happens to fit my music tastes (Indie UK music, ala Aphex twin, UNKLE, Squarepusher, Autechre etc etc. Nice web design with free inline demos of the tracks.
(I am nothing to do with bleep I just like their spin on selling music so I recommend them where I can.).
It's not that new, though:
;)
1. CD burners have existed for ages.
2. The possibility to just copy music to cassette or movies to VHS has existed for ages, and that existed even before CDs gained much adoption. Heck, in the 90's even half the portable stereos, and every self-respecting cassette deck, had room for _two_ cassettes at the same time and a button to copy from one to the other.
3. If you think people had to wait for the Internet to swap music or movies or programs, I dare say you don't remember high school that well.
4. Before mass Internet access, there were BBSs. Frankly, now that was a bigger pirate haven than the Internet... or than the Carribeans back in the 1600's
5. Internet access isn't _that_ new and unlike everything before. Sure, only now it may have reached the grandmas or finally gotten very high speeds, but I don't think those were ever the biggest pirates anyway. If grandma wants to listen to folk songs from the 50's or for some good ol' fashioned symphonic music, she can get those for pence legally. Plus she already has her cassette and vinyl collection.
The biggest problems are teens who (A) are driven by peer pressure, and have to listen, watch, wear and say exactly what their peers appreciate. Even if he goes for the rebellious punk image, the average teenager won't actually be rebellious at all, he'll be a clone of whatever punk image is currently fashionable among his peers. And (B) face high prices for that image. And (C) don't have that much disposable income. So the pressure was always there to copy the latest fashionable album.
And those already had modems, virtually all universities had Interent as early as the early 90's, and most had access to a hi-fi where they could copy a cassette.
Plus, music companies have been complaining about Napster since the 90's, so at least at that point the world was already connected enough to make a difference, according to those music companies.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you go into a hardware store and buy a hammer, you won't be paying the amount it cost to produce and ship it.
To continue to produce their product, any company has to make a profit. That is why your music can't be free.
Nobody else has this sig.
If they see no difference in piracy whether there is DRM or not, the conclusion is also that DRM does not curb piracy rates => might as well do without.
Suit 1: (opens box) "Hey, there used to be more cash in here! I want more!"
Suit 2: "Oh noes! Why did the box stop making cash?!"
Suit 1: "Maybe someone TOOK OUR CASH!"
Suit 2: "Took... you mean, like... pirates?"
Suit 1: (gasp) "Pirates! Yes, must be pirates! We must kill the pirates!"
Janitor: "Hey, don't you guys actually make money from helping new artists distribute their music to a wider audience?"
Suit 1: "Huh? Who are you? Someone throw him out... Now, let's vote, who wants to kill pirates and so the box makes more cash?"
Suits 2,3: "Yay! More cash!"
Did something like this happen next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iakR7sB0skw
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
That keeps itunes back fromt he brink of outright, obvious, monopoly is good in my book, and heck, maybe Real Rhapsody will get some customers back.
When I go to the store to buy a hammer, some of that price is the cost of making a hammer, and some is the cost of shipping a hammer, paying for warehouses full of hardware, having shop staff putting hammers on shelves, etc... and a small amount is profit.
If they could run the hammer program on a fab-o-matic and produce a hammer instantly, for damn near zero incremental cost, I would expect hammers to be a lot cheaper. If I have to use my own fab-o-matic machine and supply my own raw materials, I expect the hammer to be damn near free.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
The concept of the manufacturing enterprise is largely an artefact of the Industrial Revolution (OK, everybody cites the Arsenal, but it's an exception.)The concept of the enterprise as trade (i.e. middleman) is pretty consistent. (The British Empire in India started from a trading monopoly that accidentally had to go to war to protect its interests.) From the 1300s on, any French person using the term "entreprise" would know exactly what the two root words meant, and clearly had no quarrel with that meaning. j'entre, et alors je prise, je suis entrepreneur.
Pining for the fjords
Consider that the majors have been trying to push bloody business models where one or more of those restriction apply to you:
1) Pay for each nail you hit with the hammer
2) Rent the hammer and pay monthly for ulimited strikes on nails - when the rent expires all your nails disappear
3) Be limited to use your hammer just in your room
4) Be limited to use only a specific brand of nails - In case this is overturned by a clever hacker all the nails can cease to work (see playsforsure against old MS DRM)
5) whatever else limiting to you but more profitable to them
6) Get sued if you lent/use a hammer from another person
7) Pay for a hammer that can be used to build 10 houses - Ops, sorry, after the sale terms are changes: only 7 houses (Apple FairPlay Cd burning)
From my humble point of view as noone would use such a tool . Conclusions: those corporations have been looking actively for extincion and fully deserve it.
If I look back over history at the California gold rush era what comes to mind is how few actually got rich from digging for gold compared to those who sold supplies (shovels,food,horses). The music industry is in the same rut, they are digging for gold when they should really be selling a service with extra frills to add value to each file. A good example is "premium accounts" to gain early access to new releases, another would be "music file insurance", pay an extra 10c per file or a yearly subscription fee and that covers you for a limited period in case you lose the file by by accident ie PC stolen, hardisk wiped, then you can download the same file again for free. It doesnt take much thought but then again these guys cant see the trees because they keep staring at the forest.
...so the hammer now costs one cent. Everybody says, "Why does this hammer only cost one cent? There must be something wrong with it!" Then they go and buy exactly the same hammer from the shop across the road, because its elevated price gives it perceived worth.
Nobody else has this sig.
Hahaha, I quite like this analogy.
:)
However, I was arguing that music should cost money, (see my reply above) - not that it should be encumbered with DRM. I find DRM to be just as ridiculous as anybody else here, and you have my congratulations on extending my analogy to illustrate this so amusingly
Nobody else has this sig.
This article has to do with Digital Rights Managment music being sold online.
duh.
In the discussion of bought CDs vs. legal downloads vs. "pirated" downloads there's always the question coming up if 99c (equals $1 to me) is a justified price. As i see it it is not because of two things both resulting from comparing the downloads with the price of a CD-Album. On a CD you get about 14 Tracks and pay somewhere from $10 to $20, so that's also roughly $1 per track, give or take some cents. But there you buy a CD with better sound quality, booklet and whatnot, storage medium, and if you want you can still make some mp3 of it (even in better quality). So for the same price you get much less with the download. When you look at the publishing costs it's even worse: it's really much cheaper to put up a song for download than to press it on CD, ship it, and sell it in a store.
That's why i think $1 is not justified. Somewhere from 20-30c is more like it.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Lets try another example;
fifteen or twenty years ago (when CD's were already fairly old technology) A computer probably not even as fast as the one you're using now was called a 'supercomputer' and cost about a quarter-million dollars. The cost of computing and the cost of network bandwidth has dropped two orders of magnitude since then.
The technology behind computers isn't just similar, it IS the technology behind distributing digital music. The processing power that cost a quarter million dollars twenty years ago costs a few hundred now. The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Your analogy falls down on numerous grounds, but I'll add just one more to the replies you've already received here.
The extremely rapid evolution of music-making technology over the last decade has brought top-end studio technology to even the lowliest musician in his/her bedsit studio. I know because I'm well acquainted with the subject, and I've set up a cheap yet very capable home studio myself. Equipment that could only have been found in a million-dollar professional studio just a decade ago now can be bought for the sort of money spent by normal hobbiests.
What's more, the new technology even deals well with the part of the process for which the studios have typically charged most money and supplied their top audio engineers, namely mixing and mastering. In summary, music production costs can be as close to zero as you want now, except for those musicians who refuse to get involved with technology, which is quite rare. And while CDs still cost a few pennies to press, it's not a lot (which is why we get them as marketting coasters), and they can be avoided totally by musicians with an online presence.
So, your analogy breaks down almost totally because the cost of production is not unavoidably high anymore. The only part of the "cost" that is high is the expectation of earnings by labels, studios, and musicians. And that's not actually a cost, and should come out of profit instead, if the business model is viable.
So, the "make it $0.01 and then maybe I'll buy it" by the other AC wasn't so far off the mark --- the actual cost of an album (not a track) ought to be $0.50 or less, given the volume sales over which to amortize the small costs. The reason it's not so is because the labels (especially) have an extremely greedy expectation of earnings, nothing more.
The labels aren't complaining that music sharing doesn't let them recoup costs, because costs were recouped ages ago after just a handful of sales. They're complaining that their pure profit is dropping. Well frankly, it's hard to find much sympathy for that.
Free will trump anything else every time.
Sure, there will be a few crusaders who want to "support the artists".
Sure, there will be a few people who can't figure out how to make bittorrent work who prefer the convenience of a one-stop download site for a fee.
But the majority of the users who have already drunk from the fountain of free music will continue to do so.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Except that 0.000125 cents per song doesn't seem like fair compensation to the artist, does it? And that's ignoring the fact that not 100% of the proceeds may benefit the artist directly anyway. If 100,000 people purchased a 10-song album at your proposed rate, the entire revenue would only be $12,500! Even where I live, that's far below the poverty line. Split that across three or more band members, and they now have barely enough money to eat. And again- that's ignoring the fact that, unless they handle all their management and distribution themselves, the band won't see 100% of the money from the sales. Even if they're dedicated to their craft, at that rate, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave up on creating music altogether to get jobs as beggars.
Pricing can't be entirely dependent upon your storage means and your income. The actual production costs must be factored in as well. Taking that into consideration, I don't see 0.000125 cents per song being a feasible price any time soon.
To continue to produce their product, any company has to make a profit. That is why your music can't be free. Funny is this is slashdot, some makes millions by coding C programs which are "some text" compiled, e.g. all "bits" and they don't think Artist, record company, people producing it shouldn't get any additional money. They don't figure the fact that "art" is also a form of information and people may choose what to do with the information they produced.
Please? We don't need separate stories for each DRM press release and each DRM crack. Bring back the quickies!
They had a good selection, no DRM, and reasonable (bitrate-proportional) pricing. They did enough business and presented enough of a threat that they got shut down. That should be a lesson to UMG:
- charge a reasonable price (sliding scale, by bitrate, so people can choose to pay more for better quality)
- make it easier to buy from you than to find and download on the P2P networks
- low overhead, means you don't take a huge cut, and remember to *pay the artists*
- attract customers by offering a quality product at a competitive price (iTunes is 0.99/trk? - sell yours for less!)
Seriously. AoMP3.com didn't fail because people downloaded their entire catalog and put it on the P2P networks. They succeeded in spite of the P2P networks, because they got the selection/convenience/price equation right. I've always wondered why a legal version of AoMP3.com, one that paid the artists most of the income, and worked on high volume, low margins wouldn't be a huge success.
They're one of the worst. It is they who persuaded Microsoft to let them charge Zune users a Zune-tax. Let them lift that tax first.
Here's a secret tip: you can decline to pay the Zune-tax. I did it, and surprisingly, it works like a charm!
Follow these steps carefully:
1. Do not buy a fucking Zune
2. ???
3. Profit!
Plus, with this method, you don't have yet another piece of plastic junk littering your living quarters.
Inflation is a bitch.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
The technology behind computers isn't just similar, it IS the technology behind distributing digital music. The processing power that cost a quarter million dollars twenty years ago costs a few hundred now. The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?
While I somewhat agree with a couple of things you say, I must add; Do you even know what you're talking about? I think you're just wildly spewing out numbers because you want something for nothing. Back up your figures or stop making things up.
Besides, your model of "cost" only takes the cost of distributing into consideration. The cost of creation needs to be taken into consideration too. Look into the pricing on your average studio. At your price of $0.01 a song, it would take anywhere between 50000-100000 or more purchases to make a song break even. That's not even counting money for the artist(s) to live off of, or the cut that the record labels want to get for their efforts in advertising.
I'm not saying the current price model is fair, I don't know the break down. I'm also not saying I agree with the strategies of the large record labels, I personally dislike them and the stranglehold they have on the market. But, consider the larger picture before you shoot off that songs should be available for $0.01.
The whole problem with the music industry is that they think in potential sales. In other words: They don't go about their world being happy for everyone they meet who owns their product - they go about their world worrying about everyone they meet who doesn't. What a way to run a business!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
>Maybe there are just a few people who think that it's fair to pay for the delivery of goods and services. Ever think of that?
You must have missed the part in my post where I said:
>>Sure, there will be a few crusaders who want to "support the artists".
>Just because it's easy to (illegally) get things free doesn't mean you should.
My point is that most people will do it anyway.
>You might be happy to live with robbing people. I'm not, so I pay for my music.
Again, my point is that you are probably in a minority.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
They convinced people to rebuy their vinyl on CD with the promise of higher quality, why not try to get us to rebuy our CDs as HQ digital downloads? (The initial idea of selling it at the same price, with lower quality sound and only playable on certain devices quite remarkably doesn't seem too popular). Wow, I hadn't actually heard of a reason why I would want to download rather than have the CD, until now. You have pointed out another area where we seem to be going backwards, music quality (the quality of the medium that is, not the content. I don't want to start that flame war)
Music quality is one area where downloading could make an advance. They have tried Super Audio CD and DVD-A but they didn't take off, why not give those who want the higher quality the choice? Giving people the masters, or something close would be a real selling point for the medium.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Which cents? US, Canadian, Euro, etc?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I work in the mobile industry. What I find odd every time I think about it is these companies such as EMI and UMG being willing to sell full tracks with no DRM yet they still keep insisting we only sell the 10-30 second clip ringtones of their songs with DRM.
The only thing I can think of is that they are leaving it on the ringtones because no one is bitchg about it. After all, does anyone want to use that 30 second clip (for legal uses... not buying it once and then sending it to all of your friends) anywhere other than their phone?
So, of the batch, it seems Canadian Mac users aren't going to have many options...
- Rhapsody is US-only
- Bestbuy, Walmart are Internet Explorer only (Okay, I -COULD- download IE5, but really??)
That leaves us with Amazon.com, which doesn't even have a downloadable music store yet.
Mac user base is rising, guys... Don't make us Canadians pirate even more media!!
They still don't get it. Don't dangle DRM free music out like it's a limited time gift to us lowly music lovers who should be grateful for the opportunity. And don't make it hard to find on your website. Make it DRM free period. And for god's sake make it cheap. 99 cents per song?? Are you kidding me? In my city a newer CD costs about $15-18. And usually contains 10 to 20 songs. So if I buy the actual CD it's close to a dollar a song. How is 99 cent mp3s a deal? HA! I'd rather buy the CD at that price and get a case, disk, and little booklet with the package. Or... wait.... many people (cough certianly not me cough) will just grab torrents of DRM free ripped mp3 and build their own album without the crappy songs.
But, finding torrents that are working, good quality, and free of junk is time consuming and a pain in the but (or so I've heard cough). If I could go to a user-friendly website, download legal, high quality DRM free songs for no more than 25 cents each, I would do that in a heartbeat. But come on, 99 cents? Where's the savings from not getting a physical product? I'm not getting a CD, plastic case or full-colour printed booklet, so where's my savings? 99 cents is a joke. And these half-hearted attempts at DRM free options are an insult.
And Piracy impacts their "natural right" to control the music they own.
DRM actually makes the music less valuable than it would have been without...
At the end of the day, profit margins on CDs are so high that it is highly unlikely piracy rates would become high enough to make them unprofitable.
Plus, musicians produce things that can't be pirated like live shows.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I just hope the RIAA or one of the other groups doesn't come out with skewed numbers and they give DRM-Free music a fair chance. I don't want to see some limited set of data after one month that says piracy was up. DRM clearly doesn't have a future.
You basically just described allofmp3.com.
Rather than trying to sue them out of existence, the RIAA would have been better off simply destroying them the capitalist way - Drive them out of the market with (possibly unfair) competition.
They could easily have charged twice what allofmp3.com charged and still done well for the following reasons:
1) Better selection if they did it right. (This would be hard - allofmp3 had a better selection than many of the "I only carry music from one of the major 5 labels" official online stores.)
2) Easier payment. EASY as hell compared to the nightmare that was getting credits on allofmp3 before they were totally shut down.
3) Still far less expensive than current prices. $1.30/track is a little to expensive for "impulse buy", and means that people are only going to buy tracks they've heard. With allofmp3, I would routinely buy entire albums if I liked one track because it was so inexpensive to do so. (Oddly, people buying entire albums is one of the things the RIAA wants people to do and why they resisted any form of online sales for so long...) Likewise, with allofmp3, I would routinely buy additional albums if I liked the first one as a total impulse buy.
The RIAA was stupid with how they handled allofmp3. They looked at it and simply saw, "we're not getting paid". They were too blinded by that greed to look at allofmp3's business model and the fact that allofmp3 was proof that if you gave people content at the right price and convenience, they were perfectly willing to pay for music rather than download it for free.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Most programmers are paid by the hour/day for the act of writing those bits...
There are very few who write once, and then sit back and do nothing as multiple copies are sold.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
DRM didn't curtail piracy and neither did litigation. Whatever the solution to piracy is, it has not been found yet and the rate will continue to rise until that paradigm is reached.
All DRM did was increase discussion about DRM and increase animosity for an industry that (for whatever reason) seems hellbent on nurturing the worst music ever created...
I used to believe that music will be pirated until the intrinsic & extrinsic values met (artists and labels put out quality music) but that's not true either.
I have ~1100 cds in my collection, I have purchased every single one. The only tracks I have dl'd on my computer are the few I received from iTunes via bottlecaps and a few cds released via creative commons license.
All the whiners saying that it's not piracy or theft, you're even worse than the **AAs. Thanks to you, private companies have totally freaked out and started trying to protect their content via draconian and gestapo tactics because you are exploiting technologies that are largely misunderstood by the general public. The GP and **AAs know that you are and that they don't understand the technology so their natural and defensive (albeit immature) response is to exploit it.
Now music companies are trying to respond to the backlash against the RIAA by *trying* to trust the consumer not to pirate their property and ya know what, I don't really care any more because I know all these a**holes are still going to pirate and give the record companies to continue to jack up their prices ultimately hurting me, the purchaser (by forcing me to continue buying used cds only) and the legitimate artist, who doesn't get a share of that increase anyway.
You can throw all the pointed comments and neato-sounding buzzwords and catchy phrases you want about correlations and statistics and this n that to try and prove that it's not piracy or it's not theft but you're really just making excuses and really no better than what you're complaining against.
So I hope this works out but it doesn't matter anyway because I prefer a lossless copy and unlike the pirates or the **AA, I'm not a thief.
So when Universal does their research to find out how piracy has been affected, who are they going to use? Cause for years they've been using "researchers" trained to inflate the numbers as high as possible regardless of how ridiculous it was. If they want the TRUTH (i.e. reliable data they'll need to determine real cost-benefit), they're going to have to use LEGITIMATE research, and I don't know if they can afford legitimate research getting out there for use by policymakers. Or you know, to point out that they've been full of shit for years.
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year? Why is it reasonable to pay executives so much?
I mean the average person earns $41k a year. The answer is- it's not reasonable. We got tons of music (and movies) in the 30's... 40's... and 50's... (and most of the 60's...) when everyone on the food chain made a lot less.
We got more of them because the artists had to produce more to make a living. And the idea of getting filthy rich didn't really start until the 70's.
There is no reason in today's world that we need 15 to 20 people feeding 200k+ per year incomes off of each song. This is why songs (and movies) cost so much. Because a parasitic industry has grown up around them due to their unique government protected monopoly.
Is there any reasonable way you can justify an author getting richer than the queen of england- becoming worth over a billion dollars in such a short period of time? Is there any other kind of work which pays that kind of compensation?
Clearly copyright is currently broken. It forces society to pay grossly inflated prices compared to most of the rest of history.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's why most artists (independent or not) make their money from performing. CD's and recordings should be used (just like the radio) to promote those performances.
What you are witnessing is the death of a bad business model.
Most big label artists make most of their money from T-Shirts and Swag sold at the concerts themselves.
Live with it.
My Babylon
Live show's can't be pirated? Riiiight.
There is a very large underground market for live tapings. Little is done about it because little CAN be done about it...but for the most part the industry AND the artists do NOT condone this whatsoever...with some notable exceptions. (GD, Phish, some other taper friendly bands etc.)
Have you never seen what some live recordings will sell for? I've got bootleg vinyl from shows such as Pink Floyd, The Who, etc, that are very much not legal, and are very much worth a bit of money.
For the most part, a blind eye is turned...but you do NOT want to be caught taping a show where it is not allowed, and you do NOT want to be caught distributing illegal recordings.
No Comment.
Music industry != Computer industry
Music != Software
Music market != Computer market
Distribution costs != market price
Just because you think you know something about the computer industry does not mean you can apply it to any other industry. Costs mean nothing when you ignore (or know nothing about) what determines market price.
Those are damned small costs for most professional recordings actually. Try adding another factor of 10. And that's STILL low for professional artists/studios. You list $500-1000 per song, it can easily cost that for a low budget indy recording at a small studio. Heck, 15 years ago the band I was in spent 20k to record, mix, and master a 10 song album, and that was using a close friends studio at very cheap rates.
Popular artists regularly spend tens of thousands Per Song!
What we need to have happen is a change to purchasing true licenses for works we want to, that actually grant us rights to continue to do so. This money should go directly to the artist. 10c per song for this would be a HUGE amount more than artists currently get paid for song sales, but is still cheap for us. Organizations like the RIAA should be able to purchase Distribution Licenses from the artists. Then we buy Media from the RIAA (or whomever else) for a reasonable price that actually reflects their costs...which again, would likely be in the order of 10c per download...more for actual physical media. (Given your proof of purchasing a license for the contents of said media). Yes, this would be a LOT less than the RIAA currently rakes in...but it's STILL basically free money...and then the artist is actually getting paid because the RIAA isn't playing bullshit games of collecting money on behalf of all artists, but then paying them a meager pittance, and not even to the artists that are necessarily making the SALES.
Like that'll ever happen though.
No Comment.
Except for the lucky few, musicians or "artists" are rather on the poor side. I play in a local band, so many a time after a show we hang out with the headlining act. I see behind the scenes, behind the image... Signed musicians, and they sleep in their van, taking shifts driving to the next show. If they're lucky, someone in town offers them a place to crash for the night. That doesn't really sound like a bunch of people making >= $200k/year to me.
Yeah the stadium filling acts have tour buses and roadies and groupies and all that, but the vast majority of performing musicians make enough money to stay alive and on the road, if they're lucky.
Also, don't compare music and movies. Making music involves a band, a couple of engineers, and possibly a studio musician or two for the "extras". Next time you go see a movie in theaters, sit through all the credits... Try to count the names. Music involves a couple of handfuls of people to create, a movie requires hundreds. Now, to clarify, I'm not in any way for the high prices and I'm not defending current copyright laws (I believe the system is broken personally). I'm just pointing out that movies and music are on different levels.
I am not sure you know what inflation is. Look at purchasing power from the 80's until now. Many prices have dropped despite increased wages....look around your house. What would that item cost in 1988? How about your computer, or your microwave for example? Maybe if the Music industry spent less time trying to find a consumer-screwing scheme that didn't screw consumers, they would be able to charge less.
I was trying to be on the conservative side so I wouldn't be accused of artificially inflating my numbers. I like your ideas and views... Too bad that at this rate it will never happen.
I have a serious feeling that Metallica's not going to die if they don't sell over 100,000 records. Many artists make money from shows, not discs.
+5, Truth
When you just pirate it, your the only person that "wins". The artists get nothing, and the record company that promotes them gets nothing.
How is that beneficial to society. All it does is encourage artists to look towards other professions when people think that they have a right to their works for "free".
If you like your artists, sponsor them. Spouting crap along the lines of "They should allow me to download it for free, otherwise i'll pirate it", is nothing short of disgusting
The fact that i was modded flamebate for saying otherwise, goes to show how much people think its their right to pirate software/media for free
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
How it affects piracy? If that's the question being asked, then Uni don't get it. The real question is does this get more revenue.
And not through iTMS... hmm. Could it be Real is okay with the variable pricing scheme, which, depending on point of view, is discounting the crap or gouging for the cream. So that suggests that these DRM-free tracks will be excluded from iTMS. So if they don't get the results they want, is it because of higher prices, or avoiding the biggest digital music store which gives distributors a convenient feed to the most popular personal music device? Oops, I forgot this is a record company. If it fails, it will be because of piracy and college kids swapping music files. It's never about a blind disregard of what consumers want.
I've been buying DRM free music for decades. I go down to the record store (or online) and purchase an album. I guess that's the difference between me and teenyboppers that want to use the latest Top 10 single as a cellphone ring; I enjoy musicians who are worth listening to, not untalented one-hit-wonders spewed out of MTV and local radio stations.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
... maybe you should hold the cheers for decisions based on principle and not expedience.
"RealNetwork's Rhapsody service will offer 256kbps tracks, the company said in a desperate statement."
Corrected for your convenience.
It's all a blame game and it's rampant in society...
There's an easy way to stop pirating....
Make a good product and sell it at a decent price. Period.
If you can't survive the competition then go back to business school...
Heck, maybe go get a real job instead of pimping musical one hit wonders...
But stop thinking you can get the Government (that big corps pays for)
to Police and legislate your greedy immoral business practices....
They cannot control ALL of us...
End of Line.
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year?
Talent, ability, training, execution, performance, and a touch of luck.
The artists and the executives make so much money because they can do what they do better than most anyone else, and their audience is willing to compensate them for it. You might not appreciate their "talents", but it is something rare and very, very hard to do successfully. Pop radio spins a playlist on average of about 12 songs. There are hundreds of thousands of artists putting our records every year. I can guarantee you that not all of them are rich; some might not even eat tonight, or are working a day job to support that dream of being one of those 12, someday.
In your post, you complain about the Artists making so much money. You complain about executives who manage multinational corporations making so much money. If there's so much money to be had, why don't you do it and cash in? Why doesn't everyone?
This is the whole purpose of capitalism. It's got built-in meritocracy to reward those who can do things that people appreciate and as an incentive for them to keep doing it. I appreciate listening to my favorite musicians, so I reward them so they keep doing it. I also enjoy having hot, precooked, and tasty pizza delivered to my house. I reward the store and the delivery guy for that service. If that restaraunt could service a couple hundred million homes, then the pizza flippers and delivery guys would be millionaires, too.
The bottom line is that these "artists" get rewarded because their market scales. Sell a hundred records, make a hundred dollars. Sell a million, make a million. Good incentive to make a record that a million people will want to buy, eh?
Yeah, I want a lossy music file too. NOT. WMA or bust.
What female groupies provide has tremendous value and should be considered a sizable portion of the income a musician receives. Just think about how much that service would cost if purchased outright.
Why bother.
"The idea of getting filthy rich didn't really start until the 70's?" Huh? Ever hear of the Payola scandal of the 50's? Do you think that the recording labels paid disc jockeys to play their musician's stuff because they really, really thought that their music was important and that money had nothing to do with it? How about that payola had been well known in the Big Band era of the 30's and 40's?
Money has been part and parcel of music since long before recorded music, or do you think that it was just ars gratia artis (art for the sake of art)?
In the mid 1800's, before mechanical means to reproduce music existed, musicians made money by selling sheet music. They performed concerts not to get paid (or at least, not to get paid very much), but as a way of advertising. People could go into a music store and buy a sheet music copy that they could take home and play themselves. Unfortunately, copyright laws largely didn't exist then, so different publishers could sell competing versions of that same piece of music and never pay the artists anything. Stephen Foster, one of the premier composers of popular American music in the 1800's, died penniless. "Oh, Susanna", netted him less than $100. This is why ASCAP was created - not because they wanted to make piles of money, just because musicians and composers got tired of other people making piles of money and while they got none.
One could argue that their situation was little different than today, but today at least the artist knows that there are licensing body(s) taking in the royalties. Unfortunately ASCAP, BMI and RIAA don't agree on how musicians should be paid.
But tapes are lossy. In this case, they've lost the 'live' part.
Now, there might be some holes under the fence that people crawl under, but there's a reasonable number of those to actually police, and they're not on the property of everyone attending the show.
For some artists, a live performance is way more satisfying than a recording of the same performance.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"Popular artists regularly spend tens of thousands Per Song!"
Spending money is never a problem; they could easily spend millions per song. The free market usually deals with that kind of waste of resources simply by having competitors offer their products cheaper. But in the monopoly rights markets, such spending isnt corrected, which is why we have the prices we do for something that should cost a few cents.
"This money should go directly to the artist. 10c per song for this would be a HUGE amount more than artists currently get paid for song sales, but is still cheap for us."
How about we actually go all the way and simply put a sales tax on any revenue derived from 'copyrighted' material and hand that money directly to the artists and composers? That would void the entire problem of RIAA exploitation contracts and we could actually account for the money spent in the economy to support production of copyrighted material and see if we're getting our taxpayers moneys worth.
"The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?"
CDs cost about $20 in 1988, or the equivalent of about $2 per track. That's about $34 (or $3.40 per track) in today's money.
The record labels may want to charge $3.40, but they do not. That's the critical difference. They charge $0.99, not $3.40.
Your views on incremental costs of sale are very common around here (as shown by your 5, Insightful). I think the reasoning is that if an album costs $100K to make, but if the bandwidth for the download costs a nickel, then the cost of the download should be a nickel. Many Slashdotters are also of the understanding that since a digital file can be copied an infinite number of times, then the amortized cost per track is essentially zero. Now, I acknowledge that this line of reasoning is useful if you want to justify piracy -- after all, their cost per sale is essentially zero, and they sell the track for $0.99, then that's an insane amount of profit. The record companies are just too greedy for their own good, and piracy is our moral prerogative to teach them a lesson!
But many folks understand that production costs are accrued not over the potential for reproduction (infinity) or the potential for sale, but across the actual number of tracks sold. If your digital good cost $100K to make and you sell 100K of them, that's a rough cost per sale of a buck -- no matter how many copies were distributed without being paid for. And, as covered above, the digital medium's potential for unlimited copying does not weigh in here -- if you've sold 100K items, you've sold 100K items. Your revenue stream ends there.
A lot of people also understand that there are fixed per-sale costs other than bandwidth. Although the record companies try everything they can to get out of it, artists and performers do get royalties by law -- up to $0.25 per track in some instances. Add credit card fees and you may be up to a cost of $0.30 per sale before you even get to the innumerable amortized costs and overhead.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
If Bestbuy and Walmart are IE only and, as far as I can see, Rhapsody is subscription only (...and don't get me started on what I think of RealNetworks anyway), will there actually be any option here for a Linux user to buy songs for $.99?
Seriously...I'd like to support this, but I don't see many options here.
Tom
Best DRM analogy I've seen in a long time. I'd like to quote you in explaining to people why DRM is a problem. Mind if I forward your comment ot the Defective By Design mailing list?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
the last sentence in the article was worth about 3 minutes of laughing.
i think piracy will not falter from the path it would have taken with or without this.
universal probably realizes that this is a completely safe move because:
1. people will pirate anyway, as we all know.
2. if it increases, they get to say, look! we were right! even though the increase probably had no relation to this.
3. if it decreases or stays the same, they get to say, look! we gave you what you wanted, aren't we nice?
i totally agree with the slashdot series that says that music can now be effectively distributed legally, for free. it has a marginal cost extremely close to zero, and fixed costs can be recovered through having the free music increase other goods' values, which do not have a marginal cost of zero, such as concerts, ad contracts, shirts, etc.
of course, it makes a lot of sense to be wary of this because it looks like a one-way bottomless pit of death. but, on the other hand, how much would it really hurt a company? everyone who wants to pirate already does it until they fill their HDs, and people who like official merchandise will buy it whether or not they can get it for free.
Ahh yes, good idea. Kill the RIAA off and replace it with the government. Yeah, that'll help.
And I was talking reasonable, out of pocket for the artist, recording costs. That's ignoring the big-label practice of 'funding' the production of an album for an artist up front, in 'their' studios, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars...all of which gets paid back via album sales...of which the artist sees none of because they owe that money to the label.
Recording equipment may have gotten cheaper. But expertise and time has not. It takes a lot of time and effort to put together a well polished album. Or should artists all record to 4-track directly and call that a wrap as that is the most cost effective?
You're trying to paint a very black and white picture when the problem is that the entire industry is one big gradient of gray.
No Comment.
So, no music from any artist is released until someone buys the first $3.5 million CD and the rest cost $0.01?
Most of the stuff on
"I am not sure you know what inflation is. Look at purchasing power from the 80's until now. Many prices have dropped despite increased wages....look around your house. What would that item cost in 1988? How about your computer, or your microwave for example? Maybe if the Music industry spent less time trying to find a consumer-screwing scheme that didn't screw consumers, they would be able to charge less."
Excellent point!
The minimum wage in the mid-80s was, IIRC, about $3.75. New CD releases cost $18 - $20, for a ratio of about 5:1.
Minimum wage is presently $5.85 (it'll be going to $6.55 next summer and it's already higher in California). The average cost of a new CD release today is $13 and change, for a ratio of 2.5:1.
You may be right that record labels are just too inefficient. I've thought a bit about how an indie record label could be profitable selling tracks at $0.50 each (which is, of course, still too high for many Slashdotters). Here's my proposal:
If you manage to whittle the royalties and other costs per sale to $0.20 per track, this will give you $0.30 net profit per track before costs of production. At a production cost of $1K per track ($10K per CD), you'll need to sell 3K copies of each track to break even. This is within the realm of possibility.
So -- what enterprising Slashdotter with a million bucks in the bank wants to help me get started? ;-)
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
No, that is not how it works. To a small degree yes, but you fail to take into account the large amount of customers keeping an eye on the price. The one cent hammer would still be a great hit, and it would not be strange to see it over time outcompeting the "perceived worth" just by the strength of word of mouth advertising, and people thinking "then again, it is only a cent, I can always try it out."
Moreover your view on the analogy is lacking - you would have to imagine that the store across the road sells not a similar hammer, not even the same model of hammer, but the exact same hammer, molecule for molecule. Knowing this, nobody would pay an inflated price for it.
I mean, why even use the analogy? Why would I pay the same for music online as I would in a store, when clearly there are several steps less to the distribution chain? I mean online stores of physical goods have long been able to press prices just because they cut off the store and some times the costs of holding stock. In the case of music they cut off the store, the wholesaler, physical distribution, returns... Actually they can cut it all down to the artist and a distributor basically, which should logically cut the price by something like 50-90%.
If I pay the same for music online, then the record company gets those 50-90% all to themselves.
The cost of the music is not JUST the cost of distribution.
The guys making the music do not really do it as a hobby. They expect to be paid. Yes, you can get a microwave now for $30 when it used to cost $300. But that does not mean that a musician would be happy to make 1/10 of what he would have been paid 20 years ago.
I am also fully aware that major labels only pay their artists a mere pittance, and most artists make the money on tour. I wish it were otherwise, and perhaps it is with indie labels.
But the fact still remains that, in order to make an album, you have to pay employees to run the recording studio, you have to pay for the studio itself, you have to hire artists to make the cover art, etc.
Look at is this way: the manufacturing cost of a CD or DVD (with case) is less probably less than a dollar, yet people consider paying $30 for a videogame to be a bargain, and usually don't start bitching until the games hit $50 or more.
So, I have absolutely no problem paying a dollar per track for music that I like. The only things that I would change are the amount that the artists are paid, and to eliminate DRM forever.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Have you never seen what some live recordings will sell for? I've got bootleg vinyl from shows such as Pink Floyd, The Who, etc, that are very much not legal, and are very much worth a bit of money.
They may not be worth as much as you think if they've been liberated on Dime (or any of the other like-sites). Something you might want to consider doing.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
"At the end of the day, profit margins on CDs are so high that it is highly unlikely piracy rates would become high enough to make them unprofitable."
What is your estimate of the average net profit margin per CD?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Not worth so much now, at least the live recordings.
I've got 30 year old bootleg vinyl though, in very very good condition. I don't mean it's worth a lot of money by any stretch, and I'll never sell them anyways. But they are certainly worth a lot more than any digital copy would be.
No Comment.
Finally someone who knows what they're talking about. The ART of recording takes years to attain, and Joe Guitar buying an M-Box and a pair of SM-57s isn't going to manage recordings of the same quality that Billy Engineer is going to get with his API console, Apogee converters, a host of high-quality mics, compressors, and EQs and years of experience with the recording and mixing process. Even if Joe wants to drop the cash to get the API, the Apogee, a whole host of high-quality mics, etc, he's still missing the craftsmanship that Billy has been honing for years. The end product wont be the same. It might be the source of great pride, a labor of love, but Joe just won't produce as good a product as Billy.
The entire point of an audio engineer is to navigate the black arts of recording so that Joe Guitar's songs shine rather than just exist.
that sued a NIN fan for putting one of the leaked Year Zero songs on his website for download.
my pet machine
Good point. Some people talk about price and cost as if they were the same thing, and they're not. Price is what people are willing to pay. Price - Cost equals profit, but if the price people are willing to pay is less than cost you have losses not profit. The problem is that now that there are more alternative sources of music the price people are willing to pay for CDs has gone down, but record companies want to maintain the prices at the same (or higher) level. Meanwhile other people have explained the reasons for thinking the cost of making CDs has gone down, so by keeping the prices high the companies want to try to capture the profits on both ends, and they just can't. For $5.00 a CD in a nice sturdy package with a little booklet about the band and the songs seems to me like a pretty good deal. At $13-14 it's not.
best analogy ever.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I'm always amused by the hordes of seemingly useless people that participate in the production of a movie. Perhaps all the people are needed in some way, but the titles in the credits always scream 'bloat' to me...
I really don't care that they're going with DRM-free music. I have no respect for Universal Music Group, and will never trust them with my hard-earned money again. I'll be happily dancing on their proverbial grave the day they go bankrupt.
There's no financial incentive to do that as opposed to just living off of the interest of the $1,000,000.
Your salary needs to be more than $60,000 after taxes in order for you to break even.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
"There's no financial incentive to do that as opposed to just living off of the interest of the $1,000,000. Your salary needs to be more than $60,000 after taxes in order for you to break even."
Good points, but I should explain that a common mindset around here is that everybody is simply too greedy. Musicians, for example, should be happy with touring for the rest of their lives to make money -- or at least the Slashdot zeitgeist goes.
My plan calls for, among other things, asking artists to take less royalties than they might make with a major label contract. If my plan allowed for the owner of the business to make $60K a year, it might be seen as bad, from a moral perspective, as the traditional labels. Running a successful business in recording, producing, promoting and selling music at $0.50 per track means making sacrifices at all levels -- not just shorting the artists.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Getting an MP3 isn't really what I want... FLAC or OGG are more interesting for me...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
How depressing that most of the comments (with a few notable exceptions) have consisted of "Too little, too late" or "I won't buy music until they [fill in the blank]". The thing is, until today, [fill in the blank] was "sell DRM free music". But now that they're actually opening up and giving it a shot again, we're coming up with another reason why we won't spend our cash on music.
When it comes down to it, we download music because it's EASY and FREE. Don't get me wrong, most of us hold strong opinions about the state of the music industry and the rights of musicians, and the behavior of the RIAA - but that's not why we download music. We're not trying to make some point by downloading another album, as if we're fighting for our rights. If we were we would jump all over this oppurtunity to show that we appreciate DRM-free music, instead of simply coming up with more requirements for our money.
If DRM-free music doesn't sell, then Universal is going to say "Look, we addressed the number one complaint of music 'pirates'", and piracy is just as bad as always. Clearly the pirates are just interested in getting something for nothing". And you know what? They'll be RIGHT.
You can't have all your wishes fulfilled at once. You don't keep bopping the dog with the newspaper after he's housetrained, just because he doesn't use the toilet - reward small successes as they come, and you're more likely to see more of them. Buy Universal's music instead of downloading it and they might address the rest of our complaints.
You really need to keep inflation in mind when quoting old dollars.
r e/result.php
http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompa
In 2006, $100.00 from 1850 is worth:
$2,663.14 using the Consumer Price Index
$2,002.92 using the GDP deflator
using the value of consumer bundle *
$19,367.27 using the unskilled wage
$40,044.15 using the nominal GDP per capita
$515,417.97 using the relative share of GDP
---
A trivial search for 1860 to 1880 salaries reveals annual salaries of $150.
So $100 was not too bad for one song. He was paid 4 to 6 month's income for it.
---
Regardless, when I say "filthy rich" I mean earning more money that the average person earns in a lifetime for writing one song. And in many cases, several people earn that level of income, and many more make a year's income ($41,000) off of the song. It's irrationally high.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There is a very large underground market for live tapings. Little is done about it because little CAN be done about it...but for the most part the industry AND the artists do NOT condone this whatsoever...with some notable exceptions. (GD, Phish, some other taper friendly bands etc.)
It's actually fairly common for artists to approve of it. At least for artists where the concert is more about the music than the spectacle. With very few exceptions, the fans who collect live recordings are the type of fan that has already bought everything the artist offers and still wants more.
Have you never seen what some live recordings will sell for? I've got bootleg vinyl from shows such as Pink Floyd, The Who, etc, that are very much not legal, and are very much worth a bit of money.
Live recordings haven't been very valuable since CD burners & MP3s became common. Even less so since broadband and lossless audio formats became widely available. The value you're talking about is largely from the crowd that never wanted to give up on vinyl. I'm guessing another factor is it wasn't as easy to record a show in those days.
Now, for any band capable of selling a few hundred thousand CDs, the fans expect a FLAC encoded recording to be spreading within a week of a show.
To continue to produce their product, any company has to make a profit. That is why _their_ music can't be free.
FIXED
[site]
His model (unfortunately) really does work for things like Wine and clothing.
A hammer is a hammer (it nails stuff in or not).
But for a lot of things- if you raise the price, you raise the number of items being sold. Humans are stupid that way.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
UMG to try to force Apple to keep FairPlay locked onto ANY music that is also available directly from UMG without any copy protection.
:-)
The unfair business laws are written for precisely thus purpose. UMG are looking at lawsuits the moment that this happens.
Apple can finally wave DRM goodbye (its going to allow Apple to keep their players going without having to increase their processing for another year or so, and you know what that'll mean to the bottom line.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Buyers want selection, convenience, control over what they buy, and a low price. UMG will find a way to fail to give them at least two of these. This experiment will last several months, just long enough for some people to finally hear about it, before the plug is pulled. For those who actually did hear about it, they had to register away their life's biography and every account number they have just so that they can get a crappy selection of music where the song they were *actually* looking for they could just have easily found on any P2P client. UMG will smugly declare themselves victorious, and they will continue to lose money no matter what they believe. Why? Because they just don't get it.
Allow me to offer the clue-bat: narrow it down to cheap and convenient. DRM isn't even really about freedom for the average joe, they just don't like being inconvenienced by it. Has anyone thought of maybe kiosks offering custom-burned CD's in Walmart for pennies a song? What about pre-paid cards for music you could pick up at your local store so you don't have to worry about privacy and identity theft concerns? Seriously people, business could easily get creative if they pulled their heads out of the sand. It's like any other market, adapt or die. The music industry isn't any different.
The question on my mind is whether or not consumers, who have been screwed over and over again by all manner of DRM and the people pushing it (R.I.A.A. et al) will be willing to forgive and forget? 99 cent tracks would have been attractive to me years ago, but having watched the powers that be try harder and harder to put their hands in my pockets, I am inclined to tell them to keep their DRM free music at any price and I'll just keep downloading it for free.
Now that anyone is free to distribute their work at low cost, we're finding that there are lots and lots and lots of talented musicians out there who, in any other age, would have been laboring in obscurity. (Surely as a touring musician you will agree that this is true.) The new freedom to distribute music will increase our appetite for music, but I think to a larger extent it will increase the number of people who identify themselves as musicians. In other words, the amount of money spent on music will increase, but it will be spread around a much larger pool of people than ever before.
I view this as a good thing; we're entering a real golden age of music, probably unmatched in terms of ubiquity and creative outpouring since before the Enlightenment. As music becomes increasingly de-commoditized, those "stadium" acts seem like the last of a dying breed. In the future, we won't all have to listen to the same thing.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Ive said it a hundred times, so I might as well say it again: Anyone will sell more copies of nonDRM'd music than with DRM. Once Sony and company realize this, their greed of making money will overcome their fear of losing money... and everyone will be happy.
Ok, for all of you who were arguing back and forth about whether music should be $0.01 or not. A company has been selling CDs by independant artists pretty inexpensively. I'm sure if they were to start allowing downloads it could be pretty cheap as well, but probably not $0.01 http://cdbaby.com/home
I don't believe music should be pirated. I buy music direct from the artists. Also, I do not believe that "rights of authorship" can or should be transferred to anyone but the author. That means some company should not be able to buy up the rights to the work of a bunch of artists and just sit and collect money for nothing.
Finally, it comes down to "just how much money should somebody expect to make from a single idea"? If someone writes a pop song, should they expect to get paid for 50 years? Should their family expect to continue to get paid after the artist is dead? Do you think that "encourages creativity and innovation"?
Same goes for patents as far as I'm concerned. It can be argued that it does the opposite of encouraging innovation.
Oh, and this is something with which I have direct knowledge. I make my living off of my "intellectual property". But more and more, I just use the Creative Commons license. And you KNOW WHAT? It hasn't hurt my income one little bit.
I've had direct experience with other people taking my work without permission and making money from it. Instead of getting pissed, it just made me rethink the system for myself. I love music and artists like I love life itself. But it's time for them (us) to look differently at the way we expect to make our livings from our work. There are better ways that don't make criminals out of the people who enjoy what we do.
You are welcome on my lawn.
UMG seems to be the most progressive of the RIAA members and will make a point to actually buy a CD from them next time I like one of their artists. They have embraced youtube and now they are ditching DRM. If they keep this up I might even start buying CDs again.
You're buying songs, not bits. The size of digital representation of any artistic media is unrelated to its market price.
Should lossless songs cost 10x more than lossy? Should bluray videos cost 4x more than DVD?
Should the Harry Potter e-book cost 5 cents because it only has 11 meg worth of text?
The cost of transmission isn't mostly related to the cost of production. N
ow, you might argue that the cost of production is too high, or the profit margins are too high, or the distribution of profits are unethical - and I might agree with you on those, but those are separate arguments.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The cost of computers is not just the cost of manufacturing either. There's a hell of a lot of 'intellectual property' in the design of CPUs, mobos, and basically every other component of a computer. But when you reproduce them in the millions, the amount 'per unit' becomes something people can afford.
Music should work the same way, unless there's some weird bistromathics involved.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Yes, there IS something else. You have a team of people making processors for everybody. The current cutting-edge processor designs will, with some minor modifications, eventually cover everything from the top-of-the-line processor to (in a year or two), the basic budget box (with some cache chopped out and the multiplier locked). The one-time cost can be spread out over hundreds of thousands or millions of units.
With music, on the other hand, is much more limited (with maybe the exception of a few super-stars). I have some bands that I like, and I buy their music). You, on the other hand, probably will not like the same bands. For many artists, selling 20,000 albums is a big deal. If the artist makes $1 and album, they are still in poverty if they make one album a year. This is assuming a solo album. If it is a band, the money is split among the band members.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Not entirely - he said 'everybody' would shop across the road - misunderstanding the idea of implied value. Even for wine and clothing, while a lot of people shop brand-names, there is still a not insignificant sector of consumers who actually think before they buy. These people won't pay 100 times more just because there is a more expensive product to choose from. And even for clothes and wine, most of the time the brand name product is not identical to the knock-off. In the cases they are, the brand name products don't tend to sell as good as the forgeries.
True, but then again I do not believe that it takes a remarkable amount of talent or skill to create a hammer. The way I see it, payment is a form of respect. I respect the talent and skill of an artist, so I am willing to give him more of a profit margin than I would to buy a hammer. Have you ever sat down and tried to write a song? It's really not easy at all. And if you don't think the artist has any skill, there is an easy solution. Don't buy the music from that artist.
--Scott
At 1 cent per song, I'm hosed. Rather than continue listen to people here pull numbers out of their asses, howswabout we do some math?
Let's assume I'm shooting for the U.S. median income, around $50K/year.
Let's assume I can only produce 1 album per year (think you can do better? Try it some time, smartass.)
So I need to gross $50K/album. But wait, I'm not alone, I have bandmates. And they all want to make the median income as well. So really, we have to make $250K/album. This is your most basic labor cost.
But I probably won't be able to put out the best album possible in my basement. Hyperbolic claims for the abilities of computer software packages aside, a Neumann mic is expensive. More expensive than I can afford. So I go to a studio. Not an expensive one, a fairly cheap one that charges $50/hour and throws in the engineer for free.
Let's assume I don't hire a producer.
I can say from experience of several albums that it takes several weeks minimum to record a decent album (in the more complex musical styles...granted a singer/guitarist/folkie can record an album in a couple days if they're prepped), and in most cases several months. For this argument lets say I take 3 months. That's 40 hours per week at $50/hour, or $24,000.
Now I need to have it mastered. That's at least $500.
Production: Discmakers will do 1000 copies for $1290. Order more and you get a discount. Let's assume I get my unit cost down to $1 by ordering at least 5000 copies.
My hard production costs now look like this (note that the physical CD is an almost trival part of the cost) -
The band - $250K annual/3 months worth = $62.5K Studio time - $24K Mastering - $500 CD production - $5000
Total: $92K
Let's assume I do no marketing, and am able to sell all the CDs at gigs.
To break even, make no profit, and pay for just those 3 months work, I have to charge $18.40 per disc if I make 5000. If I try to make the CD pay for the entire year's salary for the entire band (thus generate $279.5K total) I'd have to charge $55/disc.
That's not gonna work, so I make 10K CDs and sell them all. Now I'm down to $28/disc. Assuming I can get the venues to pay me $1000/night and we gig 150 days per year, I can charge $12.90 per disc (if I make 10000). (Btw, $1000/night is wildly optimistic, as is 150 gigs per year at that rate. Try it sometime if you don't believe me.)
If we make some assumptions about amortizing the cost of the disc over some period of time we can probably get the sale price down to sub $10/disc.
This is with zero marketing. Zero label support. Just driving all over the place gigging and selling CDs. And if we actually sold 10K CDs per year we'd be way ahead of most folks...that's a lot of CDs for any non-national major label support band, and probably won't happen.
Add in marketing costs and the price goes back up. Way up.
"Just sell it online, all your costs go away!" Um, no. $10K of my costs go away. The other $269K are still very much there, thanks. Online sales takes $1 off the price. The physical disc isn't the expensive bit.
This all assumes I'm a "successful" musician who can get lots of gigs and sell lots of CDs. If I'm less successful, I'm basically making poverty wages.
Going the other way, let's take you dipshits that want to pay me $0.01 per song/$0.10 per album. Let's see, to break even I only have to sell, um...2.6 million albums? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I'm all for high standards, but don't you think that's a bit unreasonable? To do that I pretty much have to start a boy band. I'm pretty sure world jazz ain't gonna get me there. And that, my sorry little asshat, is just to make $50K/year gross. No bling, no Ferrari, hell, probably no fucking health care a
they still want us to pay 1988 prices?
The same if you omit inflation. I know a car isn't a CD, but...
So really, you're paying less than half of 1988 prices. :) And they aren't just distributors, they are also promoters. Personally, I won't be downloading their music at any price, under any terms until they stop suing people.
You might as well start calling news papers obsolete, but I'll point out we still publish them on paper, and many prefer to read it in that form. Same goes with Albums.
And I'll point out, that i haven't been referring to record companys, but companies in the music industry. This includes stores like iTunes. How retarded would that orginal sentance sound, if i directed it at Itunes. If iTunes want me to stop downloading music from P2P networks, they need to offer a better-quality product than that available for free. How is iTunes supposed to survive giving out songs for free, when it doesn't even make a profit selling them?
Does that not spell out what my previous 2 posts have been about?
Oh, and pope, I work in software. There is no merchandise, no adds, and they usaly aren't large enough to warrant a support service, to allow me to give it away free, and profit from secondary services. If people took what they wanted from me, and didn't reimburse me by BUYING it, i wouldn't be able to continue as a programmer.
Anyway, i'm finished with this discussion.
Judging by the moderation of the original post, 70% of
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
As a independant musician, I can first hand tell you that no, we do not make most of the money made (which is very, very little) from playing live. It is from selling merch directly at the live shows. The price to play is usually very small, say 100 to play plus a door deal, or if you're more well known they might throw in some of the bar sales. However that is split between all the performers from ALL bands. So even 100 people come in at 10 a ticket, you're splitting that between all the acts that play that night with the headliners generally making more. Most money is made from the other stuff you sell that night and unless you're on a label, you've paid to press a disc, which is about 2-3 per disc and whatever else you have to sell. I hate to be the one to tell you, but you don't make that much money playing live, generally enough to cover expenses while you take time off work.
The soundtrack doesn't have a load of adverts at the start before you can listen to it.
I am trolling
This was a good discussion, Bazar, but one thing bothers me:
You're second blockquote from was from someone else's comment, but you include it in a response to me, following a blockquote from my comment, making it seem like it's something I said.
This is kind of crooked, and you shouldn't do it. I'm sure you understand, and maybe it was just a mistake on your part. No harm, no foul, but be advised.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"in order to make an album, you have to pay employees to run the recording studio, you have to pay for the studio itself, you have to hire artists to make the cover art, etc.............yet people consider paying $30 for a videogame to be a bargain"
Okay, so you have now racked up a few thousand dollars to publish an album. Yippee skippee. Video games take several dozen staff members, several years to complete a quality game.
The big expense you are forgetting, is the court battles, the DRM nonsense, and the cost of paying all the over-the-air big boys to promote your music.
I still call it robbery. $1 might be fair, if i was allowed to use the same song on multiple devices............even so I think 25 cents is more reasonable.
I know that. I was oversimplifying. That's HOW you make money from performing. I mentioned exactly that later in the post, but attributed it only to big label artists. My bad.
My Babylon
Walmart's store currently does not let me in with Firefox on Linux (even with U-A switcher). Why not? If they really are selling DRM-free music, why limit the platforms?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Capitalism is about ownership of resources and production and sale of goods without government interference. By granting a limited monopoly to copyright holders, government-granted copyright monopolies interfere with the free market. Copyright creates an artificial shortage of a song and constrains the production of copies by others. In true capitalism, the government wouldn't stop someone from making copies and selling them for $5. The person that could produce, distribute and market their copies the best for the lowest price would turn out to be the winner.
I totally agree with you here. I think we need some copyright term to enable authors of expressive works to make money from them. The current copyright term however will prevent my grandkids from copying a CD that my classmate made for the duration of their lives. The media itself will have long ceased to exist by then unless extraordinary measures are taken to protect it.
Excellent point. The current system of perpetual copyrights and DRM isn't working to get money to the people that actually create the music. Sure it works for a very small minority of artists, but not for the majority. The only ones it really works well for are the record companies that have control over the music produced by the artists.