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At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs
The NYTimes reports that Atlantic is the first major label to report getting a majority of its revenue from digital sales, not CDs. Analysts say that Atlantic is out in front — the industry as a whole isn't expected to hit the 50% mark until 2011. By 2013, music industry revenues will be 37% down from their 1999 levels (when Napster arrived on the scene), according to Forrester. "'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,' said John Rose, a former executive at EMI ... Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. ... In virtually all... corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal's chief executive ... has described as 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies.'"
Cry me a farking river! If these industry assholes would have got on the bus in 97, they may have a viable option now.
They're so narrow-minded that they can look through a keyhole with both eyes at the same time.
The industry should have been the first out the gate with mp3's, giving the customers what they wanted and not what the record industry wanted to sell them.
It's almost poetic justice, the record companies have screwed the artists for years and now they seem to be getting their comeuppance.
I care for these assholes about the same that I care for that dinosaur car industry. Change or die!
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Ummm... how are we thinking that CDs aren't digital?
Waah, my business model is still outdated, Waah.
Poor f'ing babies.
How about just releasing everything world-wide, at the same time, instead of a handful of countries, or different dates for only a selected few countries? I don't care about your contracts and agreements, you're the ones who did that in the first place. It's your mess, clean it up. Your market is the whole planet, take advantage of this "new" fact.
And that goes not only for music but for movies and TV shows too.
I haven't seen a single new piece of vinyl (or CD, for that matter) listed on dancerecords.com since July.
This happened very suddenly, and it's a bit startling for those of us who have invested in actual vinyl turntables...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
There is an interesting paragraph in the article....
To paraphrase - we think the artists owe us more money
"It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical."
Well, no shit. Their old business model of selling a $15 CD with 1 good song---aka ripping people off--doesn't fly anymore. If you just want that one song, you just buy that one song.
Digital sales aren't going to match physical sales because--plain and simple--there's a lot of complete crap out there that people don't have to buy, anymore.
On one hand, it isn't right to steal. On the other hand, nothing is being stolen.
On one hand you have a bunch of jerks suing grandmothers. On the other hand you have a bunch of jerks suing college kids.
From what I can see, piracy actually helps society. More people get the valuable information they want and need to help them with their education and productivity. There is a small loss in that there is less value produced for the creator. And there is a chance that if things go out of control in favor of the pirates that the loss can become big. I just wonder. I sometimes wonder if pirates leveled the playing field so that people got almost no monetary value from what they're making, would people stop making things altogether. And I think the amount being made would be reduced, but it wouldn't be gone completely.
I think stuff would have to be funded from governments and foundations instead of trying to find a profit. Intellectual property could then be thought of as more like public roads and less like private bars of gold. This is just stuff I think about when I wonder why we don't have a centralized Internet library yet. I think the value of a centralized Internet library may outweigh the loss of new stuff produced.
Anyone want to field this..? Anyone who isn't highly biased towards the music industry... Because they never want to rationally think it through. They just want to maximize profits at all costs.
God spoke to me.
Meanwhile I think I'll go straight to the artists and the more relevant publishers/studios who work with them, and have a better understanding of the current industry and which don't have huge overheads in place that make them slow to adapt.
CDs are digital.
They mean downloads?
Or music with no physical medium that is sold?
(Go ahead, mod me +1i Pedantic)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
When I first encountered Napster I truly believed it was the start of a revolution. I considered it a matter of months before some kind of legit business model was made out of it.
I also believed with some money it would improve massively, and within a few years cds would be a thing of the past. I stopped holding my breath when the first few, half-wit lawsuits arrived a fewyears later....
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It's strange that nobody ever talks about Amazon. You can buy MP3's on Amazon for 89-99 cents per track, complete albums typically for about $8. I ripped all my CDs to mp3 this year, tossed the CDs in a dumpster, and am now buying music only on Amazon. I love not having piles of CDs lying around and making my house messy. Amazon sells music with no DRM. It works on any OS that can run a web browser.
iTunes, on the other hand ... yeesh. It's a completely proprietary system, and it doesn't run on my OS. It's also got DRM (although the DRM is fairly easy to circumvent).
Find free books.
...and you thought that cheap over compressed art-less bits of data were NOT going to outsell overpriced over compressed bits of plastic?
nonexistent sig
Actually when you think of it, no distribution, no packaging engineers, you dont have to add those RFID tabs to keep them from being stolen, lack of store theft, not having to pay for that super plastic wrap they put on them, not having to pay for the stamping of the cd's, or the cases, cover art is simpler, marketing is simpler, they cover a broader market and instant marketing feed back. How can they not be making hand over fist, unless they pay unreal amounts for their lawsuits and drm. Not only that most artists are making their big money on the concert tickets.
It isn't right to steal, it's true. However, our rights to the public commons have been stolen by Disney and Congress. Irving Berlin's estate still gets royalties for Blue Skies, for crissakes. Therefore, perhaps a bit of civil disobedience is in order. It depends on your calculations.
Well, no shit. Their old business model of selling a $15 CD with 1 good song---aka ripping people off--doesn't fly anymore.
So there's never been an artist with an album that was consistently good? REALLY?
I simply don't like the music produced right now, and I don't think I'm alone. In the 60's through the 90's, the defining part of each piece of music was typically the melody. We listened to things that had beautiful sounds and chords. We had thought provoking lyrics that read like poetry, or lyrics that one could simply associate with.
Now music is so hip-hop/rap influenced that the only thing the composers seem to think about is the beat and the star-power behind each act. This commercialization + beat + weak melody is just not working a vast minority, if not a majority of music listeners. A song today probably only has a single catchy part that lasts a few seconds, and the rest is trash. We are expected to buy this music so we can hear the 5 seconds we like of a 3:30 min song. What about the song as a complete work of art?
This problem has always existed, but before it typically showed up as filler in an album. Now the album has been scaled down to fit inside of one song, and it's just not a compelling experience.
Really young people are going to like whatever is produced because they don't know anything better- that is certainly a big market. However, the music industry has almost completely lost the 18+ crowd by trying to cater to people who have relatively unestablished tastes. They got away from the fundamentals and they're getting severely burned. If they produced good work and were losing money to piracy, I would feel sympathy for the artists and even a little for the labels who do the sound engineering. Since their work is crap, though, I'm not spending a cent on any music they produce.
Tag this one ripvanwinkle or rtfmripvanwinkle....
Bajebus! Is this guy reading 5 year old newspapers? Can we all chip in and buy the RIAA a cake that says "welcome to the 21st Century" and underneath that 'dickheads'....?
On the other hand, I thought we already had a noshitsherlock tag?
It's good to see that someone is awake in this industry, after such a long nap, perhaps now is the time to really swing with the clue stick. What I mean is perhaps now would be a really good time to stage one of those 'day without downloads' or 'week with out CDs' kind of things to get their attention. As we are coming up to the shopping season it might mean something?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Ethics in this situation are pretty subjective to which part of the issue you're seeing. However, I'd have to say that, no, people would not stop making things altogether. You'd have people producing as a hobby. You'd have new business models. Look at open source. Sure, it's software, rather than "art", but if you compare it as a business opportunity, it becomes obvious that there are viable business models out there that aren't destroyed by "piracy". And, I think that "funded from governments" would be more likely to stifle creative expression than influence it. However, going back to foundations and benefactors - that has potential.
Sure there has been. That doesn't change the business model. It just means that they put in a little bit extra effort at some point - or got lucky.
Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours.
"Since we can't make as much money ripping off artists selling music, let's take money from artists when they go on tour and sell stuff."
Now, now, I'm not greedy. As long as I've got my millions of dollars and my solid gold house, that's good enough for me.
We've sent a very powerful message that says the buying public doesn't give a rip about audio fidelity.
Please, PLEASE stop calling copyright infringement "piracy". Piracy happens on the high seas, generally, lately, near Somalia. And it can be deadly, as the pirates who tried to attack the Indian Navy vessel learned last week.
Copyright infringement is not even stealing; it's copying. Stealing (legal definition) involves depriving the owner of their property, but copying does not do that; rather, it enriches both parties.
In addition, corporations have stolen from the public domain that was granted access to all works after a short period of time, as defined by the US Constitution. So, these corporations have reneged on their social contract, and therefore do not deserve to have their copyrights respected (note that this last part has not been confirmed by the courts, but it should, soon; Google "Lessig Eldred").
And I agree: rampant copying does help society, because it helps us ensure that we bring forward our culture, rather than letting it rot, forgotten, in unmarketable silos.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
the one saving grace of Lessing's argument to the Supreme Court is that Congress is allowed to roll back the copyright time if we can ever convince them to do it. The court said Congress sets the term. I'd like to see a push to get it rolled back 50 years and see how they squirm!
Atlantic Records is one of the most common plaintiffs in the RIAA cases. (Here are some in which it is the first named plaintiff: Atlantic v. Andersen(Portland, OR) Atlantic v. Anderson (Houston, TX) Atlantic v. Boggs (Corpus Christi, Texas) Atlantic v. Boyer (Tampa, FL) Atlantic v. Brennan (New Haven, CT) Atlantic v. Dangler (Rochester, NY) Atlantic v. DeMassi (Houston, TX) Atlantic v. Does 1-14 (Portland, ME) Atlantic v. Does 1-25(New York, NY) Atlantic v. Howell (Phoenix, AZ)(pro se) Atlantic v. Huggins(Brooklyn, NY) Atlantic v. Lenentine (Portland, ME) Atlantic v. Myers (Jackson, MS) Atlantic v. Njuguna (Charleston, SC) Atlantic v. Raleigh (Missouri) Atlantic v. Serrano (San Diego, CA) Atlantic v. Shutovsky (New York, NY) Atlantic v. Zuleta (Atlanta, GA)...) As far as I'm concerned they should rot in hell.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
A fair deal that we've had since time dancing around a campfire was a political gesture is that songs and stories and legends and art become apart of the commons after a period of time. We've made a deal with the artists and their representatives that they can have exclusive use of their works for a limited time in order to encourage them to make more. That's "the deal".
With their exploitive contracts, exclusive play deals, abusive lawsuits and lobbying to get the "limited time" extended to "essentially forever", they undermine every possible benefit in an attempt to "improve their deal". They just don't get - and they won't ever get - that the deal they're breaking is the one that allows them to profit at all.
A growing share of people consider the deal broken and its terms no longer binding and they are enforcing their view of things by technical force. This may not yet be legal, but it certainly is ethical and eventually the law tends to come around to the common point of view. At first there were only a few remix geeks and DJ's. Now the amount of storage media sold in a day outstrips a year's published sales of content. I suppose it's the vast majority of people now and demographically more often the young. The young are responsible for the most enduring social changes so this change looks fairly permanent. As the years go on peer pressure will kill the rest of their market - "Kalen bought encrypted music again? He didn't learn the last six times! (tee hee)."
Copyright as applies to media content is a dead letter. It should be abolished. Maybe after a generation it can be started again with strict limits to ensure it doesn't follow the same hateful course.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What's that, son, you say the buying public dented a rapper's Audi Quattro?
Stop posting this, seriously. Nobody has once said that there was never an artist with a totally good album, just the truth: the majority of them are complete shite. The only albums I have ever completely enjoyed were Santana's.
Ezekiel 23:20
Brother,
Can you spare a bead for my abacus?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
2000 called. They want their Florida ballots back.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
On one hand, it isn't right to steal. On the other hand, nothing is being stolen.
On one hand you have a bunch of jerks suing grandmothers. On the same hand you have a bunch of jerks suing college kids.
Fixed that for you.
I just wonder. I sometimes wonder if pirates leveled the playing field so that people got almost no monetary value from what they're making, would people stop making things altogether. And I think the amount being made would be reduced, but it wouldn't be gone completely.
I listen to music that people make and release for free. Creative Commons music is great. There are quite a few artists I enjoy, and if I like them enough, I donate money to them.
I think stuff would have to be funded from governments and foundations instead of trying to find a profit.
Well, I think some of the arts would return to commission work, like it was in the past. Some good musicians could make worthwhile profits by releasing their music online with a donation page or a fill-in-the-box-with-what-you-want-to-pay scheme. That is the system I want to see for music. One where I am able to hear an artist's music before I spend money, and then vote with my dollars who I think is the best.
:(
Software would be funded by gov't/bussinesses that benefit from said software.
Oh the fantastical imaginary worlds I create with my mind!
I agree, though. Society could benefit from more public domain and less copyrighted works.
Too bad this is going to end in draconian laws.
But it may not have been because of piracy but because increased competition. Back in 1997 you had limited sources of music if you wanted to find no-name brand brand you needed to go to those shady music shops where you feel like it will be busted for a drug operation any second. But you were more or less limited to main stream media. That and combined with the fact that most music was played publicly back then vs. Now with an iPod or other portable music player. You are no longer ostracized for listening to BlueGrass mixed with death metal. So with digital music we find what we like. Vs. just getting what were are supposed to like. Also the economy was doing a lot better in 1997 then it is now, meaning back then buying music wasn't as much a luxury as it is now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You forgot to concatenate your argument with the other one.
1 Good song - purchase 1 good song
11 other dubious songs - paid for that stuff you mentioned.
So their revenue went down at the same time their costs went down, so their profits might be the same on 1/10th of the raw sales.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So there's never been an artist with an album that was consistently good? REALLY?
There have been plenty, just much fewer recently. I generally only purchase CDs where 75% or so of the songs are good. That used to be 2-3 per week, now it's like 2 per month.
Heck, it used to be that if I liked one CD from an artist, then I'd almost be assured to like their next one. Now, it seems, the labels push them to "grow" artistically, which generally means they start to diverge from what everyone liked about them.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Take, for example, what Radiohead did - let their fans decide how much to pay for the album. While with a CD you typically get $10 an album, a digital copy you may get 2-3 tracks on an album bought for around $3, Radiohead found many of their fans paying $20 and up for the album.
He actually said "piracy" wasn't stealing.
...but yeah, copyright infringement is very different from piracy.
I don't think so.
I stayed with tapes as a cheapskate, relishing in my lack of musical finesse. I just wanted a hundred of the things to stash in my car for road trips. But once CD's began to hit the flea markets tapes were finally on their way out.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You mean they are going to have to work for it. Ha, the only work it seems like they are doing is talking to their lawyers.
Tell us, is that line of crap what you really believe, or is it just how you justify your theft?
trading analog dollars for digital pennies
This is more like trading your overblown mansions for houses, or trading trillions for billions. It's not this sad pitiful situation where CEOs are somehow being victimized. After all these years, welcome to the real world music industry executives. If you're losing money on digital sales that don't cost you anything to package or distribute, you might want to ask yourself what kind of extortion your "success" came from before.
Sure. But that doesn't mean it's not a fluke. e.g.
Real McCoy: Another Night - Practically every song on the CD was "good"*. They were all radio hits as well.
Real McCoy: One More Time - The title song was it. The rest of it was filler. And rather bad filler at that. All those morals they preached in the first album? Pfff. Out the window. We need a music video of two people having sex in a public bathroom so we can include it on the disc. Sales are going to go through the roof!
As you can imagine, the second album was nowhere near as popular as the first and ended up killing the band. No worries, though. The music industry always finds someone else to draw in, chew up, and spit out.
* Subjectively assuming that the listener likes this sort of music.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
In 1990 the music industry became a giant garbage recycling industry.
http://www.xkcd.com/339/.
Nothing original has been done since.
and second hand sales of digital files are restricted (Which they will be) I will no longer buy music or movies. Call me retarded by I prefer to have something to show for when I buy music or movies like a cd or dvd. I also want to sell those items when I don't want them anymore at whatever market value they fall under and to who ever I want and not be stuck with a restricted file.
I also have no desire to have to keep/track back ups of digital music/movies I own. At least with cd's/dvd's they will most likely out last digital stored files as long as they don't get scratched and dvd/cd players are still manufactured.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I humbly suggest Magnatune
Dark Side Of The Moon.
Wish You Were Here.
War Of The Worlds.
East(Bonus point if you can name the artist)
Icehouse.
Zenyatta Mondata.
Crime Of the Century.
And thats just a start!
And thats just a start!
Yeah, that made me sad, too... I liked dancerecords.com quite a bit but only ever bought vinyl there. Luckily I live in a city that has several good local vinyl stores (I just can't shop there at 3am :-). Also the discogs.com marketplace has been getting pretty good for scoring new stuff -- several US retailers are listing new releases there regularly. Depending on what you spin you might also try djhut.com out of DC... not quite the range that dancerecords used to carry but decent stock and prices.
It strikes me that sufficiently advanced programming, and the related maths, ARE art of a kind. (IANAP)
They all need true talent to succeed.
I worked as a Live Sound Engineer for many years,
later I was a tour manager and Judge for Battles of the Bands.
I saw LOTS of bands! 80% were crap.
a further 16% were entertaining but not original.
Of the remaining 4% only a quarter really acheived success (Made any money).
The crap bands mostly played covers and made some money.
Hopefully the other members of that 4% these days
have a much better chance of doing well via the net.
Why are my line breaks always insane after previewing??
you mean writing good software isn't art?
Forget your fancy-schmancy abacus, I'm looking for another flat rock. Have you seen any?
âoeThe real question,â Mr. Rose said, âoeis how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?â
Arguably, when the record industry lost their stranglehold on the various ways that the public could be introduced to new acts, their marketing and launch management value creation was significantly reduced. Furthermore, competing in the much larger pool of availble unlimited digital stock, one would naturally expect prices to compete downward.
Also, the number of ways in which the record industry payout structure has been unfairly skewed towards the record labels is well documented. One would expect this to gradually tip downwards back to a more reasonable medium.
In the grand scheme of things, a decent recording can be made at a 10,000 dollar studio, pressed at one of any number of professional CD producers, and distributed by any number of available distributers. Add in a 1,000 dollar HD video camera for youtube promotion, and you have a comparable music system powered by the creator's time. That's a highly efficient alternative that didn't exist ten years ago.
Assuming our cultural music needs are being met, a 25% drop in overall spending on music could easily be because we have become 25% more efficient.
The ______ Agenda
like in mine, i bought a cd from the 'relapse' label that costed around 24 dlls. yes thats the price for decent new cd's in my country.
Now who in their right mind would pay that upfront again? not me, ever, the cd wasnt even that good, plus i couldnt return it. So yeah it wasnt the record company, it was a store.
but also, i decided "f-it, if im going to spend money on music, why not buy it directly from the label" this was back at '99.
i looked up some cd's at the Earache store, and sure it was cheap, i got 2 cd's for like 20 dlls.
but they never came, and i got charged for it.
Earache excuse? because the girl who managed that stuff got fired...
how am i supposed to feel when i hear that record companies are selling less cd's now? im certainly not surprised.
The problem with the music business is the attempt to use money as the promotion medium. Yes it works. But it does not cater to individual tastes.
There's a number of ways industry promotes itself. Commercial radio, newspapers, On-line - iTunes 'New Featured' albums, etc. There's magazines for Rock, Metal, etc that promote artists and include CDs of sample music - I have to think the labels push artists with $$$$$.
I love music. I've a fine collection, IMO, of Rock, Country, Blues, Jazz and all kinds of other music. I almost always have music playing. The problem is, with my varying tastes its hard for me to find new artists I want to listen to. Without relying on Hit songs being the only measure of whats good (I do a select few of the current hit songs).
My favorite albums though are from artits who don't get a lot of heavy promotion. Sad because the albums are playable tracks 01 to 12 or 15. And there's a quality and consistency to all the tracks. Sad to because they are signed on major labels and there's no backup - and if the album gets a 'bad' review from the press the label doesn't stand behind the artist. I almost feel like its done on purpose so they can focus on the 1 artist that will make them $200 million.
I think the only option is for the labels to collaboratively build a Last.fm site. The 'community' has been building the site/database (I don't know all the ins and outs) for a few years. If the labels really want to keep fans interested, make sure they know about *all* your artists. Otherwise, why blow $200,000 on a new record and hope that it does well w/o any promotion.
'Cause at this point I don't mind buying retail. I love it since I get the pressed CD. Just help guide my way to the register.
With on-line I only wish the catalogs would expand so consumers can buy songs from 20 years ago even on not-so-well selling albums. You can't find them anywhere. And if you can the copy is $500. iTunes still has some major holes in its collection. I'm not talking about bands that sold 10,000 copies either.
Piracy has referred to plagiarism for centuries. 'Meaning "one who takes another's work without permission" first recorded 1701;' Get with the times.
... rampant copying does help society, because it helps us ensure that we bring forward our culture, rather than letting it rot, forgotten, in unmarketable silos.
Copyright was originally reserved for those who were authorized to make copies for distribution, and Thomas Jefferson originally argued against it's existence, at all. When he did accept the need, he argued for a duration of 1/2 the average lifespan of a citizen in order to promote and reward creativity and originality. He sought to avoid financial dynasties, ala Disney. If Sonny Bono had had any appreciation for history and politics, we wouldn't have to suffer copyright in excess of 100 years, Mickey Mouse would be free and I wouldn't recognize the background music in most car commercials as having been an integral part of my childhood. (Yes, I'm a boomer.)
However, rot shouldn't be confused with stagnation, which is not really apparent in the music industry, if you continue to challenge yourself once in awhile. There's way more visual, musical and functional art available to me, from all over the globe, than I will ever approach during my lifetime. To whit I'm glad for the opportunity to see so much made easily and affordably over the web, affordably and legelly or not, cuz if I had to pay for everything, I could never afford most of it... I have little sympathy for the 'recording industry' because advertising doesn't make the band, talent does, and I agree with the statement that the market is global since digital distribution is limited only by customer's cost and access to bandwidth.
No longer is the question whether it would be better to have .001% of China's market or 10% of Italy's... The real question is why limit yourself from either? It seems obvious that the music and film industry understands this and has way more than enough money to go around, because the RIAA is burning cash on lawsuits like they have a spare printing press running full bore in the smoky bowels of some as-yet-solvent investment bank... hey, who's got the copyright on $100 bills, anyway!? BMI, ASHAT (no wait, that's cap...) and the kleptocracies that encourage all to suffer Madonna, Spears and Hannah What's-Her-Name are just protecting their hegemonic domination over western publishing while they try to figure out how to overcome the barriers of language and culture.
Culture is in your petri dish and your cereal bowl. Eat some more Wheaties champ, and bring me some more culture... Get in my belly!!
God, 9 years on and the record companies *still* don't have anything that's even close to Napster for ease of use and sheer range of music. My CD purchases probably have dropped off, but that's because for all that time I've been waiting for them to finally release a music download service that actually compares to the stuff I've already used.
What they perhaps don't realise is that myself and many others would gladly pay for the music we listen to, but I'm not going to be tied down to listening to it x number of times, or on x devices, or with it limited to x copies. I also don't want limits on what I can and can't listen to. If I'm going to sign up for a paid service, I want to be confident that I can download pretty much whatever I want.
Napster had all of that, and pretty much a monopoly on the download market. Makes you wonder what might have happened if the record companies had worked out a way of licensing tracks shared through it, instead of driving sharing underground.
Speaking of revenue, the statement "By 2013, music industry revenues
will be 37% down from their 1999 levels" means jack shit because it says nothing about profit. Of course revenue will drop significantly if you don't have to make, package, distribute and find retail shelf space for millions of individual physical items around the globe.
Personal anecdote of physical vs electronic: During the 90's I was the technical lead on a large project with 8000 remote mobile users, and when I say remote I mean Australia wide coverage - GSM, DATATAC, sattelite phones, radio link exchanges, and the like. To upgrade the software for all 8000 users by CD was costing ~$2M/yr (mainly in down time for the user to get the CD and install the upgrade). It took 4 programmers including myself ten minutes of thought and 6 months of work to build an automated upgrade system that did not require any action by (or delay to) the user.
The board of directors were so impressed with the $$$ signs that they wrote a long and flattering letter of appreciation to each of us, but they were a telco at the "bleeding edge", I imagine a record label would have taken us to the basement car park and shot us.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
jump on the bailout bandwagon..... like everyone else is...
Wait... if that music were public domain, the car companies wouldn't be using it in commercials? How does that work?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Wait... if that music were public domain, the car companies wouldn't be using it in commercials? How does that work?
Because... um... a good is only worth... err... what you pay for it?
chinese democracy
This is as it should be. Publishers and producers - middlemen all - never had any socially ethical right to all those "analog dollars" in the first place. The prospect that they might have to make do with "digital pennies" like the rest of us is a slight reversal of all that sickening concentration of wealth.
Since expenses regarding the production, burning/printing, shipping, distribution and selling of physical CDs disappear when you're selling music as mp3 on the internet, I suppose that net income increase every day for the musicbusiness. (Or what are they doing wrong?)
Who cares if revenues go down if profits or net income increases? Except of course for the CD manufacturers, truckdrivers and expedients in the shops.
Value is proportional to scarceness. That's why copying is stealing, not just from the seller, but also from everybody else who has paid.
Well, you've convinced me! I guess you did list the majority of all albums and they are all good!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Why would the record companies care about what format they sell to the consumer anyway? If anything they should be making up for any minor drop in sales by vastly reduced infrastructure costs.
I think there is a bigger worry here though. If Joe T. Plumber loves music from the 70's, and bought a particular track first on vinyl, then cassette, then CD, and now mp3, how the hell are they going to sell the same track to him again? Non-DRM digital files represent the end of a very lucrative sales cycle. A format shift is a format shift, but this concept must scare the living shit out of them. About the only way they can resell that track to him is if he somehow loses it, and whatever reseller he bought it from doesn't do replacements. IOW, digital files don't wear out, and can't really be obsoleted.
If you consider the track to be the basic atomic unit of music rather than the album, I wonder how sales per unit have done historically if you exclude double and triple and quadruple buys for format shifts, lost/broken media, hardware obsolescence, compilations sales, etc. My guess is probably that sort of thing made up more of their bread-n-butter than the marketing execs would care to admit.
My guess is they knew this since '97, hell maybe even since '47, and that's why they've had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the mp3 age.
Finally, a record company that gets it! How long has mp3s been out for now???
CDs are now an archaic outdated media. There is absolutely no reason to carry them around when you can carry the same songs and artwork from hundreds of CDs in one tiny widget that fits in the palm of your hand. There is no reason why anyone should have to get in their car and drive all the way to the CD store just to look at a smaller selection of music then what they can listen to instantly and effortlessly over the internet. Digital distribution is so much more efficient, and environmentally friendly then shipping plastic coasters to every corner of the world. Need I go on?
Now that the cost of production and distribution is basically zero, the price of the music should change to mirror this. There is no longer any work (just contracts and payoffs) being done by labels. There is no reason for a band with decent talent to depend on them any more. If you can afford a guitar and drums, save up some more pennies and get yourself a microphone. Do your own recording. Put it on bittorrent. Ask your fans to see your preformances and buy/donate - but don't force them and don't blame them for anything. They may have something more important to put their money towards, like paying bills, charity, or even buying their own guitar or mic. Artwork shouldn't be made for money anyway.
Maybe that wasn't the idea. What if their business model was "buy one get 7 free," where you purchased one highly marketed song for $15 and the artist threw in several more tracks as "bonus". That was, to some extent, what singles were - a track you paid for, with the "flip side" as a bonus track. They just jacked up the price and extended the number of extra cuts. The executives had a shotgun point of view, paying to produce several tracks of which they expected one to be a hit. Though the rest was chaff, there was no reason to sell only a single when you could provide "value" by selling the whole album.
Not that I believe it was consciously developed that way, but is does have a certain truth to it. They got used to selling the hit for $15, and giving you the ones that didn't make it as an album. That's a shift from the past when more artists developed albums as a complete work. Now they're pissed that the "single" concept has come back and they've gotten used to the higher development costs of their current model. By pushing artists to produce more volume, they've increased their production costs without appreciably increasing the net number of blockbusters (and some might say have actually reduced it).
Sucks to be them.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I, like many of my peers, prefer my music on good old fashioned analog CDs.
Everyone seems to be stuck on the idea of MP3s. That's all we ever hear, when it's about distributing music on the net. MP3, MP3, MP3... So when the CDs disappear completely, all we will have will be MP3s? No WAV files? No actual original full quality source files? Just crappy low quality MP3s? No way to make FLAC files? Sounds ... not so great...
The technology for "cloud" media distribution was developed and bug-fixed by the likes of Napster, not them. the whole MP3 infrastructure seems to have been put together by independent companies, research institutions and computer companies, with a notable absence of any record companies being obviously involved. Online music stores seem to be mostly developed by external companies. I'm not aware of any record companies behind the growth of the ringtone market. If you want to access databases of what's on your CDs, you don't go to the record company, you go to a database run by an independent company where the information is entered and corrected and maintained by volunteer end-users. Hell, Microsoft probably run a more reliable public back-catalogue for BMG than BMG do.
When's the last time that any of us visited a record company website to find out a major artists back-catalogue? These guys are no good at websites. They'll pay someone big money to do a glitzy "promo" site that doesn't contain any useful reference information, and pull the plug on it a couple of years later.
The big record companies say that they need to make big profits in order to find and invest in the next generation of talent, but the artists being found and nurtured by "the industry" seem to be supported by other industry "players". The big development recently has been TV talent shows, where there's a lot of money being made from tv broadcasting and pay-per-vote ... but the big record companies missed out on that money because it wasn't them that did it.
What they are trying to do now, is to have contracts that give them a slice of things like tour money. They're trying to grab someone else's historic market share to supplement their income, by awarding themselves those rights in the recording contract. Again, this is a market where the big record companies haven't invested in the past - the gigging circuit has been kept alive by bands and promoters who recognised that gigging was essential to keep part of the customer-base interested in music. The big record companies essentially left big live venues to die, leaving it to others, like the mobile phone companies, to sponsor them.
So if they're asking for a "fair slice" of the profits from music, they should be careful what they ask for. A lot of people think that their current profits represent way more than a fair slice.
Eric Baird
Who are they including in this estimate? Do they include the income of independent musicians like me?
In my own case, the answer is no - when somebody downloads my music for free and decides to send me a donation, I don't report it to the RIAA.
My guess is that, although some of the money people used to spend on music now goes to video games and other entertainment, a lot of the "losses" are going to non-RIAA musicians.
And as a personal plug: if you love music and dislike the RIAA, support independent music.
> trading analog dollars for digital pennies.
as well as trading analog expense dollars for digital expense pennies.
One thing I still don't understand is how these assholes get off charging even 1/4 of the price of a physical cd for a digital download. Most of the cd cost is manufacturing, storage, shipping and sleeve printing, not to mention the costs the store adds to it.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Since 1988, I've bought digital CDs exclusively, just to frustrate and confuse these kinds of statistics.
Ok, I know that when these weird marketroid types say "digital" they really mean "download" but why can't they say what they mean? And more embarrassingly: why do geeks play along and legitimize this kind of thing? Slashdot should be ashamed to show retarded headlines like that.
It's like if flying cars came out, and people started calling them "transportation" and then people start saying, "Lots of people are starting to use transportation instead of cars." Or, "due to increasing popularity of the web, no one reads slashdot anymore."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yeah, I just saw a monkey hitting a big black flat stone with a bone.
Squirrel!
Copyright infringement is not even stealing; it's copying. Stealing (legal definition) involves depriving the owner of their property, but copying does not do that; rather, it enriches both parties.
Who modded this 'Insightful' ? Imagine the situation where a band produce their own original songs and they press 3,000 CD's for sale at their gigs and offer paid downloads through their website. How, in any way, shape or form, can someone making a copy of their CD or MP3 files be said to 'enrich' the band ?
Squirrel!
A lot of outsiders don't realise this, but the dreaded "standard contract" tended to have a clause saying that when a new format was launched, the artist wouldn't get any royalties for any works released on that format for a certain number of years. The justification behind the clause was that if a new format was launched, there would be a certain degree of additional investment required by the record companies, but no additional work by the artist - so the artist's "contribution" to the new format launch was to forego royalties for a while. For for the first couple of years of a new format's life, output in that format would be regarded as something akin to royalty-free "promotional" product.
You saw a similar clause operating in the film industry, and this was part of the reason for the recent Writers Strike. The writers realised that the movie industry was gearing up for a possible surge in sales from Blu-Ray, as people bought duplicate copies of their favourite movies in the new format, but thanks to their contracts, the writers would get zero royalties for the period of that expected initial surge.
The "suspension of royalties" clause is supposed to help distrbution companies embrace new formats, but in the case of the record industry and MP3 it did the opposite. See, the record industry realised that the MP3 market was emerging and growing and developing on its own while they did absolutely nothing. If they got in early, then the golden "no royalties" period would start while online sales were still low. In order to maximise the proportion of sales income that went to the record companies (rather than to the artists), the trick was to wait until the formats were already starting to take off, and then start the clock, so that as much as possible of the initial surge in sales would coincide with the "golden" period in which they could keep all the income for themselves and not pay the artists anything.
So there was an argument, from the record companies' point of view, for sitting on their arses and doing nothing whle the "piracy" sector grew the MP3 market to the point where it became attractive for the record companies to step in and take over. The artists would get screwed twice - once by losing income from piracy as the record companies initially refused to release tracks in the new format, stopping people who wanted to buy the tracks online from having a legitimate way to get them, and again, while the record companies jumped into the developed MP3 market, but kept all the cash themselves. This'd give the record companies maximum return on minimum investment and minimum risk.
Where the strategy failed was that if you sit back and let other people develop a market for you, when you then decide to enter that market yourself, you find that you don't have the in-house skills or expertise or experience or presence. The smart guys who now really know the new market inside-out don't work for you, and may not want to work for you. They either want to start their own companies, or work for a business that has already shown itself to be a leader in the new format. It's more difficult to assert ownership of a developed market sector if that sector has been entirely built by other people.
The "golden period" argument obviously isn't the only reason why most record companies didn't embrace MP3 early on - but in an accounting-heavy industry where "new media" expertise was low, and it was important for individuals to avoid being associated with costly project failures, the "golden period" accounting argument was probably a useful argument for executives to do what they were already inclined to do ... nothing.
Eric Baird
Actually more information has come out about the whole Indian vessel incident. Apparently the "mothership" was actually not a pirate ship but was a ship that was itself being attacked by pirates. The Indian ship destroyed a commercial boat and killed innocent people along with the pirates that were boarding it.
Strangely enough...their music has lived past them as a group, and finds new fans each year.
Amazing what actual talent will do for you...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When you can download for free? How are they getting any sales at all?
The pirates whose goal is the elimination of revenue from digital goods are clearly not doing a good enough job. The rest of the folks, just leeches mostly, are getting theirs but evidently some people just don't know.
As with all computer issues, it is just a matter of education.
You can argue semantics all you want, but the term has stuck. Language is arbitrary and is only useful when there is a conventional meaning. If you say, "I am running a pirated version of photoshop" nobody is going to think you stole it at gunpoint on a boat. There is no point in fighting the evolution of language and the definitions are different enough to avoid ambiguity. Just food for thought. I agree overall though, we should have a different term, and you can continue to say copyright infringement, but others will continue to say pirate. That ship has sailed.
It's totally true. I have bought so much more music since iTMS came out, and everyone in the supply chain gets a few pennies with each purchase that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Why would I pay $10.00 for 12 songs where I only want three of them? I'll pay $3.00, thank you very much, and spend my other $7.00 elsewhere.
The CB App. What's your 20?
So for the people working within the industry, their skillset and professional expertise was set up for the production of a steady stream of megastars, and their marketing and promotional skills were based on their ability to persuade DJ's and other key industry people to get behind whatever product line that they happened to be pushing that week. It was about building "buzz".
For artists, you either "made it big" and hopefully came away with an awful lot of money, or you went back to your day job.
For the distribution chain, it was about achieving "critical mass". If a limited number of record companies had artists that were getting the airplay and reviews and magazine covers and physical distribution, then they could "tie up" the market in such a way as to make it difficult for new competition. The artists with potential wanted to seek out and sign to the major companies, and if you didn't sign to a major, your chances of financial success as an artist were much lower. So the old distribution model allowed big companies with good contacts to dominate and be successful, even if the rest of their business wasn't particularly efficient.
What the industry wasn't set up for was the idea that the internet lets customers bypass the old fixed media and find products themselves, or the idea that with digital delivery, customers expect to be able to buy whatever they want, whenever they want it.
Digital delivery is a great business opportunity for any business with a large popular back-catalogue that has competent inventory and computer skills. It's less about partying and slipping a few radio deejays a bit of charlie, and more about efficient database management -- less about people-networking and more about computer-networking. Trouble is, the record business traditionally hasn't had those skills. With the old model (where they were selling a restricted number of products, by the lorry-load), they didn't need them.
...and one ripe for an "ombudsman" authority to mediate -- and where necessary, provide judicial oversight in the fair management and interpretation -- of contracts between musicians and RIAA member companies. Business may have no common understanding of the word "fair", but the courts certainly do.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
BANG! THAT is in my mind the KEY. You can't release a CD with two good songs anymore and expect people to buy the shitty songs your producer's sister-in-law wrote that he promised her he'd get cut.
The companies and artists ALL need to take note. If you want to sell the whole album, record a whole album worth of good songs! AND STOP WHINING!
That's what we're trying to do with my band. We're also merchandising and touring our butts off.
If you're buying (or worried about) CDs with only one good song, you're listening to the wrong artists. I can't remember the last CD/album I bought that was more than 10-20% filler. Oh, wait - I just did. It was a CD I bought in 1994 with only 2 good songs on it. I've bought hundreds since then. Good artists produce good albums that are meant to be heard all the way through. You get the occasional dud of a track, but hey, it happens.
Either that, or just buy the individual tracks on Amazon/iTunes/eMusic and be happy.
actually, while I agree with the sentiment of your argument, it is actually flawed.
Their old business model of selling a $15 CD with 1 good song---aka ripping people off--doesn't fly anymore. If you just want that one song, you just buy that one song.
Back in the olden-days, there was such a thing as a "single", which was usually one or two songs sold for a fraction of the price of an album, and was intended to give people the chance to buy just that one song that they liked (which usually meant the song from the album that the record company thought would be a hit). Tapes and then CDs made this far less useful, because the cost of producing a tape/cd with one or two songs was no less than producing a tape/cd with an entire album, so the single died off.
CDs may *possibly* have been expensive to produce in the early days- but they milked that long after it ceased to be an issue, keeping the prices of CDs higher than LPs and cassettes.
It obviously wasn't an issue by the point (at least ten years ago) when AOL could *give away* countless CD-ROMs. I don't care how much CDs cost to replicate, it couldn't have come anywhere near justifying the UK £4 cost of a CD single in the mid-1990s (taking inflation into account, that's probably between £5-6 or US $8-11 - with tax - in today's money).
CD singles were disgustingly overpriced. Even during the first week many of them were out, when they were often sold at £2 / £2.50 to get them in the charts wasn't particularly cheap. They were padded out with multiple bonus tracks, some of which were good, but much of it was crap B-side filler material one suspects was put in to (a) justify the bloated price and (b) get diehard fans to push it into the charts and fork out money. Oh, and remember the old CD1, CD2 promotional bullshit? Buy both editions of the single to get *all* the bonus tracks including 101 crappy remixes by name producers that bear no resemblance to the original.
And they all came in those nasty slimline plastic cases.
Ordinary people may have concluded that they'd rather buy the album for £11-12 than fork out £4 for one song, another nice way of pushing expensive albums over not-cheap singles.
I'm sure that they could have sold two-track CD singles at a similar price to vinyl and made a decent profit- the difference in duplication costs would have been negligible by that stage. Any issues with the CD single format were likely due to the record companies' desire to cynically exploit it and turn it into an overpriced way to sell endless crap tracks to fans via promotional "collectors' edition" scams.
I still bought the damn things (normally the week they came out when they weren't extortionate- else I'd sometimes buy the tape or vinyl version purely because it was cheaper). However, I have no fondness for the format; on top of all that, having a bloody CD and case just for one song is annoying. I was so used to paying through the nose for one of a limited selection of overpriced lumps of plastic that even paying 80p for virtually any track on iTunes minus all the irrelevant physical garbage seems like a great deal.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I agree. It's not as if people who like painting artisticly (for example) don't paint simply because most of them can't make a living off it. They'll probably do something else to supplement their income, but will paint because they want to, and they enjoy doing it. Some people who paint stuff are employed as commercial artists to create things for other people, but the activity wouldn't go away if they weren't.
Writing and (occasionally) music are artistic areas where people who enjoy it and who are skilled might be able to find some kind of paid employment more easily, because there's currently a publishing industry that will often employ them to make stuff the publishers can package up and sell. Especially if it's a day-job like journalism, it might even pay enough to make a nice living off it.
If the business models of those industries become obsolete, though, it shouldn't mean that the creative people in them will suddenly stop being creative or producing things. They might need to find something to supplement their income, but that's the way things happen if the stuff you like doing isn't something other people will pay for.
I don't think infringing copyright on music owned by publishing companies is the right thing to do. They have the copyright on it "for a limited time" (yeah right!) which legally lets them charge whatever they want. As long as they're trying to charge more than what I want to pay for the quality they're providing, though, I don't see why I should bother. The industry's changing and making it easier to publish good quality stuff for cheaper, often directly from the artists, so naturally there are other publishers and artists with more adaptive business models coming through which are making the big publishing companies less relevant, and I'd rather just deal with them because I can still get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.
This is one of those things that probably wouldn't happen, but could. . . if you ever get audited by RIAA over music 'piracy' allegations, it's good to still have the original CDs with their packaging as proof of license. I ripped all my CD's a long time ago too, now I keep them in a box in a storage unit in my building's basement. I don't listen to the original CD's, but I got em if I need em.
I've decided that if ever my music gets good enough to sell (been giving it away free so far), I'm going with digital distribution. Getting a CD into a store is a huge hassle. And most of my friends/fans would just see a CD as an obstacle toward the final product of a FLAC/MP3/whatever on their player.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Overall revenues have definitely declined, but I can't help but wonder if the decline might be largely due to a more effective distribution system. When CDs are sold, the revenue is distributed among CD manufacturers, trucking companies, and record stores as well as a big team of employees at the record label who try and 'sell' the CDs to the record stores. If you can distribute your music without having to share revenue with all those chumps, I would imagine that profits at the artist level might be steady -- possibly even improved.
Does anyone have a more specific idea of how these revenues are broken out?
The word 'Digital' is increasingly (wrongly) being used to mean 'downloaded/stored on a hard drive.' I find it really annoying.
I bought a Blu Ray movie the other day and there was a sticker on the front: 'BONUS Digital Copy Included!' I didn't know what the hell they were talking about at first but it's this same stupid thing (you can load a lower quality version onto a computer.)
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
I think perhaps people should be more wary of using right or wrong to describe breaking the law.
Whether something is right or wrong is a decision made by an individual. Laws may influence an individual's decision but to base decisions wholey on whether an action is lawful or not seems like admitting you are less capable of making a decision than those who influenced the writing of the law.
Having said that, even if you disagree with a law it will likely impact your decision through fear of the consequences should you break it.
In the case of copyright infringement for personal use, the chance of the law being upheld is very low and consequently its impact on peoples decisions may be a lot lower than most laws.
So, if you accept that breaking the law is not inherently wrong, then you can take whether it is stealing out of the equation entirely and base your decision on whether you want to support artists by buying their music.
It is my belief that laws should not be there to provide an monetary incentive for people to be creative and I find the idea of intellectual property an unnecessary construct that does more harm than good. As to whether I should be buying music to support artists.. To participate in a system you disagree with even with good intentions may keep that system going against your best interests.
Does this make me right or wrong? It becomes a matter of perspective. From the perspective of someone who shares my view I would be right, someone who opposes my view would consider me wrong.
Maybe the most relevant question is, who has more power to uphold their view? In sharing copyrighted material, the individual has the power. While sharing copyrighted material is unlawful, that law is not easily enforceable.
Led Zeppelin... good music
You lost me there.
Check this place for some good vinyl:
http://www.dropshop.com/
Libertas in infinitum
Well, here's one: it widens their audience, which may lead to more ticket sales, t-shirts, and even purchases of their CDs both at the gigs and on-line.
Jonathan Coulton has made significant buck from giving his stuff away. Although he may be an island in a sea of failures, he is an example, and I have provided an answer to your question.
Also, the whole point enshrined in our Constitution is that it was supposed to be a social contract, where both parties obtain something of value. It is now a one-sided contract; since 1923, no work has entered the public domain, and it is highly likely that Disney et al will petition the government for a 20-year increase, every 18 years, like they've been doing. So it is no longer a contract at all; it is "merely" a restriction.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.