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Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music
Ars digs into the proposition that movies will go the way of the music business, and finds some reasons not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future. For one thing, the movie biz managed to introduce a next-generation format to follow the DVD, a trick that eluded the music crowd (anyone remember DVD-Audio? SACD?). Blu-ray isn't making up the gap as DVD sales fall, but it is slowing the revenue decline. Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" — unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted. Ars concludes: "The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night — and it may not have to."
DVDs sales are going down, but some of that gap is Amazon Unbox, Netflix, iTunes, DVRs, Hulu, etc.
The movie industry gets paid from all of these sources (including DVRs in that movie companies are paid to air movies on cable).
BluRay sales aren't huge because some retailers keep insisting on charging $35 for BluRay movies. We all know the cost of the disc is minimal. Amazon can sell BluRays for $10-$20. I'm not going to pay $35 for a movie, and I'm not alone on that issue.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Uh -- because movies have pictures?
Caveat Utilitor
On the other hand, it does have one tremendous weakness that doesn't afflict music: consumers often watch films only once.
Really, if anyone should be working on a system to enable on-demand viewing of their intellectual property it should be the movie industry.
My UID is prime!
An obvious difference is that people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once, and as soon as possible.
Music relies on people wanting to hear it multiple times and they are probably more interested in the music well after it exists. And complete knowledge of the contents of the music increases, rather than decreases, their desire to hear it.
Do they get into the fact the people are wasting there time and entertainment budgets on gaming?
Can't go see a movie when you are busy playing CoD:MW2 or Tekken 6 or etc.
Also at 60$ a Crack you might be hurting for expendable cash.
Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" -- unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted.
I stopped watching movies a few years ago, now all I watch are the trailers. They are free, you get 80% of the story, and it is always the best parts too. What's not to love?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" seems false. What else is YouTube?
not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future
Why would I even care? Seriously. I like movies, but if the big centralized studios vanished and we just had independent filmmakers left I don't think I'd shed any tears. I might actually welcome that just to see what happens.
I was horrified when I saw some of the prices on the PSN video store. £2.50 to rent Zoolander. In the UK, that film is on TV every other weekend and then DVD is probably onto £3.99. There's no way I'd rent that, much less fork out the £6.99 for the SD version.
That said, with proper 3D movies coming into play, I'm quite willing to still go to the cinema, sure I find the price quite high but if you haven't seen a 3D film yet I urge you to go and see one, it's very rare that I'm impressed with technology but this is something else.
Movies are definitely not like music, except it would be nice if you could download your favourite single episode of Family Guy, The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory instead of having to fork for the box set (or can you already do this).
Summation 2
The summary seems to suggest that audio needs a new physical format. Why? It's not like the so-called "musicians" of today want to make longer records (for which more storage would be necessary), and it's not like consumers want higher-quality audio, either - it's been repeatedly (although I wouldn't say conclusively) shown that most consumers can hear no problems with 128Kbps MP3's, and that they're perfectly happy with said bottom-of-the-barrel quality. CD's aren't great, but it's not as anybody's starving for something better (as opposed to video, where people seem to want constantly higher and higher resolution). Also - and I hate to say this, but - it seems as if the music industry is starting to "get" digital distribution which further negates the need for a new format (as opposed to the movie industry, who still totally less-than-three's physical distribution).
--- Mr. DOS
In five or ten years, a fair guess is that virtually all music and movies will be purchased in various on-demand subscription models. It's what consumers want. The companies which understand this are going to thrive. The declines mentioned in the article only seem like industry-wide problems because some of the players still haven't figured it out, and would rather prosecute their customers than adapt to a permanently-changed economic landscape. These latter companies are not long for this world.
Yes, there will probably always be physical and "owned" media revenues of some kind (collector's editions, etc.). But I think the tech is very close to being able to deliver subscriber streams to the the home on a ubiquitous scale, with mobile devices not far behind. The price points are the only things somewhat remaining to be determined.
1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
2. Make film (Citizen Kane2, The Reckoning: starring Adam Sandler or something).
3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd. ...wait a few weeks
5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price. .... wait some more
7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
8. Dvd/Bluray boxed sets with extra everything.
9. Laugh all the way to the bank (which then gambles half your money away and pays the other half to its CEO).
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I can only hope that the movie industry reads the history books, for those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Although, I can see a new market opening up, sort of a YouTube for full length movies. I wonder if this is the end of the golden age for Hollywood, I can't see movie producers willing to pay actors millions to act in their movies if their profit margins are falling off the page. I wonder if Bollywood will step in to fill in the gap? I really don't like musicals.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
I've argued this for years. CDs and their predecessors are collections of individual performances, with a few exceptions. The music industry has made an entire business model on selling an expensive set based on the saleability of a single unit. That is, they sell albums based on people wanting just one or two songs.
Movies are not like that. As much as people like to joke that much coming out of Hollywood has 5 minutes of entertainment lost in 2+ hours of bad acting, poor dialog and non-existent plot, no one is really interested in seeing just trailers.
Add to that the perceived value by the audience. I can go to the store to but a DVD of a 2+ hour performance, or a CD of a dozen 2+ minute performances for about the same price. Why does a movie that cost $100 million to produce cost the same as a music CD that maybe cost $10 million (or $1 million, or less)? The movie industry isn't going broke, so the music industry must have INCREDIBLE profit margins and is screwing over the consumer like nobody's business!
Good music can be produced for next to nothing, whereas it is much more difficult to do that with movies. A song or album can be credibly done by an INDIVIDUAL, or maybe a band and a few extra people to produce. Ten people, tops, unless they're padding it. No sets to build, to props to make, etc.
The whole music industry argument that the movie industry is just like them and "next is just FUD.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Also, one pretty significant difference between the two is the cost of production. Terminator 2 cost about $90 million and is 137 minutes long. That's $647.482 per minute. A typical album might contain an hour of music or so and can (despite what the MPAA wants you to believe) be produced for next-to-nothing*.
Of course, I am not taking into account all the last millennium issues with distribution and publicity. I'm talking about the costs of actually making a movie or album
*By "next-to-nothing" I mean that cost of time in a studio and a good mixer/sound technician is low enough that even unknown, new bands can pool their money and pay to have an album recorded quite easily.
Only if they fix their pricing. Pay per view movies on Dish Network currently cost $5, which if you know about Netflix is completely absurd (I suppose the immediacy is worth something to lots of people, but I can't imagine that $5 is anywhere near the revenue/profit maximizing price per movie).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Five bucks is what I pay for a flick. No more. When it hits the five dollar bin at Wal-Mart, that's when I may or may not buy it.
And Netflix lets customers keep a flick for two weeks at that price. Unless it's a cult classic like Rocky Horror or an animated electronic babysitter for single-digit-year-old children like Cinderella, I don't see what kind of flick you'd necessarily want to keep longer than that.
Another difference is that music is still produced as an 'album', with al the related expenses, but is now often sold as tracks. This means that some tracks probably are required to cover some of the expenses of other tracks. OTOH, movies as still sold as complete units, and are sometimes bundled with other units to generate additional profits, not cover basic expenses.
The other difference is that music has been sold directly to masses for a few generations, so the incumbents has gotten used to this as the normal situation. OTOH, movies has only been sold to the masses at the retail level for a generation or two. Prior to the 80's, movies were sold to first run theaters, then a series of lower priced venues, then to TV. Even in the 80's, with VCRs, there was still an debate whether a movie should be 'priced to sell' or 'priced to rent'. It was not uncommon for a movie to be priced $50-$100.
I do not see that bluray is going to be a big format. We have music players which changed the music industry, and we are not going to be told what we must have to watch a movie. I think the anti-piracy push of the industry shows they get this. They want to keep video cameras out of movie theaters, to protect the real profit centers. They want to stop free video streaming, so they can develop that profit center. An amazing number of movies and tv are available for streaming. This, of course is made possible by extremely tight DRM, another thing the music biz does not have, and something, I think, the video biz will have to give up in time.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You can download all the music you will ever listen to in one day from torrents. New movies come out every day and watching the same ones over is boring, downloading a HD movie or even a 1GB DVD rip still takes a while and is a pain for only one viewing. We reached the limits of the human ear a long time ago with mass produced audio technology. Movies aren't even close, we still need: better color and contrast, more resolution, 3D, holographic, sensual, etc. There are 100 years of more upgrades for movies to go through, which will drag the consumer through new formats and technologies which requires upgrading on all fronts, and money to be spent and made. With music this vanished with the CD 20 years ago. Eventually download speeds will catch up with current formats, but by the time that happens there will be a new format, for example for 3d, which will be huge and simply easier to buy or rent than download.
Moves: View Once, Large Download, Technological reasons to upgrade.
Music: Listen Forever, Small Download, No reason to upgrade ever again with the invention of the CD.
It's pretty simple.
I think that the disaggregation thing is the main key. I haven't bought a physical CD in about 18 months. In the past 4 years I've bought I think 3 of them - in those few cases the only reason was that it was a soundtrack (which I typically buy whole) and the purchase price was less than what the online album cost.
Other than that, on any given album I usually only want 1 song - definitely no more than 4. Digital distribution lets me get only those songs that I want, enabling me to buy much more music.
I think a big part of it too though, is that music of a decent quality is much smaller in size. Even using lossless compression most full albums would fit within 350MB - using still reasonable compression we're looking at 150MB per album (which we've already established that people usually don't want all of). Compare to a movie - a crappy less-than-DVD quality copy that's been compressed all to hell is going to be at least 700MB. A decent high definition movie is going to run 6+ GB.
The jist of that is that any decent sized hard drive will hold my entire music collection with room to spare, whilst even a 2TB hard drive would likely only hold half of my movie collection. There's also the transfer speed issue. While some people have faster connections, plenty of residential broadband connections are still in the 1Mbps to 6Mbps range. That's lightning for downloading music. Movies - particularly HD movies, still take a while on those connections though.
I think from a TECHNOLOGY standpoint, movies are just at the point where songs were 12 years ago. They can be digitized and stored on a home computer, and some people are certainly doing it, but space constraints and the like are going to keep people from making it their format of choice just yet. Heck I remember the first MP3 I downloaded. "The Freshmen" by The Verve Pipe. Took a good while to download on my modem and as someone who didn't even know what an MP3 was I didn't know why the hell the file was so big (I was actually searching for a MIDI copy of the song, which naturally is tiny by comparison). After I got it (and tracked down a copy of Winamp to play the thing) I was shocked when I hit play and the actual song started playing - as I said I was expecting something more akin to MIDI. Still, having only an 800MB hard drive with just one song being 5MB, I certainly didn't envision this being the way I'd prefer to get my music anytime soon.
That's the place I see movies at now. The only reason we're seeing online film sales is that politically the industry has seen the success of music sales and are willing to experiment a bit more. Once we start seeing 20+ Mbps connections in the home as the norm though, and are sporting 1 PB hard drives in our home machines, then I think we'll start seeing physical movie mediums die.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once, and as soon as possible.
That might apply to PG-13 and R rated movies, but not to the Disney animated canon. People buy Disney DVDs[1] to use them as electronic babysitters for their single-digit-year-old children.
[1] I'm not talking about Kill Bill here.
The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night
Music is going completely away? Wow. After several millenia of human musical composition I would have figured the art form had some staying power, but I guess it was a pretty good run after all. Though I must admit I was kind of looking forward to the idea of hearing new music in the future.
oh well
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Both killed by greed and proprietaryness.
Overpriced hardware, presumably because of overpriced licences for the technology.
Even Sony couldn't afford the license for more recent Sony hardware, the PS3, which initially supported SACD.
FAIL FAIL FAIL.
CDs suck.
What else is YouTube?
YouTube is a tool for parodying parts of movies, not showing them in their original context.
Well, one big difference between music and movies is that I still occasionally hear new music I like.
When was the last time a new movie came out that I was even mildly interested in seeing? Donnie Darko? How long ago was that??
Hey! That's my lawn! Get off!! Pesky kids.
Like the Music and News industries and countless other dead industries and even dinosaurs ,governments and religions before, the movie industry is not making the concessions necessary for its survival and is taking no pointers from the failures of others. Rationalizing to appease whatever future you wish for, rather than viewing the lessons of history makes for a pretty pathetic read. Wishing the best for todays failing industries is kind of like crapping in one hand and wishing in the other. Which hand will fill with tangible results first?
We should welcome the change as it will lead to better things. Where there is demand there will be product to fill it. I just may not be the same product enjoyed by our ancestors. Is it really sad that we don't ride horses everywhere anymore? Is it problematic that television displaced radio? Should we cry for the absence of player pianos? Digging farther back, it's no longer popular to light pine trees afire to let the tribe watch the pretty colors of the burn.
Truthfully most people are tired of watching the same crap recycled over and over, but still do and will until presented with other kinds of content and diversion.
Both our hands are filled with recycled crap. Time for change.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
how are you going to feel when there are no big studios left to greenlight "Cheaper by the Dozen 3"?
If Twentieth Century Fox dramatically scales back its operations, then the Gilbreths are going to have to shop their works to smaller studios, including those that use the medium of SWF serials rather than traditional feature films. But these studios will have to compete with reality TV: see Jon and Kate Plus 8 or 18 Kids and Counting or Table for 12 or the new series starring Nadya Suleman and her kids.
Music and movies are fundamentally different. Aside from the obvious visual aspect, they are much longer, require that you pay attention, and get worse with each viewing.
How many people would put on Top Gun each morning when they get into work? How many people would actually pay attention to it after the fifth time that week? How many people wouldn't notice how cheesy the dialog and special affects are after subsequent viewings?
I suspect that if you were put into a PET scanner, entirely different portions of the brain would light up when watching a movie vs. listen to music.
So while music can be listened to over and over again with the same level of enjoyment, movies can't be watched over and over again...unless you are stoned.
I don't think movies are going to go the way of music.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I read the title - "Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music" - and thought, "If you can't tell the difference, you've got bigger problems than piracy!"
unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted.
Is it time for the music industry to attempt to revert back to putting out "complete albums?" If studios went back to creating albums that uses each song as a piece of a whole, rather than disjointed collections of songs that have no relation to each other, would this increase sales? Would today's listeners be receptive to such an album or have we become to "ADD" to be able to handle listening to a whole album?
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
The summary seems to suggest that audio needs a new physical format.
You mean something other than a load of MP3s on a microSD card?
The music industry has failed because they missed the "Why" there was disaggregation. When they pump out huge masses of auto-tuned crap albums where there is only one song that is actually barely listenable, then there is no incentive to buy the whole album when you don't have to. There are precious few artists out there that make an entire album a cohesive unit that resists breaking apart without lessening the individual pieces.
The music industries death spiral is really obvious these days. I used to go to Borders to check new music in genre's other than top 40. The music was more expensive than the other options I had available to me (the ma and pop music stores had been crushed by that point). But now, the music selection is so small that in the blues and folk sections I've got significantly more selection at home than they have. Now there are no brick and mortar stores to browse so I don't buy from brick and mortar stores.
Sheldon
You don't NEED a 720p movie either. Way to apologize for a shit technology.
Blar.
I can download an album in less time than it takes to listen to it. I can barely tell the difference between the downloaded version and what I would buy at a record store. And it's already in the format I want, either for listening to it on the computer or putting it on my iPhone.
A movie, on the other hand, I'm probably going to have to leave to download overnight. It still won't be quite as good quality as the DVD version, and it will certainly be inferior to the BluRay version. If I want to watch it on my TV, I have to go to the hassle of burning it to a DVD. (If I want to watch it on my iPhone, I have to go to the even greater hassle of transcoding it.) It's probably easier to just walk to the video store around the corner and shell out the $4 to get 3 movies right away.
What's more, that 200 MB album I downloaded is probably going to get listened to dozens of times. The 2 GB movie might get watched twice if it's REALLY good.
There are a number of movies that I like to re-watch. As a consumer I will still want a permanent copy of those. But in general I agree, dead are the days of 500+ title movie collection.
People are inherently musical. While people may be inherently storytellers, a movie isn't like storytelling in the same way that recorded music is about "playing music" (otherwise we'd be seeing Lake Wobegon XVII: Garrison Stands Up And Tells Another Story (This Time It's Personal)). The music industry formed because of a distribution problem that today is basically gone. Movie studios formed because of a talent and production resource issue that is still an issue today and will be as long as humans are involved.
Movies are also harder to make well, both from a talent perspective and a technological perspective. People can make records at home now that rival the best production available in studios, but that's not really true for movies. Even when the technology is there so that VFX made at home stand up to Lucasfilm, etc., there's still the problem that good movies require writing a good script, which (as a musician), I have to say is a lot harder than writing a song or an album. What's more, playing music is easier than acting, and as a result there are millions more great musicians than there are great actors.Most people are not inherently believable actors, and they don't practice acting in their spare time. And that's a multiplicative factor, since a great record can be recorded by one person, but how many times can you watch Castaway?
The business model and distribution for movies may have some tough times, but I think there will always be a market.
Dare I say it on /. but ... for movies, DRM worked.
(Yes I know there are exceptions to what I'm about to say. I'm trying to make a point, not write a voluminous tome of completeness.)
A CD contains the complete content, uncompressed, with no DRM. Save for a few technical arguments that make most peoples' eyes roll, nothing in audio is better. CD drives are ubiquitous. You can take any CD and pop it into any computer and with few, if any, clicks it is copied into your computer and you never need touch that CD again. Thanks to no DRM, it's so easy to copy/rip a CD it's almost hard not to.
A DVD contains a fraction of the content, with DRM. Until we can distribute uncompressed UDTV-format video content for pennies, we'll keep getting upgrades. DVD drives are close to ubiquitous. While you can take any DVD and pop it into any computer to view, copying that DVD onto your computer requires non-trivial technically-illegal software with the user understanding technical obscurities. Thanks to DRM, most people are incapable of copying/ripping DVDs.
Yes, many on /. know how to beat DVD DRM. Some of us even have the T-shirt to prove it. ...but it's not trivial, it's not something so easy that it's almost unavoidable. The vast majority of users not only don't have a "video jukebox" set up on their PC, they wouldn't have a clue how to start.
Upshot is: DRM worked. DVD CSS did its job. And the reason "movies are not exactly like music", for purposes of this thread, is that thanks to DRM, DVDs resist ripping, while CDs practically encourage it.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Hollywood will be fine because movies are similar to concerts. People ENJOY going to the theater and watching a movie on the big screen (at least I and all of my friends and family do). Especially large scale action movies. The Matrix, Transformers, The Dark Night, and Apollo 13 were all AWESOME on a huge screen. That's an experience that a person can't get at home, same as with concerts. Those kinds of experiences will always be in demand.
That's the big difference between Hollywood and the big music developers. The RIAA does not sell experiences, and Hollywood does.
That doesn't work for bubblegum acts like Britney and boy bands and bubblegum acts seem to be where most of the money is. That isn't the only problem the talent pool capable of consistently producing albums where every song is good even if not related to each other is small. If we're talking concept albums where the songs are thematically related then the talent pool is smaller still. And the audience for such is discriminating and won't buy just any old crap you're shoveling.
People purchase music they like and then play it relatively frequently. Movies are quite different. Most of us will watch a particular movie once, and possibly twice or three times if we really like it. Kids videos are somewhat different in that they (the kids) tend to want to watch stuff they like over and over. Until the movie industry realizes that they can sell more and make more by significantly lowering the price of movies, they are never going to overcome "piracy" and illegal sharing of their IP. FWIW, most of the movies my wife and I purchase are in the $5 remainders bin. If feature movies sold for under $10 USD each, there would be little or no financial incentive for pirates, and it would be more cost-effective for people who share ripped, substandard, copies to simply purchase the product with official media and quality.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Your logic operates under the assumption that a movie has a fixed value, that intrinsically all films are worth $20.
In a free market, value is determined by supply and demand.
You're trying to validate theft of IP by a product losing value due to low demand. Just because an item is placed on sale, that doesn't mean you are entitled to pay nothing for it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The problem is there are hundreds of web sites you can go to and start downloading a movie. Generally this can be done within one day of release of the DVD in retail stores. If movie production companies begin to release a DVD simultaneously with the theater release, the theaters will dry up quickly.
Today, most people are pretty rude and obnoxious. The whole "theater" experience can be ruined by a single rude, obnoxious person and your likelyhood of finding someone in the same theater your are in is pretty high these days. The dedication and professionalism of the theater staff has declined over the years, such that you can usually count on a dirty, messy theater as well. Once the lights go off that may not matter much, but still unless you are paying premium prices your "theater" experience isn't likely to be that great. Therefore, anyone with a big-screen TV is likely to want to watch a movie at home rather than the theater, maybe even waiting for the DVD rather than putting up with the theater nonsense.
I'd say the only thing keeping the theaters going is a monopoly on the early release of a movie. When that changes, and it likely will, the DVD will replace the theater. Not only that, but that means the pirated, shared content will be available immediately. Free is always better than something you have to pay for. The biggest difference is on the Internet you don't have to use a gun or risk getting caught but you can still steal. There are plenty of people willing to help out there.
Yes, movie DRM helps stop casual ripping, but once the movie is ripped by someone, somewhere on the Internet the difficulty is gone. When it took a week to download a 1GB movie file that was a serious deterrent, but bandwidth for many has grown. If you can download it in a few hours it is no longer much of a deterrent.
Bye-bye movie revenue.
About the only thing that I think might save the high-revenue production of movies is to eliminate DVDs and have theater-only releases. Once it is in a digital format there is nothing to stop it from being pirated, and so it will be. However, I doubt this will happen. And "user-generated content" is just 99% crap.
The reason Audio CDs are popular with consumers today is that you can copy them. The same is true of the unencrypted MP3. I know that if I want to make a tape, or an mp3, or a FLAC for my own personal purposes, I can do that from a CD that deserves to wear the COMPACT DISC DIGITAL AUDIO logo.
The reason Audio CDs are popular with record labels today is that they are cheap to make. It's worth it to put out an easily-copyable format if you can shovel schlock along with the tracks people actually want. CD singles are sold at exorbitant prices to keep profit margins high.
We got used to copying music when the cassette tape became the dominant physical format; it had some advantages that I miss very much but which don't really apply today. Instead of being able to reuse tapes, we can avoid buying physical media altogether. It would be very nice to have a new, smaller physical format for audio; I've been buying even small-capacity MiniSD and MicroSD cards whenever I find them for a dollar or two so that if I want to give someone some data I can do it without involving the internet. It's not like they take up a lot of space :)
Movies are a bit more of a PITA to copy, at the minimum you need to frequently update software if you want to copy current movies... which you probably do, if you have children and allow them anywhere near any optical media. Hell, I know lots of adults that I don't want touching my discs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hollywood made their own bed when DVDs came out. Prior to DVDs, VHS tapes averaged $40-30 a title and Laserdiscs were $50-80 each. VCRs were $400 and laserdisc players were $1000. Then, someone got the brilliant idea that you could try to apply economies of scale to DVDs and prices started plummeting.... Hollywood thinking all the time that tey were going to continue to make more money because people would buy more movies... and they did. Only they aren't anymore. You can't apply economies of scale to something you don't use again and again.
Normal people ( not geeks, technophiles, AV junies ) buy hundreds of songs, thousands over a life time. You can't apply the same model to Movies. People don't buy hundreds of movies... and most people who do buy alot of movies end up thinking "why did I buy all these damn movies?" and then stop. The digital rental/subscription market is the future for most movies.
There will always be the ones you love that you want to buy and keep forever, but unlike a favorite song, a new movie is a fleeting interest.
You don't want to be stuck paying $15 for a digital movie that you end up not liking all that much, but you would pay a $3 rental for it.
If you are talking pop/rock then digital mp3 downloads are killing off CD's since most people would rather buy a single tune than an entire album in most cases. Of course there ARE albums that are worth owning such as ANYTHING by the Beatles, the Who's Tommy, etc. OTOH sales of classical music CD's shouldn't be down as much since here we are talking about music of longer lengths where only 1 - 3 selections fill an entire CD. Also people who listen to classical music are less likely to be happy with the quality of MP3's lossy compression and want the real thing.
If the game is good, I can easily spend hundreds of hours in multiplayer over a years time. I've found that gaming actually saves me money! When I play, I don't do any of the usual stuff and I spend less on junkfood and candy. This was really noticeable last month, I had a lot of cash left over because I was playing Modern Warfare 2. And since I eat less, I don't even have to go to the gym :)
Personally I think these failed because (1) you had to buy new equipment, and (2) you could not play them on your computer.
This latter changed, sort of, when "hybrid" SACDs came out which had the regular CD audio on one layer, and the SACD on another. With DVD-A, the initial batch of DVD video players couldn't play them at all, and the industry stopped releasing them for a while when CSS was broken.
In general, the producers of these formats went after the niche audiophile market, and so were never able to really gain mainstream acceptance. If SACD had gone 'hybrid' from the very beginning, so that every CD sold was actually also an SACD, then more player (including ones in computers) would have been created (bringing down manufacturing costs). As it stands on people who read Stereophile are likely to have a player.
How can his post be redundant when nobody said anything like it?
Back in the day when a movie theater wanted to play a movie, they had to buy a full package, including newsreels and cartoons.
When a court ruled in the '50s or '60s that this was illegal, that was the beginning of the end of a golden age of cartoons. That, and television, put newsreels out to pasture.
Ironically, while movies aren't subject to disaggregation, DVDs which include extras are. Nothing except a business decision says you can't sell these extra bits as stand-alone items.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Another point that people seem to be missing is that movies are intrinsically momre expensive and difficult to produce than music. While you might have an independent music act that is just as good as Britney Spears, we are a LONG way from independent movies that match the production quality/acting/special effects/etc. of Star Wars, 2012, etc. [Look at the credits for any movie to have at least an _idea_ of how much work goes into it].
For this reason, the democratization that threatens "big music" is very unlikely to threaten Hollywood. (The occasional independent movie that becomes a hit is unlikely to change the general trend).
i'm glad you're still selling bottled water. how quaint
if you hadn't noticed, the internet came along, and created a lake right behind your water stand. no one needs to buy your water anymore
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Play nice, you two.
Sure, you can download a rip or buy a DVD [legally or illegally], but it's different from the experience of the theater itself. A screen of a few dozen feet rather than a few dozen inches, for instance. That's probably worth paying for, at least occassionally. Not $10, though.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
BECAUSE you cannot break up a movie into smaller chunks like an album, the 2hour format will likely DIE giving way to more instant gratification in media like YOUTUBE, and online TV. I mean, do we really NEED 3 hours of 2012 ????
"I don't know where the cutoff is ..."
"I expect ..."
LEARN a little! The Lechner Distance chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_J._Lechner or in graphical form at http://hd.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/) highlights a very basic aspect of this which you're personal guesses completely overlooked -- the ability to distinguish between display resolutions is directly dependent on your distance from the screen.
So you could have a 100" screen and still not be able to distinguish 480p from 1080p if you are sitting 30 feet away.
How do album-only tracks fit into this analysis?
Mothership (a Led Zep greatest-hits album) has "Achilles Last Stand" as album-only for instance; this was the first example to come to my mind.
http://www.amazon.com/Mothership/dp/B0011Z5IXC/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1259949927&sr=301-1
This certainly falls into the "albums worth owning" category (well, if I didn't already have their eight studio albums); in this case, I'd be inclined to buy the whole thing even if there weren't album-only tracks
This is the way I've often phrased it: If you kinda like the band, you're good with the hit singles and the greatest-hits albums, if you really like the band, you want whole albums.
Much of my collection is whole albums; even if I only have one definitive album for an artist, it can be a step up from the greatest-hits collection. In rather different genres, Straight Outta Compton, London Calling and Songs in the Key of Life are examples of where this is the case.
I have the whole discography from Zeppelin, Skynyrd and Weird Al, and a significant percentage from the Beatles, Dylan, Green Day and some others
At that point, there are *very* few tracks that I dislike enough to remove them from the batch.
For the component of my collection that's singles and greatest hits, I figure I'd be quite likely to enjoy an expanded selection if I bothered to go expand it. :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
What really changes these businesses is that distribution on-line is dirt cheap and has virtually no cost of entry. Furthermore, production costs are also falling rapidly. The movie business is as much subject to that as the music business.
Yeah, I have seen some of the microTorrent detail graphs, but I'm just guessing about exact operating mechanics.
Dang, BitTorrent really is quite an impressive file-transfer technology. Too bad it gets a bad rap from the file-sharing haters.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The Princess Bride
How much do think it costs to hire a 40 piece orchestra for a day?
Ask John Williams. He tends to use the London Philharmonic when he scores a movie...
But consider that lots of people like the expensive stuff. The mainstream superstars spend millions on studio time with extremely high end equipment, studios with expensively built acoustics, engineers and mic technicians and session musicians who charge professional rates.
Just because a "superstar" likes to piss away money on extravagant expenses, does not imply that it is required in order to produce quality music.
the problem with the music industry wasn't "not coming up with a new format", it was ignoring the replacement format which consumers decided to use. The movie industry did this for longer than the music industry, but it's still a problem. Blu-Ray should not exist, but the biggest publisher of all is also a hardware manufacturer.
Hardware manufacturers don't like it when someone comes up with something like say, a computer, which means you can come out with new improved formats which benefits everyone immediately, without the need to buy anything new.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This is Slashdot.
You must be new here?!
Movies and music are two very completely different things, as different as books and music. You listen to music, when you're done listening, you can keep listening to it. You keep the cd in your in your car so you can listen to it on your way to work. You keep a copy at home so you can listen to it when you're relaxing after a long drive. You keep a copy on your mp3 player so you can listen to it while jogging. You keep a copy at work so you can listen to it while slaving. You got a party, you put on your music. Next week you got a party, you can put on the same music.
Not so with movies. You watch a movie, you're pretty much done. You can't invite a bunch of people to have a good time and watch a movie, then invite them again next week to have a good time and watch the same movie. You can't watch movie at work, you can't watch movie while driving. Most Hollywood movies are so bad you can barely stand to watch it in the first place, you don't want to sit through that again. If you really liked it, maybe you might be able to stand watching it again just once more to see if you missed any parts.
Buying movies is a pointless endeavor. This is just my opinion, maybe I'm wrong, maybe people like watching the same movie over and over again.
Movies were at one time, and in many cases still are, "an event" or "an experience." Music is... well, just music for most people... it fills the empty spaces of time with a rhythm for life to make the work day or the commute a bit more bearable. For most, music is a backdrop.
Movies require focus and attention. Significant amounts of a person's time and attention are drawn to this medium. But the industry actually cheapens the experience significantly.
People wait in line for hours... even days and I have heard weeks for some movies to come out to theaters. Putting a movie out on DVD was once heavily delayed so as not to detract from the "movies is an event" notion. But lately, the delay between theater and DVD is shorter and shorter. I think, perhaps, it is linked to their desire to get more sales numbers for the year. (There was a time when business/industry had 5 year plans and had patience when executing them. Now the metric for success is "growth" which is literally impossible to maintain indefinitely and so they hunger for more and exploit everything they can to get it.) In any case, as long as the delay between the silver screen and the big screen at home is shorter, lots of people are waiting.
I deny vehemently that the ability to download movies over the internet, for free or otherwise, hurts sales. People who watch movies in the theater still buy DVDs. People who buy DVDs aren't likely to download, but people who download are likely to buy DVDs. The only controlling factor in my opinion is QUALITY and there is a lot of reason for the lack of quality and most of it has to do with minimizing risk. New ideas are risky. Old ideas aren't... well... actually, old ideas are risky too, but perhaps more manageable. Either way, people are not getting excited about the movies any more.
Sell it at different prices to different markets, that way everyone will pay what they consider it worth. they intentionally reduce prices, so you're still paying the asking price.
A new release at $20 typically will have, day 1:
- people buying for face value
- employee discounts
- a special edition at $30 or more promised
- a retailer coupon to buy a movie, get another for some percent off
- a promotion at another retailer pushing that movie at a discounted price as a loss leader
- different prices (or different availability) in different geopolitical regions
- a higher price at the trendier stores near "high cost of living" type areas
Followed by any number of:
- official price drops
- used sales
- rentals
- more price drops
- buy 1 get 1 free retailer sales
- more coupons
You can see where I'm going with this. They alter prices enough so that the target market self-differentiates to pay what they think it's worth. The customer balances their need for instant gratification against their wallet and decides when is the right time to buy.
If they give it away in any form (free, free with purchase, bundled with something else) then you are still following their business model and making an effective purchase. The moment you set the terms, when they are not yours to set, that is usually a violation of law.
You are selling your house, I talk you down $30,000 from your asking price. I write you a check for $30,000 less than what we agreed upon. You complain, but my response is that you seemed fine when I stole the first $30,000 from you, so history shows you're fine with being $30k short. So I shorted you. Would you tell me you see my point?
No you wouldn't, so quit being a dumbass on the internet.
The "disaggregation" effect came about because record companies supported the "one song sells the record" model of A&R development and marketing. Albums used to be works unto themselves by default. You listened to the whole thing not just because it you couldn't just get one track (45's sold just fine thank you very much), but because the record companies signed bands capable of producing a whole album of good songs, and gave them the support to do so. Now they still try to push that one catchy song on the whole album, and complain that their customers look for ways to avoid getting burnt by buying 9 filler songs to hear it. Boo freakin' hoo.
But without getting into the myriad of differences between today's movies and albums, from production to distribution, the parting of ways between the music and movie industries is primarily in the passion of the people running them. At the executive level, the people who make movies at least *care* about movies. As in, they actually enjoy watching them. The CEO's of record companies increasingly don't. Go into the offices of the presidents of major music companies and they look just like the offices they had when they ran their previous business, as in, there isn't a stereo anywhere in the room. When the President of Jive records or BMG goes home and does listen to music, it's usually classical - not the genre's they sell. Perhaps rap has done better than it might have because the President of Bad Boy Records at least consumes his own product.
The time and effort it takes to pirate a movie these days is no more than it was to pirate an album in the 24,000 baud Napster days. And if most movies consisted of one neat 3 minute scene you saw in the preview along with 97 minutes of garbage, all of which was targeted to 14 year olds, then pirating would probably be as big of a threat to movie studios as it was to music studios.
Since we're all techies here, it should also be pointed out that the original lossy MP3 format wouldn't have taken off in the first place if the majority of music was so good that the sound quality was a deal breaker. I might listen to a Taylor Swift song in a low bit rate, or watch Ernest Goes to Camp at 320x200 if it's free - but I'll buy the Dark Side of the Moon on CD, and Blade Runner on Blue Ray. They still try to make movies as good as the Blade Runner. Dark Side of the Moon? Not so much.
There are a couple problems with writing, recording, and self-publishing your own album:
I'm karma-whoring with this post, but the question must be asked--what does MTV have to do with music?
They haven't played music videos this decade so far as I can tell. They may have had some input once, but that time is long since past. No one turns on MTV expecting to hear music any more. You'd have more luck finding new music via podcast or from one of the few internet radio stations still able to afford the MAFIAA's highway robbery.
If you're self-published, then you have to work the podcast circuit, the myspace music scene, sell what you can at shows along with t-shirts, etc. Its more difficult and you may never get to live like an RIAA star, but at least you know what you make is yours and your fans like your music, not your publicist. ;)
Besides, those guys who live like that on the RIAA's dime are really just living on fool's gold--all the money they're spending is a loan at incredible interest that they only hope they can pay off before their contract is up. Many of those artists end up heavily in debt to the MAFIAA and for every star you know who makes it, there are bunches of whom die penniless. There's a reason why the Rolling Stones go on tour every so many years you know... The money doesn't last and there's no pension so its off to the studio and onwards for another "good bye" tour...
You don't. You couldn't afford the lawsuit any way--the only ones who get anything out of a lawsuit like that are the lawyers. Besides, nine times out of ten its impossible to know if you've unknowingly recreated a hook or not until someone shows it to you. Read Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. Say what you will about the man's politics (I happen to disagree with him on several things) but the man is a flipping prophet when it comes to the issue of copyright law and art. It's only a matter of time before people start blowing their brains out over this kind of stuff.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
I doubt that anyone ever made a profound analysis about why sales of CDs / DVDs etc go down. Everyone claiming to have made an analysis only presents his half ass own thoughts and theories. ... oops ... for what should I buy such a DVD? ... ofc I already have bought or lend the DVDs
I for my part own no single ripped movie, and the movies I have you can count on one hand I think.
The reasons for that is very simple:
a) I watched the movie in the cinema already
- most movies are to bad to watch them a second time, this counts e.g. for 90% of the action movies, action but no story
b) a lot of movies come so late to europe that I have seen the american original already, so I don't go into the cinema either
c) many low price DVDs that are added to movie magazines e.g. only have the german version, no language slection etc.
d) seasons of TV shows like Dr. House e.g. are 5 years behind the US airing
A majour hassle is: iTunes US only sells to US residents. Again lost sales for the movie makers. I don't wait 5 years to finally buy the TV show in germany where it likely only is sold at all *IF* it was aired first successfully.
Looking at music it is even simpler, business model of the majour labels is: promote (invest) a billion per year into a few artists, promote them and let them run some shows let them make an album a year and probably let them show up in a movie. Hope that you gain the investment back with those 0 artists only ... unfortunately that means every label has only about 10 artists, that might be in total about 100 artists on the music market.
If I prefer different music? There is none. I can not even buy the music from my old LPs again as CD. Because it is simply not in store, neither online (as download) nor as CD (online or at a vendor).
You wont believe it but the last CD I bought physical was from a band that had a show here in town and sold their CDs after wards.
The only way for me to buy CDs now is to go into stores, go to the shelve of the genre I like and start browsing. Not the worst way ofc. however stores with a good selection are really rare.
My part of view is: half of the movies / music is so bad it might be worth "pirating" but certainly not buying especially if you take the prices into account. The rest of the music is either good old stuff that is not even for sale, EVEN as tehre are customers who would buy it and the rest is so bad it is not even worth pirating. Exchange bad with "flavour of the year mainstream boring" or with "not my taste" if you wish.
The music and movie industry simply does not make stuff where demand is, but just makes stuff and then advertises it and then hopes it has created enough demand/desire for its creations.
Look at the movie "district 9". The movie industry is "surprised" that this movie hit like a bomb? Hello? How stupid can one be ... the move is simple maid, has a good story, has enough surprises to let the watcher say: "oops, why this?" and has enough explanations that the watcher does not feel stupid after he said "oops".
Movies like this is what the people want, not some "Transformers II" where only the special effects are interesting and only a 16 year old boy will go in because of the cute actress.
angel'o'spheree
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If you don't NEED 1080p then you don't NEED 720p either. 480i should be good enough for everyone :) And besides, I'm used to 1080i because that's the resolution of many of the HD channels that appear on my cable box.
The tech is not yet baked for high quality video on demand IMO.
Blar.
Hollywood should pay me to watch their films!
To Point: I Got ATT U-verse about a year ago. FREE HBO, Ten channels of HBO! Plus, yada, yada, yada for 90 days. ATT includes a DVR. So, I recorded about ten FREE movies. FREE and LEGAL Movies. I am sure you know where I going with this.... How many of the those Free to watch anytime from DVR, FREE from HBO, also available free from 'HBO on DEMAND'.... FREE to watch anytime! None, not one.
when a movie comes out, its around 20-25 dollarrs. after 2 or 3 weeks, 5 dollars is knocked off the price. a few months later, another 5...and soon is in the 5 dollar bin, and not even 2 years old.
mujsic comes out, brand new cd is 25 bucks (even after the govt told the industry to lower the price, and they promiced tehy would, 25 years ago), and after 6 motn hs or so, the price becomes 16.99. and stays tehre, for eternity. i have seen 5 dollar bins at the music store, and its full of the batman soundtrack, nat king cole sings jingle bells, and other assorted novelties. perhaps they could take a pricing lesson from the movie industry. you know, lower the price. if the amount of sales measure into someone being in the top 40, wouldnt it be a good idea to let th e masses buy thier album instead of watching your profits slouch?
if i owned a company that sold Gizmo. and the price of the Gizmo stayed basically the same for 30-40 years, accounting inflation n all. then suddenly people found they could get Gizmo for FREE! at my expence. i wouldnt blame them. however the version thier getting is a much less sound quality. so i only have to look at what i have, a better product with better quality. maybe if i lowered my price people would buy Gizmo again, and not get it for free. cuase its something bout the item in hand that makes oine feel that tehy own it. i know, id lower the price! maybe afters its been out a while id let it for for only a few dollars. i dont see the need of charging 17 dollars for a 40 year old gizmo when a new one is 17.
Music concerts aren't dying, just the format od pre-recorded content distributed. Movies wont die either until everyone has a theater in their home. I still buy tickets to concerts (and CDs if the music is worth paying for. Last one was Frou Frou: Details. Older band, one album, but I love Imogen Heaps voice). I've attended every Rush concert performed in my area since 1987, and have the t-shirts to prove it.
I discovered the previously mentioned album by listening to music through last.fm and soma.fm. I listened to the radio through the intertubes. If they could just figure out that the method of distribution is changing and not the market and not theft, their lives would be good! I remember when I went to a music store to buy music way back when, I talked to the owner about what I wanted, and ended up buying a tape by (long memorial pause) dammit, like Zeppelin but heavier.... dont have it anymore.... Anyways! His big bitch was theft then too. Nothing has changed just the formats.
Kingdom Come! That was irritating. Glad I didn't wake up in the middle of the night shouting "Kingdom Come!". My wife would have committed me....