You surely know that the retail price has to be rather higher than the wholesale price in order for the retailer to break even.
Uh, yes, I run a record label. I deal with distributors.
My point was, I sell vinyl, which is generally more expensive than CDs to manufacture. And I can sell my vinyl to distributors, who sell to stores. I can sell a vinyl single for $2.25 wholesale and make a small profit. And I'm only doing it in the 1000s, not the 10,000s or 100,000s like the big labels are, so my per unit costs are WAY higher than theirs.
Thus, your comment that "the production and distribution cost of singles is just too expensive" is a bit off, I think. In my experience marketing and selling singles, you can definitely make money at it.
Surely an album with one good song would sell far fewer copies than a single? Do people really buy many albums like that?
Which would _you_ rather sell : 1,000,000 $5 singles or 500,000 $15 albums? That's $5 million versus $7.5 million, and albums have a greater profit margin than singles right now, since they are heavily over-priced (as evidenced by labels like Dischord who can sell their CDs for $10, even with high production values, good packaging and advertisements in prominent music magazines).
Look at it this way. A single or a cd has the same distribution, marketing and pressing costs. A album does have more recording costs, but that's negligable if you're selling 100,000s of copies.
Like I said, Vanilla Ice's label pulled his single when his song got big, so they could sell copies of the $15 cd instead of the $5 single. They figured this out, and this was the beginning of the end of the single in the US.
This worked great in the short term, except that customers started to get disillusioned by the fact that labels were still basically making singles, just charging more for them.
I sell vinyl singles, and can wholesale them for $2.25 and make a small profit. (And this is with a print run of just 1000.) I think they could definitely make money of singles if they wanted - the issue is if you have a full-length with only one good song, you do not want to be selling that song on a single.
True, but losses on one band's record can be deducted from the tax owed on a money-maker.
I do agree they should sell individual songs, or at least singles. If I recall, the single market died around the time Vanilla Ice's label pulled the Ice Ice Baby single from the shelves, because they realized that people would buy the full album just for that song. I miss singles.
Do YOU know anything about the recording industry?
Well, I run a small record label, have been promoting concerts for several years and know many people in bands (some of them signed, some of them not). I also worked in radio for five years. So I know a _bit_ about it. More than most people, but certainly less than many.
All I can say is take the time to drop the numbers into a spreadsheet and see for yourself. Numbers are the only thing that matters.
Okay, let's look at the numbers. The only INCOME is as follows:
Add that up, that is $340,000. If you _only_ take the $150,000 recording cost out, you get $190,000. Divide that by five members and you get $38,000, already lower than your $50K figure - without manager and lawyer fees, the cost of the tour, or any other expenses.
I'm really curious how you got your figure, since there is only $340,000 of positive income listed in his numbers. Please explain it. I'm thinking you must be counting something as income that is not.
Remeber, all money given to the band at the outset is recoupable by the label. This means, for that $250,000 advance, the band must record an album, deliver it to the label AND they then still owe that money to the label. It's the same deal for the merch advance and the publishing advance. That money is owed to the merch company and the publisher.
Now, they did actually make a bit more than the $4 figure, because this hypothetical band would have taken chunks of the various advances to live off off - but that doesn't change the fact that they owe that money. It's not free and clear income, like a normal person makes from a job- it's like living off a credit card, eventually you have to pay it back (or break up the band).
Imagine say..... TimeWarner buying PowerMacs, installing a lot of great production software and building quality, low-cost "studios" for artists they sign. That'd be a hell of a lot less expensive than plunking down $250K-$1M for studio time. All they'd have to do is get the band's best cut, send it to the techs to clean it up and press it. They could probably save as much as $800K per record or maybe even more doing that.
The problem with this idea is that, under the current system, the recording costs come out of the band's share of income from the record. In fact, all expenses do, including marketing. Thus, the label has no incentive to save money, since their cut is unchanged.
He uses accounting tricks to make it look like the band members didn't make anything when in fact, according to his own numbers, they made about $50,000 each assuming there were 5 band members.
Um, can you read? Do you know anything about the recording industry? A $250,000 advance, _minus_ manager's fee, legal fees, recording budget, etc...
When a label advances you money for an album, they expect you to deliver them a finished album for that money. It's not take-home pay. If they could have recorded their album for $0 and not had a manager or lawyer to pay, they'd have made $50k each...
So? A: I'm not Japanese, B: a product which only does well in one country is not really a stand-out, C: It failed in America, which was the beginning of the demise of SEGA as a hardware company.
Again, if the company releases their software on a different platform, that's not really emulation, is it... It's recompiling or rewriting software to work on a different platform.
Nintendo on the other hand chooses to screw it's repeat customers. I had a Nintendo, then a SNES, then a N64 but I stopped there. I spent a lot of money on N64 games and I still play them on my N64 system but I can't play them on the new hardware
C'mon, you are over-reacting a bit. I mean, the old hardware was cartridge based -would you really expect them to include a cartridge hookup on the GC, when they have switched to discs?
Besides, the PS2 is the first home console since the early days to be backwards-compatible (I'm pretty sure some of the Atari consoles had this feature, and the GameBoy line has always had it), isn't it? So it's not like Nintendo was on some greedy kick to not be backwards-compatible.
I would bet the GC2 will play GC games. If it doesn't, Nintendo is making a big mistake. Actually, I imagine this will be a standard feature on home consoles from now on.
Uh, except that the companies that put out the special interest records (Rhino, Folkways) ARE NOT the same companies that put out the crappy pop music...
The major labels have their heads so far up there ass that they drop musicians like Paul Westerberg because his records "only" sell 200,000 copies.
To me, that's crazy. Why drop an artist who consistantly sells hundreds of thousands of copies of their releases? The answer is that the big companies are so bloated that they actually can't make money on a release that "small".
However, this doesn't mean that no one can. A smaller, indie label (doghouse? vagrant? I can't recall) snapped Mr. Westerberg up and made a nice sum of money releasing his latest record, proving that you can release records by smaller artists and do very well if, and this is key, you run your business correctly.
I read an interview with Westerberg where he said he was very happy he got dropped because he manages to sell about the same amount of records with a lower marketing budget and way more royalties for him.
I run a small record label. I mostly do vinyl, but have two CD releases in the works. Both will be runs of 1000, with full color packaging, jewel cases, etc. These are professionaly duplicated CDs, not CD-Rs. The cost to me? About $2.50 per CD, with shipping included.
I'm not factoring recording costs in here, but if you are a major label and making 500,000 cds of a release, you can factor in a $1 million recording budget and still get a cost of less than $5. per piece.
Then you have to take into account that if they make 500,000 copies, the physical costs will be much less than the $2.50 I'm paying for only 1000 copies.
Where do the stores get the money to pay for these things?
Good point... except that stores generally make a dollar or so off of a CD. It might be more at chain stores, but the CD store my friend works at marks up their products by about a buck (and their prices are pretty high).
And you only ever listen to an album once? No wonder you think they're overpriced.
How many times do you exclusively listen to an album, without doing anything else? I rarely do this, music is something I put on while I'm working, or reading, etc...
AC? I've been debating with someone that has UID # 589068, not an AC. Check their username.
Filters are easy to bypass, and nobody will want a system that punts e-mails because somebody happens to trip one of those filters.
As I have repeatedly stated, I get a spam penetration rate of about 0.03%. I get a false positive rate that is comparable to that, and I wouldn't even get that if I bothered to set up my whitelist for everyone I know. This is acceptable to me. I get FAR more spam by snail mail than I get in my email inbox. When I had local phone service, I got way more telemarketing calls than I currently get spam in my inbox.
For me, spam is basically a nonissue.
It's like the RIAA's attempts to prevent CDs from playing in computers. Because of the nature of music, there's no way to restrict it without making it unusuable to their customers. Email is exactly the same way because it is fundamentally flawed.
My counter to this is that filters are working for me, and working great. You and user # 589068 _say_ that they can't work in the end, but that's completely your opinion. All I know is they work GREAT right now, and this implies to me that they have a good chance of working great in the future.
You should listen to the guy, he knows what he's talking about.
That's a little fishy, first you call him an AC even though he is not, then you know him?
He's helped me set up my e-mail to be spam free. The only way a spam can get through is if somebody hijacks the computer of one of my friends.
You needed someone to help you set up a whitelist? Why should I listen to _you_ if you couldn't even accomplish a simple task like that on your own?
Again, as far as I am concerned, my computer is spam free. If they need to send me 300 spams for ONE to get through, I'm fine with that. If I could set up a system to automatically shred 299 out of 300 credit card offers that come to my house, I'd jump for joy!
I've already ditched e-mail. I use Instant Messaging to talk to people I want to talk to because I'm sick of SPAM. Everybody else is quite happy with IM too.
Why don't you just ditch the spam? I get a spam in my inbox maybe once a week, and this is an account where I have two or three domains that have catchall emails that forward to it. I also have all my business email for two different business forwarded there (and those email addresses are on the web sites for those businesses, with a mailto:, with no subterfuge at all). Spam is no problem for me whatsoever.
Heh, and you think that's not going to filter everybody else in the world?
Why would it? If a spammer sends an email with a link to cheapviagra.com, blocking emails that link to cheapviagra.com shouldn't be a problem. Ditto for phone numbers. Sure spammers could stir up trouble by sending out spam that wasn't for their products but again, this raises their costs and makes it a harder business to be in.
You sending your mom a link to your website shouldn't be an issue, since it's not hitting 100,000 mailservers all at once.
Wrong. The Spammers will win. People won't give up the ability to get messages from their loved ones, even if it means having to put up with SPAM.
Duh, if all you want is messages from loved ones, sure, use a whitelist. There is no way a spammer can send you spam if you are using a whitelist _and_ not accepting mail from people you don't know. However, if you are trying to recieve business emails from people you don't know, then you can't really do this.
Filters are not the solution. Period. You cannot make a good enough filter to block all spam.
They work great for me. 0.3% of spam making it through is acceptable to me.
IM, on the other hand, uses the white list and permission request setup that I described, and it's been working for years. I've had the same ICQ number since 97, and I get 0 spam.
Sure, but as I said above, this doesn't work for everyone. For my various businesses, I need to receive emails from strangers who I have never communicated with before.
Uh, no. When they see a dip in sales, they'll start looking into how spam filters work and how to get around them.
This costs money. Thus making it less attractive to spam.
And since email is such an open system, it won't be hard to do. SPAMvertisers are very creative.
It also won't be very hard to block their efforts. The spam filters will continue to get better, and so will the spammers. But the cost of the spammer's development time will either cut into their profits, or make the spam more expensive. Either way makes it a less appealing business to be in, and raises the barrier of entry so that less "creative" spammers will go out of business... which is less spam, again.
I really wasn't referring to legality here.
Unless you make it illegal, the current email network we have won't be abandoned for a long time. No one is going to adopt a totally new, less open email system where they can't interact with the HUGE installed base of people who use email.
Think about it, would you? Would you stop using email in favor of a closed system that you can't recieve spam on, but no one uses?
All filtering will do is make them smarter. The end result will be nobody using e-mail at all.
I disagree. Spammers can't win the filter war because they can't get away from one thing : they must -no matter how well they disguise their headers, subject or even body text- mention a product and offer a link or phone number. Thus, their mail can be filtered.
Sure, they could get around this by not mentioning a product, or linking to a site or givinga phone number, but if they don't mention a product and give a way for the spamee to go and buy it, why would the advertiser pay them? It is advertising after all.
Also, if the filters get good enough at detecting the marketing text that spammers use, forcing them to insert more and more random text in the body of their messages, eventually the spams will be so incomprehensible, they won't work.
To me, it seems to be a fight the spammers cannot win.
For now, the best solution is do implement filters on your servers and provide users with white-list capability. Works great for me : only about 0.3% of spams get into my inbox.
Slashdot Mirror
You surely know that the retail price has to be rather higher than the wholesale price in order for the retailer to break even.
Uh, yes, I run a record label. I deal with distributors.
My point was, I sell vinyl, which is generally more expensive than CDs to manufacture. And I can sell my vinyl to distributors, who sell to stores. I can sell a vinyl single for $2.25 wholesale and make a small profit. And I'm only doing it in the 1000s, not the 10,000s or 100,000s like the big labels are, so my per unit costs are WAY higher than theirs.
Thus, your comment that "the production and distribution cost of singles is just too expensive" is a bit off, I think. In my experience marketing and selling singles, you can definitely make money at it.
Surely an album with one good song would sell far fewer copies than a single? Do people really buy many albums like that?
Which would _you_ rather sell : 1,000,000 $5 singles or 500,000 $15 albums? That's $5 million versus $7.5 million, and albums have a greater profit margin than singles right now, since they are heavily over-priced (as evidenced by labels like Dischord who can sell their CDs for $10, even with high production values, good packaging and advertisements in prominent music magazines).
Look at it this way. A single or a cd has the same distribution, marketing and pressing costs. A album does have more recording costs, but that's negligable if you're selling 100,000s of copies.
Like I said, Vanilla Ice's label pulled his single when his song got big, so they could sell copies of the $15 cd instead of the $5 single. They figured this out, and this was the beginning of the end of the single in the US.
This worked great in the short term, except that customers started to get disillusioned by the fact that labels were still basically making singles, just charging more for them.
I sell vinyl singles, and can wholesale them for $2.25 and make a small profit. (And this is with a print run of just 1000.) I think they could definitely make money of singles if they wanted - the issue is if you have a full-length with only one good song, you do not want to be selling that song on a single.
Email sent - thanks for taking the time.
True, but losses on one band's record can be deducted from the tax owed on a money-maker.
I do agree they should sell individual songs, or at least singles. If I recall, the single market died around the time Vanilla Ice's label pulled the Ice Ice Baby single from the shelves, because they realized that people would buy the full album just for that song. I miss singles.
Do YOU know anything about the recording industry?
Well, I run a small record label, have been promoting concerts for several years and know many people in bands (some of them signed, some of them not). I also worked in radio for five years. So I know a _bit_ about it. More than most people, but certainly less than many.
All I can say is take the time to drop the numbers into a spreadsheet and see for yourself. Numbers are the only thing that matters.
Okay, let's look at the numbers. The only INCOME is as follows:
Advance $250,000
Tour Gross $50,000
Merch Advance $20,000
Publishing Advance $20,000
Add that up, that is $340,000. If you _only_ take the $150,000 recording cost out, you get $190,000. Divide that by five members and you get $38,000, already lower than your $50K figure - without manager and lawyer fees, the cost of the tour, or any other expenses.
I'm really curious how you got your figure, since there is only $340,000 of positive income listed in his numbers. Please explain it. I'm thinking you must be counting something as income that is not.
Remeber, all money given to the band at the outset is recoupable by the label. This means, for that $250,000 advance, the band must record an album, deliver it to the label AND they then still owe that money to the label. It's the same deal for the merch advance and the publishing advance. That money is owed to the merch company and the publisher.
Now, they did actually make a bit more than the $4 figure, because this hypothetical band would have taken chunks of the various advances to live off off - but that doesn't change the fact that they owe that money. It's not free and clear income, like a normal person makes from a job- it's like living off a credit card, eventually you have to pay it back (or break up the band).
Games aren't popular? You do know that GT : Vice City sold more copies in just DECEMBER '02 than all but the top 2 CDs released that year?
That's right : in one month, it outsold all but the top 2 music cds of the year - something like 4 million copies.
That's pretty popular sounding to me.
Imagine say..... TimeWarner buying PowerMacs, installing a lot of great production software and building quality, low-cost "studios" for artists they sign. That'd be a hell of a lot less expensive than plunking down $250K-$1M for studio time. All they'd have to do is get the band's best cut, send it to the techs to clean it up and press it. They could probably save as much as $800K per record or maybe even more doing that.
The problem with this idea is that, under the current system, the recording costs come out of the band's share of income from the record. In fact, all expenses do, including marketing. Thus, the label has no incentive to save money, since their cut is unchanged.
He uses accounting tricks to make it look like the band members didn't make anything when in fact, according to his own numbers, they made about $50,000 each assuming there were 5 band members.
Um, can you read? Do you know anything about the recording industry? A $250,000 advance, _minus_ manager's fee, legal fees, recording budget, etc...
When a label advances you money for an album, they expect you to deliver them a finished album for that money. It's not take-home pay. If they could have recorded their album for $0 and not had a manager or lawyer to pay, they'd have made $50k each...
So? A: I'm not Japanese, B: a product which only does well in one country is not really a stand-out, C: It failed in America, which was the beginning of the demise of SEGA as a hardware company.
What was your point again?
Again, if the company releases their software on a different platform, that's not really emulation, is it... It's recompiling or rewriting software to work on a different platform.
The original poster, which might be you, said that Nintendo declared that software that emulates games has no legal purpose.
But if the company who made the game rereleases the game on a different format, that's obviously not what they were talking about.
Anyone who thinks it is is either a pedant or a jackass, or both.
Nintendo on the other hand chooses to screw it's repeat customers. I had a Nintendo, then a SNES, then a N64 but I stopped there. I spent a lot of money on N64 games and I still play them on my N64 system but I can't play them on the new hardware
C'mon, you are over-reacting a bit. I mean, the old hardware was cartridge based -would you really expect them to include a cartridge hookup on the GC, when they have switched to discs?
Besides, the PS2 is the first home console since the early days to be backwards-compatible (I'm pretty sure some of the Atari consoles had this feature, and the GameBoy line has always had it), isn't it? So it's not like Nintendo was on some greedy kick to not be backwards-compatible.
I would bet the GC2 will play GC games. If it doesn't, Nintendo is making a big mistake. Actually, I imagine this will be a standard feature on home consoles from now on.
screw the conglomerates
So who manufactured the semiconductors in your computer again?
Uh, except for the fact that they are the copyright holder and can do with they want with the game.
Uh, I could certainly imagine a videogame market without a SEGA console. Only two of their consoles have been stand-outs (Genesis & Dreamcast).
Uh, except that the companies that put out the special interest records (Rhino, Folkways) ARE NOT the same companies that put out the crappy pop music...
The major labels have their heads so far up there ass that they drop musicians like Paul Westerberg because his records "only" sell 200,000 copies.
To me, that's crazy. Why drop an artist who consistantly sells hundreds of thousands of copies of their releases? The answer is that the big companies are so bloated that they actually can't make money on a release that "small".
However, this doesn't mean that no one can. A smaller, indie label (doghouse? vagrant? I can't recall) snapped Mr. Westerberg up and made a nice sum of money releasing his latest record, proving that you can release records by smaller artists and do very well if, and this is key, you run your business correctly.
I read an interview with Westerberg where he said he was very happy he got dropped because he manages to sell about the same amount of records with a lower marketing budget and way more royalties for him.
I run a small record label. I mostly do vinyl, but have two CD releases in the works. Both will be runs of 1000, with full color packaging, jewel cases, etc. These are professionaly duplicated CDs, not CD-Rs. The cost to me? About $2.50 per CD, with shipping included.
I'm not factoring recording costs in here, but if you are a major label and making 500,000 cds of a release, you can factor in a $1 million recording budget and still get a cost of less than $5. per piece.
Then you have to take into account that if they make 500,000 copies, the physical costs will be much less than the $2.50 I'm paying for only 1000 copies.
Any way you look at it, CDs are overpriced.
Where do the stores get the money to pay for these things?
Good point... except that stores generally make a dollar or so off of a CD. It might be more at chain stores, but the CD store my friend works at marks up their products by about a buck (and their prices are pretty high).
And you only ever listen to an album once? No wonder you think they're overpriced.
How many times do you exclusively listen to an album, without doing anything else? I rarely do this, music is something I put on while I'm working, or reading, etc...
Supporting local businesses is cronyism?
I bet most cities in Texas use Dell computers, too - is that cronyism by your definition, or supporting local industry?
Scary! Uh, not that I ever do that... ;)
Are you listening to what the AC is saying?
AC? I've been debating with someone that has UID # 589068, not an AC. Check their username.
Filters are easy to bypass, and nobody will want a system that punts e-mails because somebody happens to trip one of those filters.
As I have repeatedly stated, I get a spam penetration rate of about 0.03%. I get a false positive rate that is comparable to that, and I wouldn't even get that if I bothered to set up my whitelist for everyone I know. This is acceptable to me. I get FAR more spam by snail mail than I get in my email inbox. When I had local phone service, I got way more telemarketing calls than I currently get spam in my inbox.
For me, spam is basically a nonissue.
It's like the RIAA's attempts to prevent CDs from playing in computers. Because of the nature of music, there's no way to restrict it without making it unusuable to their customers. Email is exactly the same way because it is fundamentally flawed.
My counter to this is that filters are working for me, and working great. You and user # 589068 _say_ that they can't work in the end, but that's completely your opinion. All I know is they work GREAT right now, and this implies to me that they have a good chance of working great in the future.
You should listen to the guy, he knows what he's talking about.
That's a little fishy, first you call him an AC even though he is not, then you know him?
He's helped me set up my e-mail to be spam free. The only way a spam can get through is if somebody hijacks the computer of one of my friends.
You needed someone to help you set up a whitelist? Why should I listen to _you_ if you couldn't even accomplish a simple task like that on your own?
Again, as far as I am concerned, my computer is spam free. If they need to send me 300 spams for ONE to get through, I'm fine with that. If I could set up a system to automatically shred 299 out of 300 credit card offers that come to my house, I'd jump for joy!
I've already ditched e-mail. I use Instant Messaging to talk to people I want to talk to because I'm sick of SPAM. Everybody else is quite happy with IM too.
Why don't you just ditch the spam? I get a spam in my inbox maybe once a week, and this is an account where I have two or three domains that have catchall emails that forward to it. I also have all my business email for two different business forwarded there (and those email addresses are on the web sites for those businesses, with a mailto:, with no subterfuge at all). Spam is no problem for me whatsoever.
Heh, and you think that's not going to filter everybody else in the world?
Why would it? If a spammer sends an email with a link to cheapviagra.com, blocking emails that link to cheapviagra.com shouldn't be a problem. Ditto for phone numbers. Sure spammers could stir up trouble by sending out spam that wasn't for their products but again, this raises their costs and makes it a harder business to be in.
You sending your mom a link to your website shouldn't be an issue, since it's not hitting 100,000 mailservers all at once.
Wrong. The Spammers will win. People won't give up the ability to get messages from their loved ones, even if it means having to put up with SPAM.
Duh, if all you want is messages from loved ones, sure, use a whitelist. There is no way a spammer can send you spam if you are using a whitelist _and_ not accepting mail from people you don't know. However, if you are trying to recieve business emails from people you don't know, then you can't really do this.
Filters are not the solution. Period. You cannot make a good enough filter to block all spam.
They work great for me. 0.3% of spam making it through is acceptable to me.
IM, on the other hand, uses the white list and permission request setup that I described, and it's been working for years. I've had the same ICQ number since 97, and I get 0 spam.
Sure, but as I said above, this doesn't work for everyone. For my various businesses, I need to receive emails from strangers who I have never communicated with before.
Uh, no. When they see a dip in sales, they'll start looking into how spam filters work and how to get around them.
This costs money. Thus making it less attractive to spam.
And since email is such an open system, it won't be hard to do. SPAMvertisers are very creative.
It also won't be very hard to block their efforts. The spam filters will continue to get better, and so will the spammers. But the cost of the spammer's development time will either cut into their profits, or make the spam more expensive. Either way makes it a less appealing business to be in, and raises the barrier of entry so that less "creative" spammers will go out of business... which is less spam, again.
I really wasn't referring to legality here.
Unless you make it illegal, the current email network we have won't be abandoned for a long time. No one is going to adopt a totally new, less open email system where they can't interact with the HUGE installed base of people who use email.
Think about it, would you? Would you stop using email in favor of a closed system that you can't recieve spam on, but no one uses?
All filtering will do is make them smarter. The end result will be nobody using e-mail at all.
I disagree. Spammers can't win the filter war because they can't get away from one thing : they must -no matter how well they disguise their headers, subject or even body text- mention a product and offer a link or phone number. Thus, their mail can be filtered.
Sure, they could get around this by not mentioning a product, or linking to a site or givinga phone number, but if they don't mention a product and give a way for the spamee to go and buy it, why would the advertiser pay them? It is advertising after all.
Also, if the filters get good enough at detecting the marketing text that spammers use, forcing them to insert more and more random text in the body of their messages, eventually the spams will be so incomprehensible, they won't work.
To me, it seems to be a fight the spammers cannot win.
For now, the best solution is do implement filters on your servers and provide users with white-list capability. Works great for me : only about 0.3% of spams get into my inbox.
Like criminals won't figure a way to block the signal?