The record companies don't subsidize musicians anymore. Generally all of the costs associated with recording, promoting etc are a loan to the musician
That "loan" is money they will never see again if the band fails, because it's a loan that isn't secured by anything other than the recording contract, which becomes pretty much worthless if the band does not do well enough for a second album to be worthwhile.
Cable costs money, and generally gives you lower quality than HDTV broadcasts.
House, Lost, HDTV sports, and pretty much everything on the PBS Digital broadcast is fantastic entertainment, looks great on my massive projector screen, and free free free!
Anything else I want to watch (Sopranos, etc.) I can see on DVD via NetFlix, along with my movie rentals.
So why would I even want to consider paying for a cable subscription?
At this point, yes... but why would anybody even consider buying a non-HD TV for their main living room set these days? Any old-format TV is going to need a separate tuner in a couple years to even get over-the-air broadcasts.
So essentially the music industry has become a big middle man. They don't make music, they promote and distribute it. But now they are no longer needed for distribution. The method of production has gotten cheaper and anyone with a PC can do it. They arguably don't need to promote it either - with the internet it's possible to disseminate information for free - or almost.
This comes down to the greed and short-sightedness of the musican's in every major record label's stable.
Of all the bands out there, only a tiny fraction of the very most easy-to-sell acts get offered record deals. Of those, only a small fraction actually make money, for either the label or the artist.
But every once in a while, some blonde bimbo and her producer just happen to tap into the pop zeitgeist of their moment, and make billions, so everybody wants to try to repeat that feat.
The attempt to generate a superstar act costs lots and lots of money; far more money than any young musical performer would ever be able to spend on their own, so the only way to chase "the dream" is to work with the record labels, who have both the resources and connections that the new artist lacks.
The reason the labels feel they have a right to all those profits is because they paid for it, by bankrolling failed acts by the dozens all year long. The hits subsidize the misses.
As a new, unknown artist, can you make it on your own without these labels? Maybe... if there's something special enough about your act to generate word-of-mouth hype, and if you happen to be very lucky, and if your fifteen minutes of fame doesn't get drowned out by the hype of the new season of American Idol... but there are not many examples of people making much of a living off their art that way.
So the artists who are good enough to sign with labels do so, and the labels remain the most likely source of music with the potential of mass appeal, because the only performers not signed with them are the ones who were either judged to be not good enough, or the ones who have already established a fan base through previous big-label contracts.
If someone discovered a way to effortless create / duplicate food,
Already exists.
Step 1. Bury seed corn in the ground.
Step 2. Wait a few months.
It doesn't yield as much food as if you tend to it all year, but it works.
More to the point, food producers don't have any claim of intellectual property over the food they sell. If you can find a cheaper way to produce it, they must either adopt your method or go bankrupt. Even if there ever was a patent on soybeans, it ran out about 6,000 years ago.
I so very much would like for you to be right about what you just said. What a beautiful world that would be to live in...
My observations of human behavior in my short time on this Earth has me very skeptical about your faith in the goodness and honesty of humanity.
In any case, it would be an uphill battle to convince any corporate boardroom that the best way to greater profits is to open the floodgates of digital piracy as wide as possible, and rely upon the kindness of strangers to actually ever get paid for anything.
So... they should just tell their shareholders that they've decided to give up on all that money, because "Digital Vomit" on Slashdot says he doesn't need them anymore?
Consider this example. Ford has just "invented" the assembly line. It's now possible to build cars extremely cheaply. In other words, the cost or reproduction has gone down by an order of magnitude. Let's say there had been car-makers before that, but they made custom cars to order, one at a time. They would see this sudden new method of production as a threat, and try to artificially maintain inflated prices. Would they be justified in shutting Ford down?
If Henry Ford was making duplicates of their car designs before the patents ran out, then yes. They would be justified in shutting him down.
Now, you are welcome to make the case that copyright on all things (including music) is too long. I would be 100% in favor of cutting it in half or even more.
But the problem with all business models that rely on copyright today is that no no longer need a professional production company to make duplicates of somebody else's piano rolls. Technology has made it so easy to copy and distribute all media, that the single biggest barrier to duplicating works you don't own right to has pretty much vanished entirely. This has provoked media industries to look for ways to erect other barriers.
Let's put it another way. Imagine you've been made the V.P. in charge of the Sony Music division. People are copying your music all over the place, which may or may not be related to the fact that sales are lackluster at best. If you can't improve profits from music sales, you're fired. What are you going to do about AllofMP3.com practically giving away your entire catalog without paying you one cent? What are you going to to about all the P2P swapping going on? What are your ideas?
Oh... and if you are thinking of simply taking the division in a whole other direction from trying to make money off the sale of pre-recorded music, you're also fired. Sales may be trending down, but it's still a multi-million dollar cash cow which you are not permitted to slaughter.
So there's your parameters. Now, come up with a strategy that's better than trying to lock down the music with DRM. (And I don't mean better from the consumer's perspective. How happy people are is irrelevant. I mean better from the revenue-generation perspective, because that's the only one the board cares about. It's the only one the board even has a right to care about.)
If I meet the janitor who swept the cleanroom at a Sony transistor factory, I'd pester him about this issue. I want every person in every branch of that vast company to utterly detest the people behind rootkit for making their life so miserable. I want the legend to spread far and wide to boardrooms everywhere about how collosally bad for company morale thier decision turned out to be. I want those behind the rootkit to find themselves unable to find work in the tech industry for the rest of their lives.
You didn't say E2 was "crappy", you said it was one of the worst movies ever made.
And I stand by that statement. Your attempt to site examples of worse films utterly failed. Russ Meyer!? His movies weren't very good, but I would cheerfully sit through every moment of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" again before even considering subjecting myself to a second viewing of even the highlights of Clones.
I can't imagine spending more than $50 to copy many items, a shirt might be less than a few dollars. On the other hand, copying a CD costs about $500 ($450 for the PC, $40 for the CD-R drive, $10 for the pack of CDs).
That's got to be just about the most stupid analysis I've ever seen in my life.
Cost of producing six billion shirts at $50 a pop: $300,000,000.00
Cost of producing six billion music tracks via torrents: $450.99
($450.00 for the PC plus $0.99 for the track download from the iTunes Music store. If you can find a server to start the torrents from, your bandwidth cost can be $0, because you can just use the free Wi-Fi at a library or coffee shop.)
I kind of enjoyed Hurcules in New York. Ditto the Russ Meyer films, which are so bad they are good.
But you really established yourself as an adversary when you chose to disrespect the singing cowboy movies. For shame!
Attack of the Clones was not "so bad it's good." It went past merely bad, past unintentionally campy, past shockingly and amusingly woeful, and into "please erase my memory of ever having seen it" territory. It was not just poorly made, it was painfully dull at every turn. I got more pleasent experiences out of my root canal surgery, and the surgery seemed to go by a whole lot quicker.
This has nothing to do with "betrayal" of some great franchise. For most of the people who adored the original trillogy, that halo effect had already been darkened by the first prequel. If no other "Star Wars" movie had ever been made, I would have hated Episode II every bit as much. It was just flat-out crappy.
When you buy clothes from a department store, the tag is removed and you are free to wear alter, and lend out the clothing however you see fit.
That's because their shirt can't instantly become six billion more shirts, which you can give away for free (or sell for next to nothing, like AllofMP3.com does) and take away any reason for anybody else to buy one from them.
Selling recorded music is a multi-million dollar industry, the owners of which surely don't want to just give up, just because technology has made it fantastically easy to rip them off.
If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music. (And no bullshit answers about giving it away and making their money off concerts and t-shirt sales. Suggest a solution which doesn't involve simply giving up all that sales revenue.) If you can't come up with anything better than what's out there now, why would you be surprised that they can't either, and are desperately experimenting with so many bad ideas?
I didn't mind the pod race. It seemed to me like a (mostly failed) attempt of re-capturing the feel of the trench raid in Star Wars and the speeder bikes in Jedi.
That said, a small-aircraft race was done vastly better in the Japanese anime series "Last Exile." I believe the race in question appears around episode 5 or so, and is every bit the spectacle that Lucas wishes he made when he filmed the pod race.
There's no way it can be the worst Star Wars related thing out there (currently a tie between the Christmas Special and Episode I)
Those would be tied for second-worst. A distant second, at that.
The Christmas special amused small children and built anticipation for the next "real" Star Wars product. Episode I had the fight with Darth Maul. While neither had many other redeeming qualities, they at least had that much going for them.
"Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" was not only the worst Star Wars related thing ever made, it's one of the worst movies of all time, sci-fi or otherwise.
Not only is it funny, but I really hope it gets modded high enough that it gets asked. Every last PR shill that puts themselves out as a face for Sony should get pissed-off rootkit questions thrown at them.
If a Sony rep cold-called me trying to sell me toner cartriges, I'd still antagonize them over this issue. The whole company should be made to suffer until they come around to realize what a huge mistake it was to even think of fucking with other people's home computers. Solidarity, brother!:)
I don't see why illustrated stories by anyone shouldn't be called "comics". Why do we need a loanword when we already have a perfectly good word?
Because comics from Japan are popular enough that they now occupy more space at my local bookstore than their American counterparts, and "manga" is faster to say than "Japanese comic-book trade paperbacks."
Also, if you are going to make it Available to OS X, will Apple owners be forced to play in a segregated "Mac Ghetto", as they were in the Macintosh port of EverQuest, or will you do it right this time, and let PC and Mac owners game together on the same servers?
Because they are called "manga" in Japan, so when we import them, we continue to call them "manga" to distinguish them from American comics.
Two key differences which are directly related to the fact that manga is a product of Japan:
1. Manga are printed right-to-left (unless an importer reversed it before reprinting it), with the original text (usually) written mainly in vertical-aligned hirgana and katakana. American comics are almost always left-to-right, since the only writing system we are used to flows that way.
2. Manga is written by Japanese artists, and therefore tends to contain a lot of cultural references, expressions, and "short-hand" art which westerners may not be familiar with. (For example, folk wisdom in Japan has it that stress or sexual arousal can cause nose-bleeds, so a drop of blood from the nose is often a visual queue of a young person's mental state.) American comics are written by Americans, and are rife with western pop culture influences, as a quick flip-though of a typical issue of Spider-man will demponstrate.
Or, that some people will stop listening to MP3's when they notice the battery is only about half-way down, so they can continue to receive calls, which means their MP3 phone is not really much of an MP3 phone anymore until they get a chance to charge it again.
Slashdot Mirror
The record companies don't subsidize musicians anymore. Generally all of the costs associated with recording, promoting etc are a loan to the musician
That "loan" is money they will never see again if the band fails, because it's a loan that isn't secured by anything other than the recording contract, which becomes pretty much worthless if the band does not do well enough for a second album to be worthwhile.
Cable costs money, and generally gives you lower quality than HDTV broadcasts.
House, Lost, HDTV sports, and pretty much everything on the PBS Digital broadcast is fantastic entertainment, looks great on my massive projector screen, and free free free!
Anything else I want to watch (Sopranos, etc.) I can see on DVD via NetFlix, along with my movie rentals.
So why would I even want to consider paying for a cable subscription?
Most people don't even have HDTVs
At this point, yes... but why would anybody even consider buying a non-HD TV for their main living room set these days? Any old-format TV is going to need a separate tuner in a couple years to even get over-the-air broadcasts.
Seen it.
Several times.
I could not endure a second viewing of Clones, though.
'Nuff said.
So essentially the music industry has become a big middle man. They don't make music, they promote and distribute it. But now they are no longer needed for distribution. The method of production has gotten cheaper and anyone with a PC can do it. They arguably don't need to promote it either - with the internet it's possible to disseminate information for free - or almost.
This comes down to the greed and short-sightedness of the musican's in every major record label's stable.
Of all the bands out there, only a tiny fraction of the very most easy-to-sell acts get offered record deals. Of those, only a small fraction actually make money, for either the label or the artist.
But every once in a while, some blonde bimbo and her producer just happen to tap into the pop zeitgeist of their moment, and make billions, so everybody wants to try to repeat that feat.
The attempt to generate a superstar act costs lots and lots of money; far more money than any young musical performer would ever be able to spend on their own, so the only way to chase "the dream" is to work with the record labels, who have both the resources and connections that the new artist lacks.
The reason the labels feel they have a right to all those profits is because they paid for it, by bankrolling failed acts by the dozens all year long. The hits subsidize the misses.
As a new, unknown artist, can you make it on your own without these labels? Maybe... if there's something special enough about your act to generate word-of-mouth hype, and if you happen to be very lucky, and if your fifteen minutes of fame doesn't get drowned out by the hype of the new season of American Idol... but there are not many examples of people making much of a living off their art that way.
So the artists who are good enough to sign with labels do so, and the labels remain the most likely source of music with the potential of mass appeal, because the only performers not signed with them are the ones who were either judged to be not good enough, or the ones who have already established a fan base through previous big-label contracts.
If someone discovered a way to effortless create / duplicate food,
Already exists.
Step 1. Bury seed corn in the ground.
Step 2. Wait a few months.
It doesn't yield as much food as if you tend to it all year, but it works.
More to the point, food producers don't have any claim of intellectual property over the food they sell. If you can find a cheaper way to produce it, they must either adopt your method or go bankrupt. Even if there ever was a patent on soybeans, it ran out about 6,000 years ago.
I so very much would like for you to be right about what you just said. What a beautiful world that would be to live in...
My observations of human behavior in my short time on this Earth has me very skeptical about your faith in the goodness and honesty of humanity.
In any case, it would be an uphill battle to convince any corporate boardroom that the best way to greater profits is to open the floodgates of digital piracy as wide as possible, and rely upon the kindness of strangers to actually ever get paid for anything.
So... they should just tell their shareholders that they've decided to give up on all that money, because "Digital Vomit" on Slashdot says he doesn't need them anymore?
Consider this example. Ford has just "invented" the assembly line. It's now possible to build cars extremely cheaply. In other words, the cost or reproduction has gone down by an order of magnitude. Let's say there had been car-makers before that, but they made custom cars to order, one at a time. They would see this sudden new method of production as a threat, and try to artificially maintain inflated prices. Would they be justified in shutting Ford down?
If Henry Ford was making duplicates of their car designs before the patents ran out, then yes. They would be justified in shutting him down.
Now, you are welcome to make the case that copyright on all things (including music) is too long. I would be 100% in favor of cutting it in half or even more.
But the problem with all business models that rely on copyright today is that no no longer need a professional production company to make duplicates of somebody else's piano rolls. Technology has made it so easy to copy and distribute all media, that the single biggest barrier to duplicating works you don't own right to has pretty much vanished entirely. This has provoked media industries to look for ways to erect other barriers.
Let's put it another way. Imagine you've been made the V.P. in charge of the Sony Music division. People are copying your music all over the place, which may or may not be related to the fact that sales are lackluster at best. If you can't improve profits from music sales, you're fired. What are you going to do about AllofMP3.com practically giving away your entire catalog without paying you one cent? What are you going to to about all the P2P swapping going on? What are your ideas?
Oh... and if you are thinking of simply taking the division in a whole other direction from trying to make money off the sale of pre-recorded music, you're also fired. Sales may be trending down, but it's still a multi-million dollar cash cow which you are not permitted to slaughter.
So there's your parameters. Now, come up with a strategy that's better than trying to lock down the music with DRM. (And I don't mean better from the consumer's perspective. How happy people are is irrelevant. I mean better from the revenue-generation perspective, because that's the only one the board cares about. It's the only one the board even has a right to care about.)
Slashdot math rules!
50 * 6 billion = 300 million
A foolish typo, yet your correction makes my point 1000 times as emphatic, so I don't feel so bad.
Congratulations! You have found out that converged devices are a trade-off.
More accurately, I have explained the trade-off. Many people on this thread didn't seem to grok it at all.
Yes, but the antagonism is fun.
;)
If I meet the janitor who swept the cleanroom at a Sony transistor factory, I'd pester him about this issue. I want every person in every branch of that vast company to utterly detest the people behind rootkit for making their life so miserable. I want the legend to spread far and wide to boardrooms everywhere about how collosally bad for company morale thier decision turned out to be. I want those behind the rootkit to find themselves unable to find work in the tech industry for the rest of their lives.
That's not too much to ask, is it?
Don't forget the giant tick-cows in Episode II.
Ugh. I almost managed to do so. Thanks for nothing!
You didn't say E2 was "crappy", you said it was one of the worst movies ever made.
And I stand by that statement. Your attempt to site examples of worse films utterly failed. Russ Meyer!? His movies weren't very good, but I would cheerfully sit through every moment of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" again before even considering subjecting myself to a second viewing of even the highlights of Clones.
I can't imagine spending more than $50 to copy many items, a shirt might be less than a few dollars. On the other hand, copying a CD costs about $500 ($450 for the PC, $40 for the CD-R drive, $10 for the pack of CDs).
That's got to be just about the most stupid analysis I've ever seen in my life.
Cost of producing six billion shirts at $50 a pop: $300,000,000.00
Cost of producing six billion music tracks via torrents: $450.99
($450.00 for the PC plus $0.99 for the track download from the iTunes Music store. If you can find a server to start the torrents from, your bandwidth cost can be $0, because you can just use the free Wi-Fi at a library or coffee shop.)
I kind of enjoyed Hurcules in New York. Ditto the Russ Meyer films, which are so bad they are good.
But you really established yourself as an adversary when you chose to disrespect the singing cowboy movies. For shame!
Attack of the Clones was not "so bad it's good." It went past merely bad, past unintentionally campy, past shockingly and amusingly woeful, and into "please erase my memory of ever having seen it" territory. It was not just poorly made, it was painfully dull at every turn. I got more pleasent experiences out of my root canal surgery, and the surgery seemed to go by a whole lot quicker.
This has nothing to do with "betrayal" of some great franchise. For most of the people who adored the original trillogy, that halo effect had already been darkened by the first prequel. If no other "Star Wars" movie had ever been made, I would have hated Episode II every bit as much. It was just flat-out crappy.
When you buy clothes from a department store, the tag is removed and you are free to wear alter, and lend out the clothing however you see fit.
That's because their shirt can't instantly become six billion more shirts, which you can give away for free (or sell for next to nothing, like AllofMP3.com does) and take away any reason for anybody else to buy one from them.
Selling recorded music is a multi-million dollar industry, the owners of which surely don't want to just give up, just because technology has made it fantastically easy to rip them off.
If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music. (And no bullshit answers about giving it away and making their money off concerts and t-shirt sales. Suggest a solution which doesn't involve simply giving up all that sales revenue.) If you can't come up with anything better than what's out there now, why would you be surprised that they can't either, and are desperately experimenting with so many bad ideas?
I didn't mind the pod race. It seemed to me like a (mostly failed) attempt of re-capturing the feel of the trench raid in Star Wars and the speeder bikes in Jedi.
That said, a small-aircraft race was done vastly better in the Japanese anime series "Last Exile." I believe the race in question appears around episode 5 or so, and is every bit the spectacle that Lucas wishes he made when he filmed the pod race.
There's no way it can be the worst Star Wars related thing out there (currently a tie between the Christmas Special and Episode I)
Those would be tied for second-worst. A distant second, at that.
The Christmas special amused small children and built anticipation for the next "real" Star Wars product. Episode I had the fight with Darth Maul. While neither had many other redeeming qualities, they at least had that much going for them.
"Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" was not only the worst Star Wars related thing ever made, it's one of the worst movies of all time, sci-fi or otherwise.
Not only is it funny, but I really hope it gets modded high enough that it gets asked. Every last PR shill that puts themselves out as a face for Sony should get pissed-off rootkit questions thrown at them.
:)
If a Sony rep cold-called me trying to sell me toner cartriges, I'd still antagonize them over this issue. The whole company should be made to suffer until they come around to realize what a huge mistake it was to even think of fucking with other people's home computers. Solidarity, brother!
I don't see why illustrated stories by anyone shouldn't be called "comics". Why do we need a loanword when we already have a perfectly good word?
Because comics from Japan are popular enough that they now occupy more space at my local bookstore than their American counterparts, and "manga" is faster to say than "Japanese comic-book trade paperbacks."
Ah, Slashdot. You gotta love it. A place so nerdy, you can get tagged as "flamebait" for arguing over the definition of the word "manga."
Also, if you are going to make it Available to OS X, will Apple owners be forced to play in a segregated "Mac Ghetto", as they were in the Macintosh port of EverQuest, or will you do it right this time, and let PC and Mac owners game together on the same servers?
Because they are called "manga" in Japan, so when we import them, we continue to call them "manga" to distinguish them from American comics.
Two key differences which are directly related to the fact that manga is a product of Japan:
1. Manga are printed right-to-left (unless an importer reversed it before reprinting it), with the original text (usually) written mainly in vertical-aligned hirgana and katakana. American comics are almost always left-to-right, since the only writing system we are used to flows that way.
2. Manga is written by Japanese artists, and therefore tends to contain a lot of cultural references, expressions, and "short-hand" art which westerners may not be familiar with. (For example, folk wisdom in Japan has it that stress or sexual arousal can cause nose-bleeds, so a drop of blood from the nose is often a visual queue of a young person's mental state.) American comics are written by Americans, and are rife with western pop culture influences, as a quick flip-though of a typical issue of Spider-man will demponstrate.
Or, that some people will stop listening to MP3's when they notice the battery is only about half-way down, so they can continue to receive calls, which means their MP3 phone is not really much of an MP3 phone anymore until they get a chance to charge it again.