Most of these "labels" are just vanity imprints like you see in book publishing. The suits give an artist a varying degree of independence in exchange for past success. Also its not just rap groups, its everyone now. Practically every CD you buy from a big group after the first one has some kooky record "label".
IIRC: Grand Royal was part of Capitol. Death Row was part of Interscope
But: No Limit was actually independent, which explains the big lack of air/video play. (It's either that or the fact that everything on it sucks)
First, you're forgetting all the expenses that are still there, like recording, producing, promoting, the video, and the manager, which was a big chunk of the gross.
But more importantly, what is this mythical album that 500,000 people paid $7.00 to download? I'd really like to know.
10 Basic fonts are just what was holding me back from setting up a Linux desktop. Does anyone have time to set up a site where you give away true type fonts for free? That would be a great idea and I've never seen one.
Well one big difference is that PayPal charges you the same fees that CC companies do, or higher (for business accounts). Its something like $0.35 per transaction + 3% I think.
While we obviously aren't anywhere in the ball park of MSFT financially, we do offer similar service (email). These big companies making beneficial use of the hordes of idle lawyers they likely have is to be commended, even by competitors.
Stupid business model, In your opinion. I have no problem scanning the ads of a company that provides me a very valuable service (thinking MapQuest here). Some chode decides he wants to violate the AUP and writes a nifty little program that gives people the map without ads. This program ends up on a popular site and now a significant portion of MapQuest's users are providing no revenue. They eventually convert it to a pay-only service, so the chode referenced now just cost me the use of a valuable service or X dollars a month because HE doesn't like ads.
You are exactly right, it doesn't really matter what the profit _margin_ is* which is why I wasn't talking about the margin. Its the bottom line. Do I care about their costs? No. I don't ask the car manufacturer how much its paying for rubber or steel, do you? If the price is agreeable to me, then I buy it. When I first started buying CDs back in 1987 or so, they cost about $18-20. Now, 15 years later, I'm paying about $15 ($11.88 for most new releases at Newbury Comics). Sounds to me like they are getting cheaper.
Also, can some explain the logic in "Labels screw artists by giving them a small share, so I will pirate the music and make sure the artist gets zero"? If you mail the artist a few bucks for every album you grab off the net, my pardons, but I doubt that is commonplace.
* I'm sure it matters but not as much as total profit
I see this over and over and over again, that CD's are too expensive. So a CD costs a dollar to make, big deal. There are thousands of other products that have low manufacturing costs with extremely high markup to cover product marketing and development, do you complain about all of them? Now I do think the recording industry is fighting the tide here, and that they need some fundamental changes. I'm not going to go off on the whole "function of the label" rant you've likely seen before, but there is a basic reason that CD's cost what they do and its from your first economics class:
So lets say the overall cost of a CD including manufacturing, royalties, all the various channel costs, and promotion is about $5. CDs are now about $15, and I buy about 4 a month, with revenue of $60 and profit of $40. If CDs were $30, I'd probably buy one, revenue is $30, profit is $25, not a good move on the part of the label. Now, if CDs were $7, I'd probably buy a couple extra, but not alot extra because I just don't have time to listen to that many new ones and quite frankly, there are probably not enough good ones to satisfy that level of purchase. Now that the revenue is at $42 and the profit is at $12, someone at the label is going to get fired. Oh, and if it cost $7, you would either a) still say its too expensive or b) find a new reason to justify pirating, so they get nothing from you either way.
Also, if charging $15 is so evil, how come every band I see selling CDs at their shows charges $10-15? Do you yell at them for "exorbitant" markup?
Keep in mind the adage "There's no such thing as bad press" applies only to show business...
If you wanted to market a product, are you going to give money to a company thats in court for what you are paying them to do? I'd be worried that they would receive injunction before they performed the service find some way not to give my marketing budget back.
Spoken like a person who hasn't spent days on end rescuing servers from spam attacks.
A regular DoS attach is illegal, not much debate there. The person doing DoS typically is forging headers or ignoring return information, thus making it clear there is no beneficial aspect to the actions. Spam however is a DoS attack as a side effect (even if that effect is the intent), and a regular DoS attack isn't protected by free speech, so yes it is much much different. Cable companys won't shut someone off if they are spamming because they are paranoid about getting sued by the spammer.
Nobody seems to have a problem with blocking 25 on dialups, the only difference between a dialup and a dsl/cable line is that you can do alot more damage, so there should be even stronger support for blocking it.
The "blocking doesn't solve anything" defense is faulty. I wonder if the same people advocating that are the ones who run open relays and leave the broadcast address open on their routers?
You might say that a spammer can just use another port, and you'd be right except:
1. He can't connect to my mailserver, or AOL's on another port. He's going to have to set up a relay somewhere. 2. That relay is likely going to be a colo which has monitoring and will shut him down very quickly if they see spam.
The short and simple way to put this is the less options you give spammers the easier it is to stop them.
Does it suck that you wouldn't be able to run a mail server? Well kind of, but you could set up a relay through a different port also. And if you aren't spamming the relay you use won't get any problems from the colo company. You may feel as if your leet skillz are being wasted, but remember that the speed limit for a ferrari is the same as a mini.
To someone that obviously understands the problem, thank you!
Let me outline a common spam attack that most people don't think happens:
1. Luser gets a cable modem, fires up his spam-program, and starts blasting out a megabit of mail to a@aol.com, b@aol.com, c@aol.com, etc. 2. He is putting 50 "RCPT TO" addresses on each message, a common limit, and putting a bogus random "@hotpop.com" address in the "MAIL FROM". 3. 99% of the users he is trying at AOL don't exist, so for every message he sends, 49 bounces go to hotpop. 4. Ths user at hotpop doesn't exist, so the connection errors out. 5. Repeat this process 24/7 for weeks on end, because it takes AOL that long to respond to abuse reports.
Now do you think spam is a filtering problem or is it in fact a DoS attack? I think its the latter, and if the users couldn't get fast access to AOL's mail servers from another providers line, then this common problem would not exist. Could he launch the same attack against his own ISP's users? Sure can, but you can be pretty sure that an ISP is going to care a bit more about protecting its own mail servers.
You also might be thinking, hotpop is a mail service provider, this is simply a cost of doing business right? In practice, it is, because it happens all the time. But wait until that little mail server you are so adamant about running on your DSL line has this happen to it...
It is SO frustrating for people to say "well I had trouble w/Tomcat blah blah blah". Listen up people, Tomcat is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION. Simply put, this means they are more concerned with features than with performance/stability/scability. Yes this is a good thing, because it lets us try out the new specs before the real products adopt them. If you don't believe me, look how many "WORKSFORME" resolutions there are in Bugzilla, far too many to justify a real product. Sure its on Jakarta and sure it is fine for developing/testing apps but it is totally unsuitable for a large/medium scale deployment. I refuse to deploy tomcat for anything other than an intranet application. Resin (and others) are rock solid performance demons that blow away pretty much any other comparable dynamic server pages out there (Java and not)
As far as PHP, of course its not going to handle the numbers, its a weak design. If you don't believe me, look at the list of upcoming features in PHP, nearly all of which have been in Java for years.
Actually no, most spammers don't send by open relay any more. This solution is a very poor one.
Re:Google Viewer doesn't work on Opera
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 1
Well google probably writes their stuff to use the standards which Opera does a pretty weak job of compared to Mozilla/IE. Anyways, why is anyone still using Opera? Phoenix is faster, and Mozilla is better...
Now I always consider performance when designing/writing code, but programmers are WAY more expensive than hardware, so eeking out performance can often be a wasted effort. Everyone knows that C will smoke Java in most operations, but having its so hard to manage at the enterprise level that you are much better taking the 50%+ performance hit and writing in a "leaky" language.
Actually, a strong business case for XML is that it IS human readable/editable. With a schema/dtd and a half-decent editing tool, xml can be very nice to work with. The nesting can get a little tough to manage, but overall the clients I've worked with like the fact that someone can get a reasonable idea of the config file without much support documentation.
Why is it that/. constantly posts a considerably higher % of MS's bugs than other software? It seems counterintuitive that a non-MS crowd would care about MS stuff so much. We knows its buggy, we know its unstable and hard to manage, big deal, what is knowing about another exploit or two going to do for us?
You realize that Klez is a client virus right? Mailing abuse@ is only going to piss off the person reading and take time away from dealing with issues they have some control over.
I've heard this sentiment before, but none of those people has signed up for pressplay, which is basically exactly what you just said you wanted to pay 40-60/month, except for 10-18/month.
No I don't work for presslay and I don't subscribe, but then again, I buy CD's...
OK, today is your lucky day because I'm going to save you money at no cost. First, you took one small step down a road to making efficient sites that ends where Zeldman is talking about. So you switched font tags to css, cool. There are a few easy steps that will cut your costs down alot as well.
First, strip out all extra whitespace and blank lines, that knocks your homepage from 37310 bytes down to 32799, not bad for a few sed commands. better yet knock out almost all the newline characters, it shouldn't break anything, now we're down to 30719 bytes. Amazingly we have gotten an 18% drop in 2 minutes, and we haven't even touched the html at all. Now, as an extremely conservative approximation of moving to css layout (i've used this method before and its as close as you can get in a quick and dirty manner), just just remove all of your spacer images and tr tags. We are now down to 22984 bytes, a drop of 38%. You would probably be closer to 50% if you designed it as a gracefully degradable css-layout page, which is a pretty number in my experience.
Another observation, you are using px as your font unit which means that the fonts can't be resized (they can in some browsers but the spec calls for px to be fixed). It takes a little getting used to because of nesting issues, but em's are the way to go. Your css sheet also has a ton of extra whitespace and you haven't combined redundant classes much, that will save you bigtime there.
Hope this gives you (and others) some ideas on how to save a few bucks. Alot of the above stuff can easily be implemented with some sed scripts and be integrated into your publishing process.
One HUGE mistake managers (technical or not) often make is not realizing the difference between a developer and a programmer. Personally I consider myself an excellent developer and a competent programmer. What's the difference you say? Well the programmer lives in the world of code and pops his head up into the real/business world as needed. The developer is just the opposite. Programmers are typically the caffiene-fueled hackers that can bust out elegant/efficient/stable code that developers can only admire. The developer is presented with a problem and very quickly figures out platform/logistical/architecture issues, and can implement the solution (but is better off helping a programmer to do so).
Unfortunately many programmers/developers also don't realize the difference and think they are both. In truth you can't be one without some of the other, but after a few years you will realize which camp you really excel in. I once worked with a large team of only (good) programmers and it was a nightmarish experience because they didn't appreciate the "development" side of the work, leading to a steaming pile of logistical problems and a missed deadline. Conversely, a team of only developers will likely turn out code with great intentions and design but a weaker implementation.
Its not a matter of being better or smarter or more personable or working better in teams because those skills are valuable to both trades. It really boils down to
what you like to do
what you are good at
why you do it
To answer the question at the top, I think the first thing you need to do is find out what you have on your staff already, and then establish what you need and interview with that in mind. Looking for the person who does everything and does it well is likely going to lead to dissapointment.
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Most of these "labels" are just vanity imprints like you see in book publishing. The suits give an artist a varying degree of independence in exchange for past success. Also its not just rap groups, its everyone now. Practically every CD you buy from a big group after the first one has some kooky record "label".
IIRC:
Grand Royal was part of Capitol.
Death Row was part of Interscope
But:
No Limit was actually independent, which explains the big lack of air/video play. (It's either that or the fact that everything on it sucks)
First, you're forgetting all the expenses that are still there, like recording, producing, promoting, the video, and the manager, which was a big chunk of the gross.
But more importantly, what is this mythical album that 500,000 people paid $7.00 to download? I'd really like to know.
10 Basic fonts are just what was holding me back from setting up a Linux desktop. Does anyone have time to set up a site where you give away true type fonts for free? That would be a great idea and I've never seen one.
PayPal has its issues, but from a merchant's point of view, have you ever dealt with credit card companies? I'll stick w/PayPal...
Well one big difference is that PayPal charges you the same fees that CC companies do, or higher (for business accounts). Its something like $0.35 per transaction + 3% I think.
While we obviously aren't anywhere in the ball park of MSFT financially, we do offer similar service (email). These big companies making beneficial use of the hordes of idle lawyers they likely have is to be commended, even by competitors.
This marks a first (that I know of), where /. linked to a page that spawned at least two popups and tried to install Gator
:(
Stupid business model, In your opinion. I have no problem scanning the ads of a company that provides me a very valuable service (thinking MapQuest here). Some chode decides he wants to violate the AUP and writes a nifty little program that gives people the map without ads. This program ends up on a popular site and now a significant portion of MapQuest's users are providing no revenue. They eventually convert it to a pay-only service, so the chode referenced now just cost me the use of a valuable service or X dollars a month because HE doesn't like ads.
Thanks.
Nail on head? Hit.
related old post
You are exactly right, it doesn't really matter what the profit _margin_ is* which is why I wasn't talking about the margin. Its the bottom line. Do I care about their costs? No. I don't ask the car manufacturer how much its paying for rubber or steel, do you? If the price is agreeable to me, then I buy it. When I first started buying CDs back in 1987 or so, they cost about $18-20. Now, 15 years later, I'm paying about $15 ($11.88 for most new releases at Newbury Comics). Sounds to me like they are getting cheaper.
Also, can some explain the logic in "Labels screw artists by giving them a small share, so I will pirate the music and make sure the artist gets zero"? If you mail the artist a few bucks for every album you grab off the net, my pardons, but I doubt that is commonplace.
* I'm sure it matters but not as much as total profit
I see this over and over and over again, that CD's are too expensive. So a CD costs a dollar to make, big deal. There are thousands of other products that have low manufacturing costs with extremely high markup to cover product marketing and development, do you complain about all of them? Now I do think the recording industry is fighting the tide here, and that they need some fundamental changes. I'm not going to go off on the whole "function of the label" rant you've likely seen before, but there is a basic reason that CD's cost what they do and its from your first economics class:
So lets say the overall cost of a CD including manufacturing, royalties, all the various channel costs, and promotion is about $5. CDs are now about $15, and I buy about 4 a month, with revenue of $60 and profit of $40. If CDs were $30, I'd probably buy one, revenue is $30, profit is $25, not a good move on the part of the label. Now, if CDs were $7, I'd probably buy a couple extra, but not alot extra because I just don't have time to listen to that many new ones and quite frankly, there are probably not enough good ones to satisfy that level of purchase. Now that the revenue is at $42 and the profit is at $12, someone at the label is going to get fired. Oh, and if it cost $7, you would either a) still say its too expensive or b) find a new reason to justify pirating, so they get nothing from you either way.
Also, if charging $15 is so evil, how come every band I see selling CDs at their shows charges $10-15? Do you yell at them for "exorbitant" markup?
Keep in mind the adage "There's no such thing as bad press" applies only to show business...
If you wanted to market a product, are you going to give money to a company thats in court for what you are paying them to do? I'd be worried that they would receive injunction before they performed the service find some way not to give my marketing budget back.
Spoken like a person who hasn't spent days on end rescuing servers from spam attacks.
A regular DoS attach is illegal, not much debate there. The person doing DoS typically is forging headers or ignoring return information, thus making it clear there is no beneficial aspect to the actions. Spam however is a DoS attack as a side effect (even if that effect is the intent), and a regular DoS attack isn't protected by free speech, so yes it is much much different. Cable companys won't shut someone off if they are spamming because they are paranoid about getting sued by the spammer.
Nobody seems to have a problem with blocking 25 on dialups, the only difference between a dialup and a dsl/cable line is that you can do alot more damage, so there should be even stronger support for blocking it.
The "blocking doesn't solve anything" defense is faulty. I wonder if the same people advocating that are the ones who run open relays and leave the broadcast address open on their routers?
You might say that a spammer can just use another port, and you'd be right except:
1. He can't connect to my mailserver, or AOL's on another port. He's going to have to set up a relay somewhere.
2. That relay is likely going to be a colo which has monitoring and will shut him down very quickly if they see spam.
The short and simple way to put this is the less options you give spammers the easier it is to stop them.
Does it suck that you wouldn't be able to run a mail server? Well kind of, but you could set up a relay through a different port also. And if you aren't spamming the relay you use won't get any problems from the colo company. You may feel as if your leet skillz are being wasted, but remember that the speed limit for a ferrari is the same as a mini.
To someone that obviously understands the problem, thank you!
Let me outline a common spam attack that most people don't think happens:
1. Luser gets a cable modem, fires up his spam-program, and starts blasting out a megabit of mail to a@aol.com, b@aol.com, c@aol.com, etc.
2. He is putting 50 "RCPT TO" addresses on each message, a common limit, and putting a bogus random "@hotpop.com" address in the "MAIL FROM".
3. 99% of the users he is trying at AOL don't exist, so for every message he sends, 49 bounces go to hotpop.
4. Ths user at hotpop doesn't exist, so the connection errors out.
5. Repeat this process 24/7 for weeks on end, because it takes AOL that long to respond to abuse reports.
Now do you think spam is a filtering problem or is it in fact a DoS attack? I think its the latter, and if the users couldn't get fast access to AOL's mail servers from another providers line, then this common problem would not exist. Could he launch the same attack against his own ISP's users? Sure can, but you can be pretty sure that an ISP is going to care a bit more about protecting its own mail servers.
You also might be thinking, hotpop is a mail service provider, this is simply a cost of doing business right? In practice, it is, because it happens all the time. But wait until that little mail server you are so adamant about running on your DSL line has this happen to it...
It is SO frustrating for people to say "well I had trouble w/Tomcat blah blah blah". Listen up people, Tomcat is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION. Simply put, this means they are more concerned with features than with performance/stability/scability. Yes this is a good thing, because it lets us try out the new specs before the real products adopt them. If you don't believe me, look how many "WORKSFORME" resolutions there are in Bugzilla, far too many to justify a real product. Sure its on Jakarta and sure it is fine for developing/testing apps but it is totally unsuitable for a large/medium scale deployment. I refuse to deploy tomcat for anything other than an intranet application. Resin (and others) are rock solid performance demons that blow away pretty much any other comparable dynamic server pages out there (Java and not)
As far as PHP, of course its not going to handle the numbers, its a weak design. If you don't believe me, look at the list of upcoming features in PHP, nearly all of which have been in Java for years.
Anyone have a guess when we will see high-transfer-rate solid state drives in the $1000/GB range?
Actually no, most spammers don't send by open relay any more. This solution is a very poor one.
Well google probably writes their stuff to use the standards which Opera does a pretty weak job of compared to Mozilla/IE. Anyways, why is anyone still using Opera? Phoenix is faster, and Mozilla is better...
Now I always consider performance when designing/writing code, but programmers are WAY more expensive than hardware, so eeking out performance can often be a wasted effort. Everyone knows that C will smoke Java in most operations, but having its so hard to manage at the enterprise level that you are much better taking the 50%+ performance hit and writing in a "leaky" language.
Actually, a strong business case for XML is that it IS human readable/editable. With a schema/dtd and a half-decent editing tool, xml can be very nice to work with. The nesting can get a little tough to manage, but overall the clients I've worked with like the fact that someone can get a reasonable idea of the config file without much support documentation.
Why is it that /. constantly posts a considerably higher % of MS's bugs than other software? It seems counterintuitive that a non-MS crowd would care about MS stuff so much. We knows its buggy, we know its unstable and hard to manage, big deal, what is knowing about another exploit or two going to do for us?
You realize that Klez is a client virus right? Mailing abuse@ is only going to piss off the person reading and take time away from dealing with issues they have some control over.
I've heard this sentiment before, but none of those people has signed up for pressplay, which is basically exactly what you just said you wanted to pay 40-60/month, except for 10-18/month.
No I don't work for presslay and I don't subscribe, but then again, I buy CD's...
OK, today is your lucky day because I'm going to save you money at no cost. First, you took one small step down a road to making efficient sites that ends where Zeldman is talking about. So you switched font tags to css, cool. There are a few easy steps that will cut your costs down alot as well.
First, strip out all extra whitespace and blank lines, that knocks your homepage from 37310 bytes down to 32799, not bad for a few sed commands. better yet knock out almost all the newline characters, it shouldn't break anything, now we're down to 30719 bytes. Amazingly we have gotten an 18% drop in 2 minutes, and we haven't even touched the html at all. Now, as an extremely conservative approximation of moving to css layout (i've used this method before and its as close as you can get in a quick and dirty manner), just just remove all of your spacer images and tr tags. We are now down to 22984 bytes, a drop of 38%. You would probably be closer to 50% if you designed it as a gracefully degradable css-layout page, which is a pretty number in my experience.
Another observation, you are using px as your font unit which means that the fonts can't be resized (they can in some browsers but the spec calls for px to be fixed). It takes a little getting used to because of nesting issues, but em's are the way to go. Your css sheet also has a ton of extra whitespace and you haven't combined redundant classes much, that will save you bigtime there.
Hope this gives you (and others) some ideas on how to save a few bucks. Alot of the above stuff can easily be implemented with some sed scripts and be integrated into your publishing process.
Unfortunately many programmers/developers also don't realize the difference and think they are both. In truth you can't be one without some of the other, but after a few years you will realize which camp you really excel in. I once worked with a large team of only (good) programmers and it was a nightmarish experience because they didn't appreciate the "development" side of the work, leading to a steaming pile of logistical problems and a missed deadline. Conversely, a team of only developers will likely turn out code with great intentions and design but a weaker implementation.
Its not a matter of being better or smarter or more personable or working better in teams because those skills are valuable to both trades. It really boils down to
To answer the question at the top, I think the first thing you need to do is find out what you have on your staff already, and then establish what you need and interview with that in mind. Looking for the person who does everything and does it well is likely going to lead to dissapointment.