Premises. Hardware. Software. On and off site backup facilities. Electricity. Connectivity. Consumables. Insurance. Maintenance contracts. Travelling expenses. Legal advice.
We're talking about $50K budget, not $50K income. Sure, you can scrape by on less, but every minute you spend dumpster diving for monitors is one minute less you can spend developing.
Well, sure, it's funny because it's true. The Soviet Union managed to persuade a whole bunch of Western scientists and establishment figures to either move there or hand over sensitive information, all on the basis that, sure, they were an oppressive dictatorship, but they were at least well intentioned.
While everybody knew they weren't, just like everybody knows North Korea is up to no good, rocket scientists are almost axiomatically not "everybody". They will indeed go to whoever lets them play with their toys.
Yes, $50K is great if you're living in your parents' basement and they're buying your hardware. God forbid that a development team should have a workplace or pay for their own dev kit or anything.
>>Perhaps we could ask them to give the US a year's grace before they start becoming suicide bombers?
>How about, instead, we see if there are a significant number of suicide bombings after a year?
Nuh huh, no fair changing the rules now. We're in the era of preemptive strikes against potential terrorists, remember?. No more reacting after the fact.
That's the hand we've drawn. Now, are we going to raise or fold?
>You see, many good musicians/bands have to get popular via their own means, grow a fanbase, provide a website that informs new fans about tour dates, provides an email list/group, and offers songs to download.
Many in the sense of John Mayer and Howie Day, who you know about because they broke into the big time rather than burning out? Also you seem to be joining in a different discussion. This thread is about whether you can make a living wage by charging fans an annual fee for access to content, and continue to do that without breaking into the big time and getting signed by an RIAA label.
Can you actually find five (out of the "many") sites that do what I just said (not what you said), or do you want to go and find a more suitable thread for your examples of something completely different?
>Instead of worrying about the number, focus on the model. People who want to use numbers to discredit models, are wasting time. The model works.
My god, you've been frozen in a block of ice since 1998! Wake up man, it's 2003! The.com boom is over! You actually have to have revenue to make profit these days.
Once again, show us five examples of this model working. That's five non-RIAA bands that make living money off of electronic fan clubs. Show us five.
>Obviously you know nothing of the dollar stretching power of musicians.;)
Obviously you know nothing about how quickly people get tired of their musican friends and relatives parasiting off of them when they actually start bringing in money.
>Most groups I know have friends or relatives that do the website.
See above. I'd do a fan site for nothing. Once it's asking for money, I want a cut.
>Server cost is negligible
Everything is free until you have to start caring whether it works or not.
>A band that gigs regularly and has a fairly sizable local following will easily cover bandwidth in one or two nights.
What's a band that's gigging regularly going to put on their fan site that'll attract people who weren't at their gigs? If you're gigging, you're not working on new material. If you're not putting new material on your site, who's going to subscribe?
I take the point that for small bands, this might - might - provide some extra income, but I suspect that it will be beer and guitar strings money, not apartment rent or healthcare money. Heck, go ahead and prove me wrong.
>I used 5000 because I know even a crappy band can sell 5000.
Great! Please let us know which crappy (non-RIAA) band has a web based community that collects $12 a year from 5000 fans. For extra points, find us a solo singer/songwriter/musician/backing vocalist/recorder/editing/web guru.
You have no idea what you're talking about do you? I'm calling you out. Show us the money.
Well said. I get the feeling that all of these schems are concocted by people living off of their parents, who's biggest problem in life is scraping up enough money to buy that '93 Mustang.
It was indeed a perfect example of how vague handwaving and "oh, but of course" economics fall flat on their face when you're not living in your parents' basement.
>If you are hiring a webguy and doing all this stuff, you better be a damn good band.
But if you can't afford a webguy, how do you let people know how good you are. Hmm, that reminds me of something:
You see the problem? Sure, tell yourself that you can set up a fan site for peanuts, but the first time it falls over with an "Out of Cheese" error, you have lost your revenue stream. Better hope your cupboard is full of those noodles.
>I was being very conservative when I came up with the 5000 number, any good musician should be able to do 15-20,000 easy
Which end of you did that number get pulled from? I'd like to know before I touch it. Can you provide examples of several non-RIAA bands that have managed to set up fan sites that have 20,000 subscribers at $12 a year? Note "several", because "any good musician". If it's that easy, let's see the examples.
If, as I suspect, you're pulling all this out of your quivering pick ass, and you're living in the aforementioned basement (or otherwise living off of handouts) and have no idea what the phrase "working musician" actually implies, at least have the good grace to acknowledge it.
Give the music away as marketing, and make money from moichandising and streaming live performances, with breaks for real time chats and viewer requests. That model is proven to make money. You can find thousands of such performances going on right now. Granted, your bands would have to perform naked, but if they put up a "do not disturb" sign on their parent's basement door, that shouldn't be a problem.
>R*AA and MS etc.. are gonna be astroturfing this site, and building their strategies based on some of the posts - methinks it wud be nice not to post any bright ideas.
Yes, it would really suck if they abandoned cartel price gouging and started selling high quality singles at low prices in high bandwidth uncrippled formats. Where would the madness end?
That's enough to pay for hosting and bandwidth plus two salaries, if they like eating Ramin noodles 3 meals a day. That's Web Guy, who'll we'll charitably assume does the recording and editing, plus a drummer. You'd better hope that you can find 5000 people that like drum solos.
Fuck albums. I don't listen to albums, I don't burn albums, I listen to and burn tracks. Don't force me to buy filler. If your artists are producing typical RIAA albums that are three good singles quality tracks and a bunch of filler, that's their problem, not mine.
I can preview RIAA music on the radio, on MTV-a-like channels, and in some music stores before I buy (oh, and I can share it, but let's pretend I only do that after I've previewed it elsewhere). How can I preview yours? Remember, this is per track. Don't give away the best track and then expect me to buy filler. I suggest you give away low bitrate previews, and that you consider them a marketing tool. Go ahead and mangle the intro and outro if you like, fade it out halfway through and then voiceover the URL where you can buy it, heck, I just want to get a feel for the style. Encourage people to share these sample tracks on P2P services. It's marketing, not piracy, and it saves you bandwidth.
Sell in the format that your customers ask for. mp3, wma, ogg vorbis, whatever people ask for, and in the bit rates that they ask for. Don't assume that everyone will want super-high bitrates, I generally downsample to 128 mp3's anyway, as the difference in quality is negligible on a portable device. Storage is cheaper than bandwidth, so store multiple bitrate versions. If you don't want to store every track in multiple formats and multiple bitrates, consider storing at high bitrate in one format then converting and storing new formats on demand. You can almost certainly convert faster than you can upload, so there won't be much of a delay even for the first person that asks for something. You won't have to do it that often, because (cue the denials) there won't be a large intersection between people that will actually pay for music and those that will only accept it in ogg vorbis format.
Don't sell crippled tracks. Don't even countenance it. If you treat us like thieves, you give us little incentive not to act like thieves. Be honest, acknowledge (explicitely) that customers can de facto share the music, but suggest - politely and in a positive way - that we share the demo tracks instead. Thank us for doing so. Thank us for purchasing. Make us feel good about helping your artists out.
Cover art, meh, whatever. I'd prefer lyrics, artist bios, trivia, something to read while I'm listening or downloading, but it wouldn't effect my decision to purchase either way.
Pricing. Well, the market will decide, but I feel that a dollar US is reasonable - for tracks that I've previewed, and which are in the format that I want. More than that, and I won't bother. Force me to buy albums, and I won't bother. Wave any "licensed for US distribution only" crap in my face, and I won't bother.
Does this sound like I'm expecting you to bend over backwards? Yes. Welcome to the cartel run music business. You're competing against a billion dollar marketing machine, so you need to offer sweet deals and rely on happy customers and good word of mouth to make this fly. Good luck.
Partially, but the concept is a clusterfuck to start with. If you need a space taxi, design a space taxi. If you need a cargo hauler, design a cargo hauler. If you need a space lab, design a space lab (and leave it up there). Trying to design one Jack of all trades was always going to produce something that satisfied nobody.
Again, I take the point that this decision was forced on NASA by budget constraints, but they didn't have to put up with it. They could have stuck to their guns and told Congress: "You want to give us the budget to build one vehicle? Then you pick which one."
Sure, hindsight and all, but it didn't really take much foresight to figure out the limitations of the orbitter program. I mean, they could afford a slide rule, right?
It's irrelevant whether I'm prepared to give them a year's grace. What matters (pursuant to this discussion) is what the Iraqi people think, and most particularly what the orphans and bereaved think. Perhaps we could ask them to give the US a year's grace before they start becoming suicide bombers?
>If you really, really think that the common folk of Afghanistan, or Iraq, or the Soviet Union were happy living as they were, then I should be the one weeping for you.
How happy are they now? The schools, hospitals and museums are looted, there's no electricity, thieves roam freely, political protestors are gunned down, the cowards and traitors of the Iraqi "army" are the only people still getting paid, the Ba'ath party still runs the country (nobody else knows how), and they are ruled by a military dictator and a council of puppets.
Yes, it sucked to be ruled by Saddam. But it doesn't seem to suck much less being ruled by Bush. Maybe if we stop massacring anyone who actually tries out this "free speech" thing, it might get better, but I'm betting not. The 3rd infantry, an outfit of pissed off teenagers, is going to start kicking some serious raghead ass soon, and they won't care much what sort. Afghanistan is a clusterfuck as well, with the Taliban resurgent and things pretty much back to the status quo outside of Kabul. The Soviet Union is a different case, as they freed themselves.
But it's all right. You'll never hear any of this on Fox or CNN, so it's not really happening. What's happening is that they're all waving Stars and Stripes and reciting the pledge of allegiance. Yup. Boy howdy.
We spend tens of millions (hard to say, NASA won't disclose) training "astronauts", and then dedicate most of the lifting capacity of the vehicles to keeping them alive while they watch a board and occasionally push a button that could be pushed by the guy that trained them back at mission control. That's a hell of a lot of money per button push.
Buzz Aldrin says it best. He never thought space exploration would come to mean shuttling cargo up to low earth orbit. Let's leave that to the machines, and send men out to do what they can't. Explore and describe the wonders that are out there, so that us lesser men touch them by proxy.
Slashdot Mirror
Premises. Hardware. Software. On and off site backup facilities. Electricity. Connectivity. Consumables. Insurance. Maintenance contracts. Travelling expenses. Legal advice.
We're talking about $50K budget, not $50K income. Sure, you can scrape by on less, but every minute you spend dumpster diving for monitors is one minute less you can spend developing.
Well, sure, it's funny because it's true. The Soviet Union managed to persuade a whole bunch of Western scientists and establishment figures to either move there or hand over sensitive information, all on the basis that, sure, they were an oppressive dictatorship, but they were at least well intentioned.
While everybody knew they weren't, just like everybody knows North Korea is up to no good, rocket scientists are almost axiomatically not "everybody". They will indeed go to whoever lets them play with their toys.
No, not OK, but as neither of us make the rules, I guess we'll both have to wait and see whether we have to wait and see.
The parent post should be modded down.
If we can't retain a degree of levity at times like this, then the terrorists have already won.
Yes, $50K is great if you're living in your parents' basement and they're buying your hardware. God forbid that a development team should have a workplace or pay for their own dev kit or anything.
>>Perhaps we could ask them to give the US a year's grace before they start becoming suicide bombers?
>How about, instead, we see if there are a significant number of suicide bombings after a year?
Nuh huh, no fair changing the rules now. We're in the era of preemptive strikes against potential terrorists, remember?. No more reacting after the fact.
That's the hand we've drawn. Now, are we going to raise or fold?
>You see, many good musicians/bands have to get popular via their own means, grow a fanbase, provide a website that informs new fans about tour dates, provides an email list/group, and offers songs to download.
Many in the sense of John Mayer and Howie Day, who you know about because they broke into the big time rather than burning out? Also you seem to be joining in a different discussion. This thread is about whether you can make a living wage by charging fans an annual fee for access to content, and continue to do that without breaking into the big time and getting signed by an RIAA label.
Can you actually find five (out of the "many") sites that do what I just said (not what you said), or do you want to go and find a more suitable thread for your examples of something completely different?
>Instead of worrying about the number, focus on the model. People who want to use numbers to discredit models, are wasting time. The model works.
My god, you've been frozen in a block of ice since 1998! Wake up man, it's 2003! The .com boom is over! You actually have to have revenue to make profit these days.
Once again, show us five examples of this model working. That's five non-RIAA bands that make living money off of electronic fan clubs. Show us five.
You're comparing selling apples with leasing pictures of oranges.
Quote examples of people doing this right now. If it's so easy, there must be hundreds of bands doing it. Find five.
They can always move to North Korea.
Er, on second thoughts, perhaps we should let them do their rocketeering right here.
>Obviously you know nothing of the dollar stretching power of musicians. ;)
Obviously you know nothing about how quickly people get tired of their musican friends and relatives parasiting off of them when they actually start bringing in money.
>Most groups I know have friends or relatives that do the website.
See above. I'd do a fan site for nothing. Once it's asking for money, I want a cut.
>Server cost is negligible
Everything is free until you have to start caring whether it works or not.
>A band that gigs regularly and has a fairly sizable local following will easily cover bandwidth in one or two nights.
What's a band that's gigging regularly going to put on their fan site that'll attract people who weren't at their gigs? If you're gigging, you're not working on new material. If you're not putting new material on your site, who's going to subscribe?
I take the point that for small bands, this might - might - provide some extra income, but I suspect that it will be beer and guitar strings money, not apartment rent or healthcare money. Heck, go ahead and prove me wrong.
>I used 5000 because I know even a crappy band can sell 5000.
Great! Please let us know which crappy (non-RIAA) band has a web based community that collects $12 a year from 5000 fans. For extra points, find us a solo singer/songwriter/musician/backing vocalist/recorder/editing/web guru.
You have no idea what you're talking about do you? I'm calling you out. Show us the money.
Well said. I get the feeling that all of these schems are concocted by people living off of their parents, who's biggest problem in life is scraping up enough money to buy that '93 Mustang.
> If we can't even stay up there [in LEO] how are we going to stay on the Moon or Mars?
Huh? If we can't stay on the Moon or Mars with all of their resources, how on earth do we expect to be able to stay in the empty near-vacuum of LEO?
LEO is a nice place for satellites and microgravity experiments. It's not the gateway to the solar system.
>It was just an example
It was indeed a perfect example of how vague handwaving and "oh, but of course" economics fall flat on their face when you're not living in your parents' basement.
>If you are hiring a webguy and doing all this stuff, you better be a damn good band.
But if you can't afford a webguy, how do you let people know how good you are. Hmm, that reminds me of something:
Bill: Ted, while I agree that in time our band will be most triumphant, the truth is Wyld Stallyns will never be a super band until we have Eddie Van Halen on guitar.
Ted: Yes Bill, but I do not believe we will get Eddie Van Halen until we have a triumphant video.
Bill: Ted, it's pointless to have a triumphant video before we even have decent instruments.
Ted: Well how can we have decent instruments when we really don't even know how to play.
Bill: That is why we need Eddie Van Halen.
Ted: And that is why we need a triumphant video.
(Pause)
Both: Excellent. (Air Guitar.)
You see the problem? Sure, tell yourself that you can set up a fan site for peanuts, but the first time it falls over with an "Out of Cheese" error, you have lost your revenue stream. Better hope your cupboard is full of those noodles.
>I was being very conservative when I came up with the 5000 number, any good musician should be able to do 15-20,000 easy
Which end of you did that number get pulled from? I'd like to know before I touch it. Can you provide examples of several non-RIAA bands that have managed to set up fan sites that have 20,000 subscribers at $12 a year? Note "several", because "any good musician". If it's that easy, let's see the examples.
If, as I suspect, you're pulling all this out of your quivering pick ass, and you're living in the aforementioned basement (or otherwise living off of handouts) and have no idea what the phrase "working musician" actually implies, at least have the good grace to acknowledge it.
Give the music away as marketing, and make money from moichandising and streaming live performances, with breaks for real time chats and viewer requests. That model is proven to make money. You can find thousands of such performances going on right now. Granted, your bands would have to perform naked, but if they put up a "do not disturb" sign on their parent's basement door, that shouldn't be a problem.
>R*AA and MS etc.. are gonna be astroturfing this site, and building their strategies based on some of the posts - methinks it wud be nice not to post any bright ideas.
Yes, it would really suck if they abandoned cartel price gouging and started selling high quality singles at low prices in high bandwidth uncrippled formats. Where would the madness end?
> First off, kudos for doing whole albums instead of track-by-track. This allows experimentation and breadth of style.
Only if it's marketed as "Buy five good tracks, get five three minute guitar solos free!"
>5000 people paying $12 a year, is decent money
That's enough to pay for hosting and bandwidth plus two salaries, if they like eating Ramin noodles 3 meals a day. That's Web Guy, who'll we'll charitably assume does the recording and editing, plus a drummer. You'd better hope that you can find 5000 people that like drum solos.
Fuck albums. I don't listen to albums, I don't burn albums, I listen to and burn tracks. Don't force me to buy filler. If your artists are producing typical RIAA albums that are three good singles quality tracks and a bunch of filler, that's their problem, not mine.
I can preview RIAA music on the radio, on MTV-a-like channels, and in some music stores before I buy (oh, and I can share it, but let's pretend I only do that after I've previewed it elsewhere). How can I preview yours? Remember, this is per track. Don't give away the best track and then expect me to buy filler. I suggest you give away low bitrate previews, and that you consider them a marketing tool. Go ahead and mangle the intro and outro if you like, fade it out halfway through and then voiceover the URL where you can buy it, heck, I just want to get a feel for the style. Encourage people to share these sample tracks on P2P services. It's marketing, not piracy, and it saves you bandwidth.
Sell in the format that your customers ask for. mp3, wma, ogg vorbis, whatever people ask for, and in the bit rates that they ask for. Don't assume that everyone will want super-high bitrates, I generally downsample to 128 mp3's anyway, as the difference in quality is negligible on a portable device. Storage is cheaper than bandwidth, so store multiple bitrate versions. If you don't want to store every track in multiple formats and multiple bitrates, consider storing at high bitrate in one format then converting and storing new formats on demand. You can almost certainly convert faster than you can upload, so there won't be much of a delay even for the first person that asks for something. You won't have to do it that often, because (cue the denials) there won't be a large intersection between people that will actually pay for music and those that will only accept it in ogg vorbis format.
Don't sell crippled tracks. Don't even countenance it. If you treat us like thieves, you give us little incentive not to act like thieves. Be honest, acknowledge (explicitely) that customers can de facto share the music, but suggest - politely and in a positive way - that we share the demo tracks instead. Thank us for doing so. Thank us for purchasing. Make us feel good about helping your artists out.
Cover art, meh, whatever. I'd prefer lyrics, artist bios, trivia, something to read while I'm listening or downloading, but it wouldn't effect my decision to purchase either way.
Pricing. Well, the market will decide, but I feel that a dollar US is reasonable - for tracks that I've previewed, and which are in the format that I want. More than that, and I won't bother. Force me to buy albums, and I won't bother. Wave any "licensed for US distribution only" crap in my face, and I won't bother.
Does this sound like I'm expecting you to bend over backwards? Yes. Welcome to the cartel run music business. You're competing against a billion dollar marketing machine, so you need to offer sweet deals and rely on happy customers and good word of mouth to make this fly. Good luck.
Partially, but the concept is a clusterfuck to start with. If you need a space taxi, design a space taxi. If you need a cargo hauler, design a cargo hauler. If you need a space lab, design a space lab (and leave it up there). Trying to design one Jack of all trades was always going to produce something that satisfied nobody.
Again, I take the point that this decision was forced on NASA by budget constraints, but they didn't have to put up with it. They could have stuck to their guns and told Congress: "You want to give us the budget to build one vehicle? Then you pick which one."
Sure, hindsight and all, but it didn't really take much foresight to figure out the limitations of the orbitter program. I mean, they could afford a slide rule, right?
Oooh oooh OOOH AAH AAAH AAAH EEEEE EEEEE EEEEEE! (thump chest, throw faeces)
So, how many terrorists did you kill today?
It's irrelevant whether I'm prepared to give them a year's grace. What matters (pursuant to this discussion) is what the Iraqi people think, and most particularly what the orphans and bereaved think. Perhaps we could ask them to give the US a year's grace before they start becoming suicide bombers?
>If you really, really think that the common folk of Afghanistan, or Iraq, or the Soviet Union were happy living as they were, then I should be the one weeping for you.
How happy are they now? The schools, hospitals and museums are looted, there's no electricity, thieves roam freely, political protestors are gunned down, the cowards and traitors of the Iraqi "army" are the only people still getting paid, the Ba'ath party still runs the country (nobody else knows how), and they are ruled by a military dictator and a council of puppets.
Yes, it sucked to be ruled by Saddam. But it doesn't seem to suck much less being ruled by Bush. Maybe if we stop massacring anyone who actually tries out this "free speech" thing, it might get better, but I'm betting not. The 3rd infantry, an outfit of pissed off teenagers, is going to start kicking some serious raghead ass soon, and they won't care much what sort. Afghanistan is a clusterfuck as well, with the Taliban resurgent and things pretty much back to the status quo outside of Kabul. The Soviet Union is a different case, as they freed themselves.
But it's all right. You'll never hear any of this on Fox or CNN, so it's not really happening. What's happening is that they're all waving Stars and Stripes and reciting the pledge of allegiance. Yup. Boy howdy.
We spend tens of millions (hard to say, NASA won't disclose) training "astronauts", and then dedicate most of the lifting capacity of the vehicles to keeping them alive while they watch a board and occasionally push a button that could be pushed by the guy that trained them back at mission control. That's a hell of a lot of money per button push.
Buzz Aldrin says it best. He never thought space exploration would come to mean shuttling cargo up to low earth orbit. Let's leave that to the machines, and send men out to do what they can't. Explore and describe the wonders that are out there, so that us lesser men touch them by proxy.