If you think that people who download MP3s don't also buy CD, then you're grossly uninformed. During the 2 years that Napster was fully operational, dollar sales for CDs grew 15% each year. After Napster's shutdown, CD sales have fallen 10% per year.
For most people, file sharing of MP3s is like flipping through the magazines at Barnes and Noble for an hour, and then just buying one book (if anything). Imagine if B&N randomly sued every 10000th customer $5000 for each magazine they looked at, and then offered to settle for $50 apiece. Guess what would happen to sales at B&N. Also think about what would happen to periodical sales at B&N if they started to shrink wrap every item in the store so that customers couldn't browse through.
They only block sites because they're concerned about their own citizens viewing pronography and non-sanctioned political or religious ideas. I'm sure they consider advertisements for teen porn and sex organ size enhancers to be par for the course in america. They might start to care if we managed to get asian e-mail addresses added to the spammer lists.
Future TV workable for industry and customers
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TV's Tipping Point
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· Score: 1
It's true that TIVO is a revolutionary way to watch TV. As it grows though, the industry is going to fight back against their inability to sell commercial time when people aren't even watching them.
The next big revolution is going to come when content providers get together with TIVO type box makers. There are several things that satisfy both sides:
1. Video recorded to a local hard drive for 'on-demand' playback. You can watch streams live, or set your box in advance to save ones you want to watch. Everyone receives the stream simultaneously, and thus bandwidth requirements are low. This is pretty much in place.
2. Frequent repeats of streams. Instead of showing the same infomercial on 10 stations at 3am, rebroadcast recent 'primetime' shows for those people who missed it the first time. Either they were saving other streams at the time, or they didn't know about the show. This is already somewhat implemented by cable stations that show the same 3 hour primetime block again after primetime is over. [Or the same show 2-3 times in a row like FX does sometimes.]
3. Free show listings. Listings, with stream times and descriptions should be freely included with the basic service package. i.e. why do DirecTV customers who get a DirecTV PVR have to pay $5/month extra for the digital listings that they already get with regular sattellite subscription? WTF?!? I mean, I watch a video stream of at least half a meg per second bandwidth, why does 50kb per day of listing data cost $5/month?
4. New commercial / compensation model. Let's face it, the producers have to get paid so they can make the shows. But current commercial models are retarded. Commercials need to be reduced, and targetted better. A fourth of broadcast time is for commercials. Product ads should be limited to a few minutes per hour of video. Users should be able to skip commercials for products they're not interested in, and the set-top box should learn better what commercials to display to each individual viewer. Some household should never see a single mini-van commercial. Others should never have to watch a 'feminine product' commercial. Or maybe a commercial for the latest Disney movie. Or a Pepsi commercial. Or that Humvee that costs more than you make in two years. Individual commercials could be shown a certain limit of times per month, week or (god forbid) even day. And the best thing for both sides would be a 'tell me more' feature that could give you an extended version with more information. Car commercial get your attention? Get an in depth tour of the vehicle right now. TV show promo spots would also get a few slots per hour. And the box would be intelligent about not airing ads for show that you already have set to record, as well as not showing ads for programs you've missed already. You could also tell the box that you don't like that show, and don't want to see ads for it anymore. [I can't even begin to describe how much more I hate 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' since I have to see commercials for the same episode 5 times for every episode of 'The West Wing' that I watch on Bravo.] You could click one button during the ad to tell the box to record that show when it streams.
5. Alternate payment methods for programming. You still hate commercials? Just pony up 25 cents to watch you show commercial free. Or maybe old MASH episodes for a dime each. See the Superbowl commercial free for $5. Or go the opposite way. Catch that pay-per-view movie for free with a few unskippable targetted commercials every 5 minutes.
6. (Un)Censored TV. Viewers should be able to set their own threshold for censorship of the TV programs they watch. The basic stream should be uncensored. Digital markers could include programming to censor content in the box using audio drops, blurry boxes, or even blanked video. The viewer or parent/guardian could determine what gets censored. Nudity (male or female), sex, gore, violence, or language could be blocked on a per-incide
China blocks everything outside of it unless it feels there is a good reason to let it's people access it. Having a site show up on it's block list doesn't really say much.
HL1 is still on the shelves after about 5 years. I think they want to get HL2 to market ASAP so they can ride it's sales as long as possible. Today's top-of-the-line is simply mid-range in 6 months. It's really nice for people to have a great new game to pick up when they're blowing $1200 on a new computer.
That loss is for the whole company, which has many more titles that it's working on. I'd be surprised if any software companies stay in the black all year, considering how massive sales are during November and December. Most retailers barely break even the first 10 months of every year, and make all their profits in the last 60 days.
I think a big part of the HL2 profit strategy will be to sell the game engine to other game developers. If you can license the thing to 15 game makers at a million apiece, you've made some serious coin. Once HL2 comes out, people are going to expect the features it has, and games in the pipe right now can move to the HL2 engine for alot less money than coding their own.
I think the real reason for game manufacturers losing money is that the consoles are getting old (massive back-inventory of titles for $10-20), and PC game makers have been mostly releasing shit for the past two years. And the shit has been slow to arrive as well. I've hardly had anything to look forward to for the last 2 years, and starting a month ago, it's been raining good games in the PC market.
Considering that AOL and Warner Bros. (an RIAA member) are both part of the same company, AOL Time Warner, I would expect the subpoenas to be unnecessary.
These are many 'land rich' (another poster tried to name this incorrectly) old-timers. My grandparents live on 70+ acres about an hour south of Minneapolis. 50 years ago, their land and 4 bedroom house with no electricity or running water cost them $10000. That land is assessed at 2-3 million now, and none of that is the house. They live on about $12-15k/year now between working and social security (they're long past retirement age). They could sell out the home they've lived in their whole lives and be rich, but they'd rather die than move away from their church and friends.
These are not the ferrari driving, day-trading, botox injecting, embezzeling, got-out-before-the-dotcom-bubble-burst, got-rich-quick scum that so many people think of when they think of millionaires. Not most of them, at least.
Is this a troll or something? Tell her to get a damned American credit card and quit whining. Or a debit card even. Or have them change her billing address to match her home address. I mean holy crap, the Japanese call Americans lazy?!?
I agree that the $5 price point is low, but to order your album would cost me $19. It's like asking me to pay fillet mignon prices for ground round, just because you slap an 'organic' sticker on it. Why should I pay more for an album from a little known group than I would pay for something from a well known, established group with professional backing at every step of the way? Hell, I could go buy just about any movie on DVD for that much.
Let me put it this way. Even at $7.50 per CD, you'd make $5+ off every CD. You can cut your price in half and still triple your money on every sale! And you're putting your music into the hands of tons more people who are more likely to buy your next album. What's going to sound better to a club owner who is considering booking you? 'We've sold 800 CDs and made $10000' or 'We've sold 2000 CDs and made $10000, and have a new CD on the way'. BTW, I really think that a sales jump from 800->2000 is a very conservative figure.
KMFDM is one of the larger artists in my scene, and all reports from reputable industry people indicate that their last album (ATTAK) sold under 6000 copies, internationally. Six Thousand CDs sold for a band with easily a dozen albums to their name, and as many years of history.
I have a few of KMFDM's albums. I bought them all at a used CD store where they let you listen to the CDs before buying them and are very friendly to people exploring new artists. I paid about $8 each for them. If KMFDM could ship me everything I don't have for $7 each, I'd take them all. $15-16 each? No Way!
If you only generate 850 CD sales at $5 each, then you're probably not very good, and thus shouldn't expect to make anything at all. You should be satisfied that your hobby isn't a huge money pit like most people.
OTOH, if you've already sold 1000 copies of your album at $15 each, then I bet you would sell 5000 copies easily at $5 each. Perhaps even 10000 copies. Probably anyone who sees and enjoys your show at a club would buy it. If you play in front of a crowd of 500 people and can't sell 100 CDs at $5 each, then either everyone already has your album, or you suck. Someone who buys the first album is also much more likely to buy whatever you put out next. It's like having your business card sitting in their CD rack.
Perhaps you should try cutting down your freebies to just the local stations that are likely to play your music. Try to grow a fan base rather than bursting onto the scene.
I'm interested in where the $2500 for 1000 CDs comes from. Discmakers.com (your reference) has a price for 1000 CDs in jewel cases as $1590. Or in cardboard jackets for $990. Maybe you should buy a run of each, and mail out the cardboard jacketed ones as the freebies (cheaper mailing cost too, around $1). Offer both versions for sale side by side at a $1-2 difference.
Personal note:
I checked out your site, and the MP3 previews of songs you have up. I like the music, but your vocalist doesn't match up very well with your musical style. The vocals feel passive, while the music is more edgy. The real turnoff though, is that to buy your album would cost me $19 shipped. Having another company handling all of your sales adds another markup layer to your distribution. You should be able to take money directly, and ship them yourself. Shipping a CD should cost no more than $2. You can bubble wrap it, toss it in a 6x9 envelope and leave it for the mailman for $1.50 (first class), or send it with delivery confirmation for about $2. Or ship it in a cardboard mailer via media mail for about the same $2. Add 50 cents to cover the transaction costs. Move your sales to something more friendly to small sellers, like yahoo's sales area, or Ebay stores. Put links on your site so that people can just Paypal the money to you directly. But for god's sake, drop that $15 price! There's hundreds of artists with millions of dollars in ad revenue trying to sell their CDs for LESS than that. The mp3 previews are a great start, but a no-name band needs to be able to put a CD in my hands for about $8 for me to consider it.
They proved they could get the price point for CD's when they first came out, $15-20 in '82 that I can remember, before that there were too few titles on CD that I cared about, and I was still collecting vinyl in those days.
So it turned out the market could bear the price.
Back then, most people bought cassette tapes for about $8-10 each. It was only wealthier people who could afford $500 CD players who were willing to pay 2X the money for higher quality audio. Also, retail stores wanted higher margins from CDs since they sold much less than cassettes, and took up enormous amounts of space because of the longboxes (remember them?). Now that CDs are de rigeur, and cost less to manufacturer than tapes, prices need to drop in line with what tapes would cost with inflation, which means $10-13.
It also means that the wholesale prices for CDs should drop down to the $9 range. Bestbuy and their ilk will probably be offering CDs for $10 each then.
Under his plan, the federal government gives away over 6 trillion dollars per year. I forsee tons of jobs created... keeping illegal aliens from crossing the border for free cash! Communism or welfare nation, whatever you call it, it's already been tried and failed.
What we need is forced job training for anyone who takes unemployment or welfare for more than 6 months (or 3 if you have a high school education or less). If you barely have enough job skills to run a cash register, then you should be forced to live in a millitary style training facility where you will be trained to wield a nail gun, or arc welder, or drive a truck, or repair robots. Teach people landscaping skills or home design and repair. Teach people to cook again, so they don't have to eat out or buy MREs. Train people to run the robots.
I'm amazed at how often the gas station attendant can't even bother to keep the receipt printer at the pump full of paper. Job skills that low don't deserve minimum wage. I'm begging for the day when I can put in my own order at Taco Bell without having to let some moron screw it up first. The most interaction I want from the employees there is for them to say 'here's your food'. I'm glad I can go to the gas station or local WalMart and make my purchases without even making eye contact with a single employee. Having to wait in line to be serviced by some idiot with no job skills wastes my time. And I pay extra for it!
The poverty level in this country equates to being able to afford a small car, a two bedroom house, AC, cable TV and enough food and beer to make you obese. Alot of people aren't interested in working harder than that. As long as you keep raising minimum wage for their useless jobs, they will never try anything more mentally taxing than running a cash register.
Re:Scalability? [farms]
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MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 1
I was brainstorming, and I think the best way would be to strap antennas to the electrical poles every 1000 feet or so. The electrical lines are usually kept clear of brush and trees anyway, and they go to every house. Power is also convienently located.:) The only problems I can see is electrical interference from the power lines, and getting broadband out to the general area in the first place.
Re:Scalability? [farms]
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MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 1
Most people in farm country are at least half a mile from their nearest neighbor, averaging more like a mile between. Even if you can find a way to daisy chain the nodes with directional amplifiers, if a single node goes down, then everyone down the line drops off. This is not the kind of redundancy that puts the 'net in internet.
Anyone know what his email address is? I get several spams a day to an address at my domain that they made up (mortgageshoppers@...). I currently autoforward them to uce@ftc.gov. Autosending a copy to a spammer would be additional satisfaction.
Cheap: $1 for a song, maybe $2 for several mixes of the same song. Buy the whole album at once for 50 cents/song; $5-8 total. Offer to also ship a pressed CD with liner notes and lyrics for $3 more.
Convienence: Filesharing with MP3s is popular because you can burn a CD, transfer it between all of your MP3 playing devices, and listen to it as often as you like. Music isn't like a toilet (RIAA not withstanding). Two people should be able to use it at the same time. There should be no restrictions on my music listening when I pay for it.
High download speeds: Filesharing has a serious weakness that you are typically downloading at 1-5 KB/sec. Make sure your servers can sustain 100+ KB/sec. My time is worth money. I'll gladly pay money so I don't have to spend time rummaging through strangers' hard drives.
Previews: Offer either 64kbs streams/downloads for free to preview every song, or at least a minute of excerpts from the song so that you can get a good feel for the sound. The RIAA is already flooding Kazaa with preview files, but they upload slowly, aren't labeled clearly and are just as badly organized as the rest of the music (*sarcasm*).
I can download two minute trailers for upcoming movies. Music frequently just has art on the cover by someone other than the musician. Useful for porn, not useful for music.
Cross-reference music by popularity. Show other artists and songs that were also popular with people that liked the song I'm looking at. Clear Channel is killing music diversity in this country. I want to find and buy new music, not the crap that gets played on 4 different radio stations 10 times a day. I'd like to find artists from other countries. E-mail me when my favorite artist releases something new. Send me weekly links with music that is similar to other stuff I have bought before.
Add extras: Give free lyrics and pictures with the download. Especially with a full album. People like to be able to put a face to the artist.
Diverse selection: Indie labels are screwed in this regard. The RIAA labels should have set up their own pay-to-download site a few years ago. They should have at least set up listening stations in every store with more than 1000 CDs. Walmart has them, but they carry very few CDs, and you can only preview a limited selection. 250 gig hard drives are pretty inexpensive now. There is no excuse for not having a secure music server with 5000 albums in every Best Buy (and other major music retailer) in the nation.
Most importantly, remember that listening to music needs to be fun, easy and a good value. There are tons of entertainment forms. Music is just one of them.
One interesting thing about the entire series is that virtually no character is assigned any kind of religious faith.
They sure seem to get alot of faith once Christmas rolls around. It's a rather amusing jab, considering that Christmas was created in the image of the pagan holidays of the time in order to help persuade people to convert.
Yes, gift exchanging, putting up decorations, and the winter break are all from the very old pagan traditions. The only thing Christianity really added is the Nativity. Even Santa Claus kind of turns Christmas back into a pagan holiday again.
Most people don't willingly exercise their religion until adulthood (if even) anyway. Why be surprised that a bunch of kids away from home aren't practicing a particular faith?
They're both forms of entertainment aimed at the 12-30 age group (and beyond). Most people don't have a book budget, so the money has to come from somewhere.
I'm betting that you had some allowance money left to buy HP after getting your transmission fixed.;)
Alot of kids don't have the money, or especially time, left for the Hulk after buying an 800+ page book for $20-30.
Your thinking has the same error that the RIAA is making. They refuse to admit that the rise of DVD sales is contributing to their fall in CD sales (among about 20 other reasons). People tend to budget a certain amount of money for 'Entertainment', rather than individual categories like movie tickets, books, DVDs, concerts, CDs, cable TV, games.
Harry Potter 5 sucked $160+ MILLION dollars out of the hands of The Hulk's target audience. Is it really hard to believe that The Hulk ticket sales would suffer?
1 monitor per computer unless they are both LCD. Ask people to set the hard drive power management settings to 30 minutes. Their pr0n drive doesn't need to be spinning all weekend. Systems that will be unused for more than an hour should be turned off. Less power used means a cooler room. Cooler room means less stanky gamers.
Don't include food in the weekend price. Don't cook anything more than microwave popcorn. The health department is not someone you want to meet.
Arrange for food onsite from a restaurant and charge enough to turn a decent profit. Fill a new garbage can with ice (freeze large blocks to save cash) and dump in a few cases of popular soft drinks. Charge 50 cents each. Arrange a discount with various restaurants for ordering mass quantities of only 1 or 2 different items. Order from someone new for each meal. i.e. Arby's regular roast beef or beef & cheddar for lunch. Then pizza for dinner (cheeze or sausage). Wendy's jr cheezeburger deluxes or double cheezeburger for lunch the next day. Sub sandwich place for dinner. Talk to the store manager and get at least 20% off. Be flexible in the delivery time. Order a little less than you expect to sell and charge enough to make about 30-40%. Most people will still be happy that they are not having to leave or pay for delivery. All will be happy to avoid paying hotel-food prices. Scout out local fast food joints for the 20% of people who would rather get their own meal.
A friend of mine runs gaming tournaments of 150-500 people. He alternates between Arby's sandwiches for $2.50 each, and Sbarro. Sbarro brings two guys with about 20 cheeze, pepperoni or sausage pizzas and 20 salads. Cheeze is $1.50/slice or meat for $2/slice. $16 for a sausage pizza is a damn fine profit. He takes a 20% cut of the Sbarro sales.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that people who download MP3s don't also buy CD, then you're grossly uninformed. During the 2 years that Napster was fully operational, dollar sales for CDs grew 15% each year. After Napster's shutdown, CD sales have fallen 10% per year.
For most people, file sharing of MP3s is like flipping through the magazines at Barnes and Noble for an hour, and then just buying one book (if anything). Imagine if B&N randomly sued every 10000th customer $5000 for each magazine they looked at, and then offered to settle for $50 apiece. Guess what would happen to sales at B&N. Also think about what would happen to periodical sales at B&N if they started to shrink wrap every item in the store so that customers couldn't browse through.
They only block sites because they're concerned about their own citizens viewing pronography and non-sanctioned political or religious ideas. I'm sure they consider advertisements for teen porn and sex organ size enhancers to be par for the course in america. They might start to care if we managed to get asian e-mail addresses added to the spammer lists.
It's true that TIVO is a revolutionary way to watch TV. As it grows though, the industry is going to fight back against their inability to sell commercial time when people aren't even watching them.
The next big revolution is going to come when content providers get together with TIVO type box makers. There are several things that satisfy both sides:
1. Video recorded to a local hard drive for 'on-demand' playback. You can watch streams live, or set your box in advance to save ones you want to watch. Everyone receives the stream simultaneously, and thus bandwidth requirements are low. This is pretty much in place.
2. Frequent repeats of streams. Instead of showing the same infomercial on 10 stations at 3am, rebroadcast recent 'primetime' shows for those people who missed it the first time. Either they were saving other streams at the time, or they didn't know about the show. This is already somewhat implemented by cable stations that show the same 3 hour primetime block again after primetime is over. [Or the same show 2-3 times in a row like FX does sometimes.]
3. Free show listings. Listings, with stream times and descriptions should be freely included with the basic service package. i.e. why do DirecTV customers who get a DirecTV PVR have to pay $5/month extra for the digital listings that they already get with regular sattellite subscription? WTF?!? I mean, I watch a video stream of at least half a meg per second bandwidth, why does 50kb per day of listing data cost $5/month?
4. New commercial / compensation model. Let's face it, the producers have to get paid so they can make the shows. But current commercial models are retarded. Commercials need to be reduced, and targetted better. A fourth of broadcast time is for commercials. Product ads should be limited to a few minutes per hour of video. Users should be able to skip commercials for products they're not interested in, and the set-top box should learn better what commercials to display to each individual viewer. Some household should never see a single mini-van commercial. Others should never have to watch a 'feminine product' commercial. Or maybe a commercial for the latest Disney movie. Or a Pepsi commercial. Or that Humvee that costs more than you make in two years. Individual commercials could be shown a certain limit of times per month, week or (god forbid) even day. And the best thing for both sides would be a 'tell me more' feature that could give you an extended version with more information. Car commercial get your attention? Get an in depth tour of the vehicle right now.
TV show promo spots would also get a few slots per hour. And the box would be intelligent about not airing ads for show that you already have set to record, as well as not showing ads for programs you've missed already. You could also tell the box that you don't like that show, and don't want to see ads for it anymore. [I can't even begin to describe how much more I hate 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' since I have to see commercials for the same episode 5 times for every episode of 'The West Wing' that I watch on Bravo.] You could click one button during the ad to tell the box to record that show when it streams.
5. Alternate payment methods for programming. You still hate commercials? Just pony up 25 cents to watch you show commercial free. Or maybe old MASH episodes for a dime each. See the Superbowl commercial free for $5. Or go the opposite way. Catch that pay-per-view movie for free with a few unskippable targetted commercials every 5 minutes.
6. (Un)Censored TV. Viewers should be able to set their own threshold for censorship of the TV programs they watch. The basic stream should be uncensored. Digital markers could include programming to censor content in the box using audio drops, blurry boxes, or even blanked video. The viewer or parent/guardian could determine what gets censored. Nudity (male or female), sex, gore, violence, or language could be blocked on a per-incide
China blocked the traffic at its backbone
China blocks everything outside of it unless it feels there is a good reason to let it's people access it. Having a site show up on it's block list doesn't really say much.
HL1 is still on the shelves after about 5 years. I think they want to get HL2 to market ASAP so they can ride it's sales as long as possible. Today's top-of-the-line is simply mid-range in 6 months. It's really nice for people to have a great new game to pick up when they're blowing $1200 on a new computer.
That loss is for the whole company, which has many more titles that it's working on. I'd be surprised if any software companies stay in the black all year, considering how massive sales are during November and December. Most retailers barely break even the first 10 months of every year, and make all their profits in the last 60 days.
I think a big part of the HL2 profit strategy will be to sell the game engine to other game developers. If you can license the thing to 15 game makers at a million apiece, you've made some serious coin. Once HL2 comes out, people are going to expect the features it has, and games in the pipe right now can move to the HL2 engine for alot less money than coding their own.
I think the real reason for game manufacturers losing money is that the consoles are getting old (massive back-inventory of titles for $10-20), and PC game makers have been mostly releasing shit for the past two years. And the shit has been slow to arrive as well. I've hardly had anything to look forward to for the last 2 years, and starting a month ago, it's been raining good games in the PC market.
Considering that AOL and Warner Bros. (an RIAA member) are both part of the same company, AOL Time Warner, I would expect the subpoenas to be unnecessary.
These are many 'land rich' (another poster tried to name this incorrectly) old-timers. My grandparents live on 70+ acres about an hour south of Minneapolis. 50 years ago, their land and 4 bedroom house with no electricity or running water cost them $10000. That land is assessed at 2-3 million now, and none of that is the house. They live on about $12-15k/year now between working and social security (they're long past retirement age). They could sell out the home they've lived in their whole lives and be rich, but they'd rather die than move away from their church and friends.
These are not the ferrari driving, day-trading, botox injecting, embezzeling, got-out-before-the-dotcom-bubble-burst, got-rich-quick scum that so many people think of when they think of millionaires. Not most of them, at least.
Is this a troll or something? Tell her to get a damned American credit card and quit whining. Or a debit card even. Or have them change her billing address to match her home address. I mean holy crap, the Japanese call Americans lazy?!?
I agree that the $5 price point is low, but to order your album would cost me $19. It's like asking me to pay fillet mignon prices for ground round, just because you slap an 'organic' sticker on it. Why should I pay more for an album from a little known group than I would pay for something from a well known, established group with professional backing at every step of the way? Hell, I could go buy just about any movie on DVD for that much.
Let me put it this way. Even at $7.50 per CD, you'd make $5+ off every CD. You can cut your price in half and still triple your money on every sale! And you're putting your music into the hands of tons more people who are more likely to buy your next album. What's going to sound better to a club owner who is considering booking you? 'We've sold 800 CDs and made $10000' or 'We've sold 2000 CDs and made $10000, and have a new CD on the way'. BTW, I really think that a sales jump from 800->2000 is a very conservative figure.
KMFDM is one of the larger artists in my scene, and all reports from reputable industry people indicate that their last album (ATTAK) sold under 6000 copies, internationally. Six Thousand CDs sold for a band with easily a dozen albums to their name, and as many years of history.
I have a few of KMFDM's albums. I bought them all at a used CD store where they let you listen to the CDs before buying them and are very friendly to people exploring new artists. I paid about $8 each for them. If KMFDM could ship me everything I don't have for $7 each, I'd take them all. $15-16 each? No Way!
If you only generate 850 CD sales at $5 each, then you're probably not very good, and thus shouldn't expect to make anything at all. You should be satisfied that your hobby isn't a huge money pit like most people.
OTOH, if you've already sold 1000 copies of your album at $15 each, then I bet you would sell 5000 copies easily at $5 each. Perhaps even 10000 copies. Probably anyone who sees and enjoys your show at a club would buy it. If you play in front of a crowd of 500 people and can't sell 100 CDs at $5 each, then either everyone already has your album, or you suck. Someone who buys the first album is also much more likely to buy whatever you put out next. It's like having your business card sitting in their CD rack.
Perhaps you should try cutting down your freebies to just the local stations that are likely to play your music. Try to grow a fan base rather than bursting onto the scene.
I'm interested in where the $2500 for 1000 CDs comes from. Discmakers.com (your reference) has a price for 1000 CDs in jewel cases as $1590. Or in cardboard jackets for $990. Maybe you should buy a run of each, and mail out the cardboard jacketed ones as the freebies (cheaper mailing cost too, around $1). Offer both versions for sale side by side at a $1-2 difference.
Personal note:
I checked out your site, and the MP3 previews of songs you have up. I like the music, but your vocalist doesn't match up very well with your musical style. The vocals feel passive, while the music is more edgy. The real turnoff though, is that to buy your album would cost me $19 shipped. Having another company handling all of your sales adds another markup layer to your distribution. You should be able to take money directly, and ship them yourself. Shipping a CD should cost no more than $2. You can bubble wrap it, toss it in a 6x9 envelope and leave it for the mailman for $1.50 (first class), or send it with delivery confirmation for about $2. Or ship it in a cardboard mailer via media mail for about the same $2. Add 50 cents to cover the transaction costs. Move your sales to something more friendly to small sellers, like yahoo's sales area, or Ebay stores. Put links on your site so that people can just Paypal the money to you directly. But for god's sake, drop that $15 price! There's hundreds of artists with millions of dollars in ad revenue trying to sell their CDs for LESS than that. The mp3 previews are a great start, but a no-name band needs to be able to put a CD in my hands for about $8 for me to consider it.
They proved they could get the price point for CD's when they first came out, $15-20 in '82 that I can remember, before that there were too few titles on CD that I cared about, and I was still collecting vinyl in those days. So it turned out the market could bear the price.
Back then, most people bought cassette tapes for about $8-10 each. It was only wealthier people who could afford $500 CD players who were willing to pay 2X the money for higher quality audio. Also, retail stores wanted higher margins from CDs since they sold much less than cassettes, and took up enormous amounts of space because of the longboxes (remember them?). Now that CDs are de rigeur, and cost less to manufacturer than tapes, prices need to drop in line with what tapes would cost with inflation, which means $10-13.
It also means that the wholesale prices for CDs should drop down to the $9 range. Bestbuy and their ilk will probably be offering CDs for $10 each then.
Under his plan, the federal government gives away over 6 trillion dollars per year. I forsee tons of jobs created... keeping illegal aliens from crossing the border for free cash! Communism or welfare nation, whatever you call it, it's already been tried and failed.
What we need is forced job training for anyone who takes unemployment or welfare for more than 6 months (or 3 if you have a high school education or less). If you barely have enough job skills to run a cash register, then you should be forced to live in a millitary style training facility where you will be trained to wield a nail gun, or arc welder, or drive a truck, or repair robots. Teach people landscaping skills or home design and repair. Teach people to cook again, so they don't have to eat out or buy MREs. Train people to run the robots.
I'm amazed at how often the gas station attendant can't even bother to keep the receipt printer at the pump full of paper. Job skills that low don't deserve minimum wage. I'm begging for the day when I can put in my own order at Taco Bell without having to let some moron screw it up first. The most interaction I want from the employees there is for them to say 'here's your food'. I'm glad I can go to the gas station or local WalMart and make my purchases without even making eye contact with a single employee. Having to wait in line to be serviced by some idiot with no job skills wastes my time. And I pay extra for it!
The poverty level in this country equates to being able to afford a small car, a two bedroom house, AC, cable TV and enough food and beer to make you obese. Alot of people aren't interested in working harder than that. As long as you keep raising minimum wage for their useless jobs, they will never try anything more mentally taxing than running a cash register.
I was brainstorming, and I think the best way would be to strap antennas to the electrical poles every 1000 feet or so. The electrical lines are usually kept clear of brush and trees anyway, and they go to every house. Power is also convienently located. :) The only problems I can see is electrical interference from the power lines, and getting broadband out to the general area in the first place.
Most people in farm country are at least half a mile from their nearest neighbor, averaging more like a mile between. Even if you can find a way to daisy chain the nodes with directional amplifiers, if a single node goes down, then everyone down the line drops off. This is not the kind of redundancy that puts the 'net in internet.
If you're trying to apply anything 'real world' to The Matrix, then you obviously didn't understand the premise of the movie in the least.
Anyone know what his email address is? I get several spams a day to an address at my domain that they made up (mortgageshoppers@...). I currently autoforward them to uce@ftc.gov. Autosending a copy to a spammer would be additional satisfaction.
Cheap: $1 for a song, maybe $2 for several mixes of the same song. Buy the whole album at once for 50 cents/song; $5-8 total. Offer to also ship a pressed CD with liner notes and lyrics for $3 more.
Convienence: Filesharing with MP3s is popular because you can burn a CD, transfer it between all of your MP3 playing devices, and listen to it as often as you like. Music isn't like a toilet (RIAA not withstanding). Two people should be able to use it at the same time. There should be no restrictions on my music listening when I pay for it.
High download speeds: Filesharing has a serious weakness that you are typically downloading at 1-5 KB/sec. Make sure your servers can sustain 100+ KB/sec. My time is worth money. I'll gladly pay money so I don't have to spend time rummaging through strangers' hard drives.
Previews: Offer either 64kbs streams/downloads for free to preview every song, or at least a minute of excerpts from the song so that you can get a good feel for the sound. The RIAA is already flooding Kazaa with preview files, but they upload slowly, aren't labeled clearly and are just as badly organized as the rest of the music (*sarcasm*).
I can download two minute trailers for upcoming movies. Music frequently just has art on the cover by someone other than the musician. Useful for porn, not useful for music.
Cross-reference music by popularity. Show other artists and songs that were also popular with people that liked the song I'm looking at. Clear Channel is killing music diversity in this country. I want to find and buy new music, not the crap that gets played on 4 different radio stations 10 times a day. I'd like to find artists from other countries. E-mail me when my favorite artist releases something new. Send me weekly links with music that is similar to other stuff I have bought before.
Add extras: Give free lyrics and pictures with the download. Especially with a full album. People like to be able to put a face to the artist.
Diverse selection: Indie labels are screwed in this regard. The RIAA labels should have set up their own pay-to-download site a few years ago. They should have at least set up listening stations in every store with more than 1000 CDs. Walmart has them, but they carry very few CDs, and you can only preview a limited selection. 250 gig hard drives are pretty inexpensive now. There is no excuse for not having a secure music server with 5000 albums in every Best Buy (and other major music retailer) in the nation.
Most importantly, remember that listening to music needs to be fun, easy and a good value. There are tons of entertainment forms. Music is just one of them.
One interesting thing about the entire series is that virtually no character is assigned any kind of religious faith.
They sure seem to get alot of faith once Christmas rolls around. It's a rather amusing jab, considering that Christmas was created in the image of the pagan holidays of the time in order to help persuade people to convert.
Yes, gift exchanging, putting up decorations, and the winter break are all from the very old pagan traditions. The only thing Christianity really added is the Nativity. Even Santa Claus kind of turns Christmas back into a pagan holiday again.
Most people don't willingly exercise their religion until adulthood (if even) anyway. Why be surprised that a bunch of kids away from home aren't practicing a particular faith?
They're both forms of entertainment aimed at the 12-30 age group (and beyond). Most people don't have a book budget, so the money has to come from somewhere.
I'm betting that you had some allowance money left to buy HP after getting your transmission fixed. ;)
Alot of kids don't have the money, or especially time, left for the Hulk after buying an 800+ page book for $20-30.
Your thinking has the same error that the RIAA is making. They refuse to admit that the rise of DVD sales is contributing to their fall in CD sales (among about 20 other reasons). People tend to budget a certain amount of money for 'Entertainment', rather than individual categories like movie tickets, books, DVDs, concerts, CDs, cable TV, games.
Harry Potter 5 sucked $160+ MILLION dollars out of the hands of The Hulk's target audience. Is it really hard to believe that The Hulk ticket sales would suffer?
Does anyone know of other recent games that you can run multiple monitors with? FPS games are more my thing.
1 monitor per computer unless they are both LCD. Ask people to set the hard drive power management settings to 30 minutes. Their pr0n drive doesn't need to be spinning all weekend. Systems that will be unused for more than an hour should be turned off. Less power used means a cooler room. Cooler room means less stanky gamers.
Don't include food in the weekend price. Don't cook anything more than microwave popcorn. The health department is not someone you want to meet.
Arrange for food onsite from a restaurant and charge enough to turn a decent profit. Fill a new garbage can with ice (freeze large blocks to save cash) and dump in a few cases of popular soft drinks. Charge 50 cents each. Arrange a discount with various restaurants for ordering mass quantities of only 1 or 2 different items. Order from someone new for each meal. i.e. Arby's regular roast beef or beef & cheddar for lunch. Then pizza for dinner (cheeze or sausage). Wendy's jr cheezeburger deluxes or double cheezeburger for lunch the next day. Sub sandwich place for dinner. Talk to the store manager and get at least 20% off. Be flexible in the delivery time. Order a little less than you expect to sell and charge enough to make about 30-40%. Most people will still be happy that they are not having to leave or pay for delivery. All will be happy to avoid paying hotel-food prices. Scout out local fast food joints for the 20% of people who would rather get their own meal.
A friend of mine runs gaming tournaments of 150-500 people. He alternates between Arby's sandwiches for $2.50 each, and Sbarro. Sbarro brings two guys with about 20 cheeze, pepperoni or sausage pizzas and 20 salads. Cheeze is $1.50/slice or meat for $2/slice. $16 for a sausage pizza is a damn fine profit. He takes a 20% cut of the Sbarro sales.