I especially like the part where someone actually thinks they will be able to force tenured faculty to only use books available from whatever broker they hire to supply the electronic textbooks. Or that faculty would actually get their book orders in early enough for said broker to license content that it doesn't already. It's difficult enough with the traditional model to get the faculty to order the books early enough to actually have the books shipped in from the publisher or distributor before classes begin. I can only imagine the argument between a professor and the broker representative when the professor demands on the Friday before classes that they have the book available to the students by Monday. The book from a publisher that the broker doesn't currently license content from and may not be able to get, at all, much less by Monday.
Well, mentioning that is was CAD not USD might have tipped people off that the amount(s) would be higher than they would expect for the US.
Besides the insurance, $100/tank for gas is pretty expensive in the US right now, unless you own some enormous crap-mobile. I haven't been in Canada for a while, but I know when I lived in New York, I could count on the gas in Ontario being about twice as expensive. I hardly know anyone in Toronto who owns a car, whereas I actually know people in NYC who do, as insane as that is.
... and the part I love best is that I actually need to rip the thing before it wrecks my CD player. I bought the "DualDisc" version of the Trey Anastasio CD they show in the EFF write-up. Every time I put it in my 10 year old Sony CD player, it makes a horrible racket. One of my friends is having trouble playing it in his portable because it's so thick that it's brushing the lid. I'm afraid to put it in the car disc player for fear that it will get stuck.
Besides putting a personal ban on buying any more Sony junk, and doing my best to avoid buying any albums on their label, I will also be writing to the artist and urging others to do the same.
And no, it's not worth having a laptop to take notes on in class - unless you're taking English Literature or something, you'll find it a lot easier to take notes the good old-fashioned way, on paper.
Agreed. I'm firmly in the habit of keeping a 2 or 3 subject and a cache of nice pens around. Forget those 10 for $2 Bics and pick yourself up a fountain pen or two, or at least a nice rollerball or gel pen from a fountain pen company. You'll find it a lot easier to take a lot of notes quickly.
On top of that, one of the best methods of study is to regularly type up your handwritten notes, so you have searchable files or nice printed copies come test time. I find I don't need to do this these days, but did when I was an undergrad. Usually reading through my notes and having to give them enough thought to arrange everything logically as I typed it was enough to remember most of the material. I rarely did more studying than just quickly reading through my notes the night before or the day of the test.
In grad classes, there are a lot more assignments due that reinforce the learning, so notes aren't as important. Also, in my major (library and information science) there aren't nearly as many tests as there are papers and other types of projects.
not violate the copyrights on their students' work
on
Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.
He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.
Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.
And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.
I used to work in a bar in a college town. I knew the owner from a previous job and so he contacted me when he needed people to open the place. The ASCAP guy came in while they were still setting the place up and gave his speech. The owner listened and at the end ASCAP man said, "We'll get you some forms and get you set up..." to which the owner replied, "Thanks but we don't need to bother with that. The stereo is Music Choice and the bands play originals. Good day."
Music Choice, btw, is the music stations piped in by the cable company. The fees for that are paid up front by the business owners. ASCAP man wasn't very happy, but as far as I know there was never any trouble over it.
Why the hell do your pumps allow you to let go of them and walk away, whilst still pumping?
In the US, it depends on the state. In New York, the catch that holds the pump on has to be disabled. They actually have them, I think, for full service stations, so the attndant can have gas pumping in several cars at once.
A lot of people don't, though. I drive an old (1985) Ford because the price was right and parts are readily available and cheap, so it costs me little to keep it running. However, after having the transmission give out on two late 80's Tauruses (or, to be more accurate, a Taurus and a Mercury Sable) a few years ago, I would be loath to buy a new vehicle from them. Same goes for GM. I owned an Oldsmobile that was so awful, there are not words to describe it. I also know a few people unfortunate enough to have actually owned Monte Carlos.
Similarly, after having two spectacular Western Digital hard drive failures, even though the drives were covered by warranty and were replaced, I switched to Seagate for my newest drive. Even when the things are replaced, there's still the hassle of having no computer for a few days and then having to reinstall and load backups.
That sounds like my apartment. I didn't realize until I started moving in that there is only one outlet in each room of this place, except for the kitchen and living room. The kitchen has what is the only new wiring (and only 3 prong outlets) on the entire floor. The rest is the original, although circuit breakers were put in at some point.
The living room has three outlets, but one of them doesn't work. The power strip for the television and stereo is running off of a 20 foot appliance extension to the outlet on the other side of the room.
In my room, I've got a computer, printer, speakers, a mixing board, guitar amp, DAT recorder, 8-track recorder, two cassette decks, a lamp and a wall fan running off one outlet.
Needless to say, we'll be apartment hunting again when the lease is about to expire. We haven't tripped a breaker yet or blown a power strip, but the computers act a little funny sometimes.
Most pens use a 'standard' cartridge. Parker and Scheaffer are the two notable exceptions, although Parker's cartridges are close in size to the standard ones. Anyway, just about anything but Scheaffer should work on a Lamy.
Personally, I'm now sold on bottled ink. I've had problems with my Parker and Waterman pens leaking or at least getting this kind of funky layer of film on the bottom and sides of the nib by the time I finished the cartridge. I recently switched to bottles and my pens all write better now. My own recommendation would be to pick up a couple of converters and a few bottles of some decent ink. In the long run, it's cheaper as well, seeing as a bottle costs about as much as a couple of packs of cartridges and lasts a lot longer.
The Levenger ink is good. Another place to order ink (and pens) online is www.fountainpenhospital.com. They also have a retail store in NYC.
As for the whole Porsche discussion (below), while expensive pens are certainly nice, there are perfectly functional ones available for a reasonable price. My own current daily-use pens are a Parker Frontier I picked up in a set with a bunch of ink cartridges and a converter for 20 in London when I was studying there and one of the Waterman Harley-Davidson models (all I have to say is flame-job) that I got for $20 at the Fountain Pen Hospital when I was in New York last Winter. My girlfriend has loads of pens, from old collectible and expensive limited editions down to $5 cheapies, and the ones she tends to use are the low-end to mid-price models.
You won't if you're using a ripper with decent error checking, unless the disc is damaged.
However, if you rip the same disc on different drives using a program that doesn't account for offset will result in files with different MD5 sums.
BTW, I say drives meaning drive models, although there is also some variation among individual drives.
And yes, I've not only ripped a file multiple times and gotten the same MD5 sums, I've also burned it and ripped the burned copy and gotten the same MD5 as the original.
The drivers on the CD that came with my Rage 128 (Rage Fury card), if installed, will cause my machine to lock up when you try to boot it. I had to download newer drivers before I could even use the card. And even then, it was a good six months or so before they had a set that were relatively stable.
One big reason to use lossless encoding (besides the fact that some of us are picky) on live sources, even more than on studio recordings, is the fact that the recordings aren't as good.
Generally, live recordings contain more noise than an average rock record, the big two being recording noise (more in older tapes than newer ones, but still present) and audience noise. Noisier recordings suffer more from mp3 (or similar) compression than do cleaner ones. The first place you'll usually hear the compression artifacts is in the audience. If the recording has been transferred from an analog source, then it will also be audible in whatever tape hiss may be present.
Quite frankly, I find tape hiss less annoying and I burn all my stuff to CDR anyway, so I can listen to it in a room other than the one the computer is in (or in my car).
So, yes, there is a reason. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean there isn't one.
Metallica has allowed recording of their concerts and trading of live recordings since the "black album" tour. Back when they were just starting to suck. Personally, I wouldn't buy their new album just because it sucks, like everything else they've done since the late 1980's.
While recording and releasing a concert quickly is not a really difficult thing to pull off, selling CDs at the venue immediately after is a bit more difficult.
Phish is already offering all of their new concerts online. They record every show to a 48 track setup, any, and they've been releasing concerts off of their soundman's reference DATs. The sound of those discs is pretty good.
What they do now is send a clone of the DAT off to the people running their website, who transfer the show, chop the files up, compress them and put them online.
However, to be able to sell discs right after the show, those doing it would have to bring in an awful lot of CD recorders, all hooked into the soundboard feed. I would imagine quality control would be a bit difficult for a couple of reasons. One is all the discs would be running live. Another is it's difficult enough to set up a good distribution amplifier setup for the large number of CD burners that would have to be used, much less one that is portable. I also don't see how they could offer discs "five minutes" after the show, seeing as it would take longer than that to unload and case a few hundred burners.
There are a lot of good reasons to try it, though. There are a lot of people out there willing to pay for recordings of concerts, as evidenced by the healthy bootleg industry. A few artists (Pearl Jam, String Cheese Incident) have done decently selling limited pressings of entire tours. The Who offered CDs of all the shows from their last tour for sale online. This seems like a good deal for distribution as it won't take up a lot of rack space in the stores, but the shipping costs can get expensive. There is also the impulse-buy factor. Bands or promoters could get a lot of extra sales, I think, selling a disc of the show as a souvenier before the concertgoers even leave the building.
In short, I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the not-too-distant future. It is possible to get better than bootleg quality out of this type of record and release program, but it won't be as good as the typical major label live album, but then again, they also wouldn't suffer from the overproduction and editing that those often have. And there is a lot of money to be made here.
So this is why, every time something goes wrong with my computer at work, I end up having to fix it myself after two different people from IT look at it, can't figure out what the problem is, and then never return or call back? Because I, the end-user, am a moron?
At work, I am constantly told that I am supposed to call IT to fix computer problems. When we call in problems, we're lucky if we get a call back or a visit the same day (the only quick response I've ever gotten was when I called to tell them that I'd had the klez virus emailed to me five times in two days from one of the campus news LISTSERVs). So, I'm supposed to wait for a day for someone to come look at my machine to figure out why Groupwise won't load. Which, oddly enough, is something I would have thought would have been checked when it was installed. And then I'm supposed to wait another two days until another guy who's actually been trained for this piece of software gets back from vacation. Of course, this guy never showed up and I figured out the problem myself and fixed it (turned out I didn't have the correct version of a library on my system). It was lucky for me that the web access feature was working or I wouldn't been able to check my email for four days while I was waiting for them to fix it.
The only problem members of my department had when we upgraded to Windows XP last Summer was that only two of us could print. This wasn't because we were the only ones who could figure out where the print button was in the new system, but because they hadn't bothered to install the print drivers and spooler on everyone's machines when they did the upgrades and then it took them two weeks to come back and do it.
And as for the problems we have with our (newish - it was changed before I got there) system. Those mostly stem from the fact that two people who can barely run a Windows system decide what software we're going to use for our book and POS system. Not only is the system badly designed from a functionality standpoint, but the thing crashes constantly and is set up poorly. In December, the system would go down every time our supervisor tried to generate shelf tags for our sales floor (I work in a college bookstore). After not taking our problem seriously for over a week, a lot of screaming finally got them to look at the problem and find that the system didn't have enough memory or hard drive space to generate the whole file. I was never quite clear on which it was as I was off for the second week of the fiasco and heard it all thirdhand when I returned. And if that all wasn't enough, the vendor has a bad habit of upgrading the system without telling us, usually breaking it at critical times, like the week before a semester starts.
Treating all users as idiots does no one any good. My grandfather has trouble operating a computer, but I'll bet he could whip your ass at rebuilding a carburetor.
on the artist, the label, the studio, etc. Even among people I know personally, the figure has varied widely. The most my own band ever paid in studio costs to record anything was when we paid $140 to record a six-song EP. I know one band who had a pretty decent regional following and were together for ten years. They released several recordings, but a lot of them were done really cheaply because they knew people who would cut them breaks.
Two hardcore/metal bands I knew a couple of years ago from the same town each put an album out around the same time. One spent a couple of weekends at a small local studio and put together a full-length CD for about $1200. The other, who had hired a manager and thought they were going to go big time, took a month off, put themselves up in an apartment in a town 30 miles away and recorded an album in a "big" studio for $30,000. They never did get the big break. The two guys who wrote most of the material left the band because they refused to quit their jobs to do the joke of a "tour" the band set up after the CD came out.
The band i farm, with whom my former band used to play shows, went from making self-released records at the same $20/hour studio we recorded at and being recorded by their friends in recording school to recently doing an album for a small indie label for $6000 at the Blasting Room (run by Stephen Egerton and Bill Stevenson from All/the Descendants).
The point is, it's a really difficult question to answer. Really big bands spend a lot of time in really big, expensive studios working on albums. It's incredibly easy to run the cost of a recording up to the $200,000 mark or past when you're speding six months in a $2000/day studio in another country (thereby incurring housing costs as well). Or working in multiple studios. And bringing in guests to play. And hiring three different engineers to mix, etc.
As for markup. When I was working in a CD store (1994), we, as an independent store, paid the one-stops an average of between 8.99 and 10.99 for discs which had a usual retail of about $15.99-$16.99 at the local chain store (it was a big deal at the time that the new Tom Petty greatest hits album cost us $12.49 and was going for $17.99 in the chain stores).
Of course, as an independent, we had to undercut the chains by selling the discs for $13.99-14.99. And, of course, as an independent, we also had less buying power and had to buy discs through a middle man. The chains who were charging more for the same discs got them far cheaper directly from the labels by the truckload.
One more thing to consider as far as major labels are concerned is that their idea of artist development is to throw a bunch of money at a whole group of performers and hope that one or two of them make it big. They charge the associated costs to make the album back to the artists and give them all a big advance. A couple make it and actually pull in enough money to cover those costs and make some money. The rest never see any money past their advance because they aren't paid royalties until the album breaks even. Some make several albums that never break even and just go deeper into debt with each album.
The best thing that happens to some indie bands that jump to majors and don't get big is to get dumped from the label because by the time that happens they're usually so far in debt they'll never get out. If they've still managed to keep a good portion of their fanbase, they can go back to making cheaper albums for a small label again (see: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones).
The interesting thing about the music industry is that albums are like films. If you keep the budget down, you don't have to get a lot of business to make money. Chasing Amy was Kevin Smith's most successful film not because it brought in the highest box office take. Chasing Amy, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back all made about $30 million at the box office, but Chasing Amy was the only one that cost less than a million to produce. Similarly, Elektra stays with a band like Phish, who refuse to promote themselves to a wider audience and don't sell a lot of albums because they sell a steady amount of albums and they don't spend a lot of money making those albums.
Good luck. The University where I work still insists that we use NS4. Newer versions of Netscape, Mozilla, IE, etc. are all "unsupported." In fact, recently the IT people got my department in trouble for upgrading to NS6 because we needed it to do our work. They discovered the upgrades during an update (from Win 95) to Windows XP.
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I especially like the part where someone actually thinks they will be able to force tenured faculty to only use books available from whatever broker they hire to supply the electronic textbooks. Or that faculty would actually get their book orders in early enough for said broker to license content that it doesn't already. It's difficult enough with the traditional model to get the faculty to order the books early enough to actually have the books shipped in from the publisher or distributor before classes begin. I can only imagine the argument between a professor and the broker representative when the professor demands on the Friday before classes that they have the book available to the students by Monday. The book from a publisher that the broker doesn't currently license content from and may not be able to get, at all, much less by Monday.
Well, mentioning that is was CAD not USD might have tipped people off that the amount(s) would be higher than they would expect for the US. Besides the insurance, $100/tank for gas is pretty expensive in the US right now, unless you own some enormous crap-mobile. I haven't been in Canada for a while, but I know when I lived in New York, I could count on the gas in Ontario being about twice as expensive. I hardly know anyone in Toronto who owns a car, whereas I actually know people in NYC who do, as insane as that is.
... and the part I love best is that I actually need to rip the thing before it wrecks my CD player. I bought the "DualDisc" version of the Trey Anastasio CD they show in the EFF write-up. Every time I put it in my 10 year old Sony CD player, it makes a horrible racket. One of my friends is having trouble playing it in his portable because it's so thick that it's brushing the lid. I'm afraid to put it in the car disc player for fear that it will get stuck.
Besides putting a personal ban on buying any more Sony junk, and doing my best to avoid buying any albums on their label, I will also be writing to the artist and urging others to do the same.
Agreed. I'm firmly in the habit of keeping a 2 or 3 subject and a cache of nice pens around. Forget those 10 for $2 Bics and pick yourself up a fountain pen or two, or at least a nice rollerball or gel pen from a fountain pen company. You'll find it a lot easier to take a lot of notes quickly.
On top of that, one of the best methods of study is to regularly type up your handwritten notes, so you have searchable files or nice printed copies come test time. I find I don't need to do this these days, but did when I was an undergrad. Usually reading through my notes and having to give them enough thought to arrange everything logically as I typed it was enough to remember most of the material. I rarely did more studying than just quickly reading through my notes the night before or the day of the test.
In grad classes, there are a lot more assignments due that reinforce the learning, so notes aren't as important. Also, in my major (library and information science) there aren't nearly as many tests as there are papers and other types of projects.
There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.
He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.
Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.
And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.
I used to work in a bar in a college town. I knew the owner from a previous job and so he contacted me when he needed people to open the place. The ASCAP guy came in while they were still setting the place up and gave his speech. The owner listened and at the end ASCAP man said, "We'll get you some forms and get you set up..." to which the owner replied, "Thanks but we don't need to bother with that. The stereo is Music Choice and the bands play originals. Good day."
Music Choice, btw, is the music stations piped in by the cable company. The fees for that are paid up front by the business owners. ASCAP man wasn't very happy, but as far as I know there was never any trouble over it.
A lot of people don't, though. I drive an old (1985) Ford because the price was right and parts are readily available and cheap, so it costs me little to keep it running. However, after having the transmission give out on two late 80's Tauruses (or, to be more accurate, a Taurus and a Mercury Sable) a few years ago, I would be loath to buy a new vehicle from them. Same goes for GM. I owned an Oldsmobile that was so awful, there are not words to describe it. I also know a few people unfortunate enough to have actually owned Monte Carlos.
Similarly, after having two spectacular Western Digital hard drive failures, even though the drives were covered by warranty and were replaced, I switched to Seagate for my newest drive. Even when the things are replaced, there's still the hassle of having no computer for a few days and then having to reinstall and load backups.
That sounds like my apartment. I didn't realize until I started moving in that there is only one outlet in each room of this place, except for the kitchen and living room. The kitchen has what is the only new wiring (and only 3 prong outlets) on the entire floor. The rest is the original, although circuit breakers were put in at some point. The living room has three outlets, but one of them doesn't work. The power strip for the television and stereo is running off of a 20 foot appliance extension to the outlet on the other side of the room. In my room, I've got a computer, printer, speakers, a mixing board, guitar amp, DAT recorder, 8-track recorder, two cassette decks, a lamp and a wall fan running off one outlet. Needless to say, we'll be apartment hunting again when the lease is about to expire. We haven't tripped a breaker yet or blown a power strip, but the computers act a little funny sometimes.
Most pens use a 'standard' cartridge. Parker and Scheaffer are the two notable exceptions, although Parker's cartridges are close in size to the standard ones. Anyway, just about anything but Scheaffer should work on a Lamy. Personally, I'm now sold on bottled ink. I've had problems with my Parker and Waterman pens leaking or at least getting this kind of funky layer of film on the bottom and sides of the nib by the time I finished the cartridge. I recently switched to bottles and my pens all write better now. My own recommendation would be to pick up a couple of converters and a few bottles of some decent ink. In the long run, it's cheaper as well, seeing as a bottle costs about as much as a couple of packs of cartridges and lasts a lot longer. The Levenger ink is good. Another place to order ink (and pens) online is www.fountainpenhospital.com. They also have a retail store in NYC. As for the whole Porsche discussion (below), while expensive pens are certainly nice, there are perfectly functional ones available for a reasonable price. My own current daily-use pens are a Parker Frontier I picked up in a set with a bunch of ink cartridges and a converter for 20 in London when I was studying there and one of the Waterman Harley-Davidson models (all I have to say is flame-job) that I got for $20 at the Fountain Pen Hospital when I was in New York last Winter. My girlfriend has loads of pens, from old collectible and expensive limited editions down to $5 cheapies, and the ones she tends to use are the low-end to mid-price models.
You won't if you're using a ripper with decent error checking, unless the disc is damaged. However, if you rip the same disc on different drives using a program that doesn't account for offset will result in files with different MD5 sums. BTW, I say drives meaning drive models, although there is also some variation among individual drives. And yes, I've not only ripped a file multiple times and gotten the same MD5 sums, I've also burned it and ripped the burned copy and gotten the same MD5 as the original.
The drivers on the CD that came with my Rage 128 (Rage Fury card), if installed, will cause my machine to lock up when you try to boot it. I had to download newer drivers before I could even use the card. And even then, it was a good six months or so before they had a set that were relatively stable.
One big reason to use lossless encoding (besides the fact that some of us are picky) on live sources, even more than on studio recordings, is the fact that the recordings aren't as good.
Generally, live recordings contain more noise than an average rock record, the big two being recording noise (more in older tapes than newer ones, but still present) and audience noise. Noisier recordings suffer more from mp3 (or similar) compression than do cleaner ones. The first place you'll usually hear the compression artifacts is in the audience. If the recording has been transferred from an analog source, then it will also be audible in whatever tape hiss may be present.
Quite frankly, I find tape hiss less annoying and I burn all my stuff to CDR anyway, so I can listen to it in a room other than the one the computer is in (or in my car).
So, yes, there is a reason. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean there isn't one.
Metallica has allowed recording of their concerts and trading of live recordings since the "black album" tour. Back when they were just starting to suck. Personally, I wouldn't buy their new album just because it sucks, like everything else they've done since the late 1980's.
While recording and releasing a concert quickly is not a really difficult thing to pull off, selling CDs at the venue immediately after is a bit more difficult.
Phish is already offering all of their new concerts online. They record every show to a 48 track setup, any, and they've been releasing concerts off of their soundman's reference DATs. The sound of those discs is pretty good.
What they do now is send a clone of the DAT off to the people running their website, who transfer the show, chop the files up, compress them and put them online.
However, to be able to sell discs right after the show, those doing it would have to bring in an awful lot of CD recorders, all hooked into the soundboard feed. I would imagine quality control would be a bit difficult for a couple of reasons. One is all the discs would be running live. Another is it's difficult enough to set up a good distribution amplifier setup for the large number of CD burners that would have to be used, much less one that is portable. I also don't see how they could offer discs "five minutes" after the show, seeing as it would take longer than that to unload and case a few hundred burners.
There are a lot of good reasons to try it, though. There are a lot of people out there willing to pay for recordings of concerts, as evidenced by the healthy bootleg industry. A few artists (Pearl Jam, String Cheese Incident) have done decently selling limited pressings of entire tours. The Who offered CDs of all the shows from their last tour for sale online. This seems like a good deal for distribution as it won't take up a lot of rack space in the stores, but the shipping costs can get expensive. There is also the impulse-buy factor. Bands or promoters could get a lot of extra sales, I think, selling a disc of the show as a souvenier before the concertgoers even leave the building.
In short, I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the not-too-distant future. It is possible to get better than bootleg quality out of this type of record and release program, but it won't be as good as the typical major label live album, but then again, they also wouldn't suffer from the overproduction and editing that those often have. And there is a lot of money to be made here.
So this is why, every time something goes wrong with my computer at work, I end up having to fix it myself after two different people from IT look at it, can't figure out what the problem is, and then never return or call back? Because I, the end-user, am a moron?
At work, I am constantly told that I am supposed to call IT to fix computer problems. When we call in problems, we're lucky if we get a call back or a visit the same day (the only quick response I've ever gotten was when I called to tell them that I'd had the klez virus emailed to me five times in two days from one of the campus news LISTSERVs). So, I'm supposed to wait for a day for someone to come look at my machine to figure out why Groupwise won't load. Which, oddly enough, is something I would have thought would have been checked when it was installed. And then I'm supposed to wait another two days until another guy who's actually been trained for this piece of software gets back from vacation. Of course, this guy never showed up and I figured out the problem myself and fixed it (turned out I didn't have the correct version of a library on my system). It was lucky for me that the web access feature was working or I wouldn't been able to check my email for four days while I was waiting for them to fix it.
The only problem members of my department had when we upgraded to Windows XP last Summer was that only two of us could print. This wasn't because we were the only ones who could figure out where the print button was in the new system, but because they hadn't bothered to install the print drivers and spooler on everyone's machines when they did the upgrades and then it took them two weeks to come back and do it.
And as for the problems we have with our (newish - it was changed before I got there) system. Those mostly stem from the fact that two people who can barely run a Windows system decide what software we're going to use for our book and POS system. Not only is the system badly designed from a functionality standpoint, but the thing crashes constantly and is set up poorly. In December, the system would go down every time our supervisor tried to generate shelf tags for our sales floor (I work in a college bookstore). After not taking our problem seriously for over a week, a lot of screaming finally got them to look at the problem and find that the system didn't have enough memory or hard drive space to generate the whole file. I was never quite clear on which it was as I was off for the second week of the fiasco and heard it all thirdhand when I returned. And if that all wasn't enough, the vendor has a bad habit of upgrading the system without telling us, usually breaking it at critical times, like the week before a semester starts.
Treating all users as idiots does no one any good. My grandfather has trouble operating a computer, but I'll bet he could whip your ass at rebuilding a carburetor.
on the artist, the label, the studio, etc. Even among people I know personally, the figure has varied widely. The most my own band ever paid in studio costs to record anything was when we paid $140 to record a six-song EP. I know one band who had a pretty decent regional following and were together for ten years. They released several recordings, but a lot of them were done really cheaply because they knew people who would cut them breaks.
Two hardcore/metal bands I knew a couple of years ago from the same town each put an album out around the same time. One spent a couple of weekends at a small local studio and put together a full-length CD for about $1200. The other, who had hired a manager and thought they were going to go big time, took a month off, put themselves up in an apartment in a town 30 miles away and recorded an album in a "big" studio for $30,000. They never did get the big break. The two guys who wrote most of the material left the band because they refused to quit their jobs to do the joke of a "tour" the band set up after the CD came out.
The band i farm, with whom my former band used to play shows, went from making self-released records at the same $20/hour studio we recorded at and being recorded by their friends in recording school to recently doing an album for a small indie label for $6000 at the Blasting Room (run by Stephen Egerton and Bill Stevenson from All/the Descendants).
The point is, it's a really difficult question to answer. Really big bands spend a lot of time in really big, expensive studios working on albums. It's incredibly easy to run the cost of a recording up to the $200,000 mark or past when you're speding six months in a $2000/day studio in another country (thereby incurring housing costs as well). Or working in multiple studios. And bringing in guests to play. And hiring three different engineers to mix, etc.
As for markup. When I was working in a CD store (1994), we, as an independent store, paid the one-stops an average of between 8.99 and 10.99 for discs which had a usual retail of about $15.99-$16.99 at the local chain store (it was a big deal at the time that the new Tom Petty greatest hits album cost us $12.49 and was going for $17.99 in the chain stores).
Of course, as an independent, we had to undercut the chains by selling the discs for $13.99-14.99. And, of course, as an independent, we also had less buying power and had to buy discs through a middle man. The chains who were charging more for the same discs got them far cheaper directly from the labels by the truckload.
One more thing to consider as far as major labels are concerned is that their idea of artist development is to throw a bunch of money at a whole group of performers and hope that one or two of them make it big. They charge the associated costs to make the album back to the artists and give them all a big advance. A couple make it and actually pull in enough money to cover those costs and make some money. The rest never see any money past their advance because they aren't paid royalties until the album breaks even. Some make several albums that never break even and just go deeper into debt with each album.
The best thing that happens to some indie bands that jump to majors and don't get big is to get dumped from the label because by the time that happens they're usually so far in debt they'll never get out. If they've still managed to keep a good portion of their fanbase, they can go back to making cheaper albums for a small label again (see: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones).
The interesting thing about the music industry is that albums are like films. If you keep the budget down, you don't have to get a lot of business to make money. Chasing Amy was Kevin Smith's most successful film not because it brought in the highest box office take. Chasing Amy, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back all made about $30 million at the box office, but Chasing Amy was the only one that cost less than a million to produce. Similarly, Elektra stays with a band like Phish, who refuse to promote themselves to a wider audience and don't sell a lot of albums because they sell a steady amount of albums and they don't spend a lot of money making those albums.
Good luck. The University where I work still insists that we use NS4. Newer versions of Netscape, Mozilla, IE, etc. are all "unsupported." In fact, recently the IT people got my department in trouble for upgrading to NS6 because we needed it to do our work. They discovered the upgrades during an update (from Win 95) to Windows XP.