All of that could true (i'm not going to get into the details of your delusional post)... AND Iran could be up to something that violates the NPT they signed. There was an Iran before Bush, and (just maybe) there will be one after. Just because you hate Bush, doesn't mean that the Iranian gov't doesn't mean us harm. Bush's idiocy and Iran's theocracy seeking WMD are not mutually exclusive.
If Bush did nothing about Iran, and Iran does something bad in 2009... "Bush let Iran build nukes!". Looks like a lose/lose proposition. Act, and he's an evil dolt. Do nothing, calamity strikes, and Bush is still an evil dolt.
Are you an brilliant troll or are you really that blinded by partisanship?
Not for several years. So far we have a design and a plan, but no actual sites.
Russia is pissed at Poland because they've sided with the West and Russia can't be loved so they'll go for feared. Russia needs an enemy too, it seems.
"And snooping is almost strictly detrimental. If you feel the need to snoop, you have another concern to address."
So true.
i had a gf a few years ago who was fidelity challenged (manic-depressive or bi-polar) and from time to time i'd snoop. Every time i did, i found something bad. What i should have done is thought... if i'm about to do this, it's either because i smell smoke or because i want to. Either way, it bodes poorly.
As if the rightness or wrongness of something depends upon how many people accept it. The majority can be wrong. Just because a use is accepted in everyday use, doesn't make it right. If you have to cite definition 3 to defend use of a word....
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. - George Orwell
There's evolution and there's corruption. By allowing the corruption of the word hacker, people who are hackers in the correct sense are lumped in with those in the incorrect sense. Now we have to come up with another word for those who are hackers in the original sense... when we already had words for both! By allowing copyright infringement to be called piracy, they are associating it with something far more sinister than kids swapping files. If some Germans were Nazis, it would be wrong to call all Germans Nazis, wouldn't it? Unless we water down what we originally meant by Nazi.
We think in language. Propagandists use this against us all the time. "It's not murder... it's execution."
Another clip from Orwell:
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
____
An Anonymous Coward saying something silly throwing in some childish ad hominem passes for insightful?
At least have the courage of your convictions. If you're you going to slam someone, don't hide behind anonymity where you can't be held accountable. You could try posting like an adult, and then you could make your point without cowering.
Alas, the ignorant shape the use of our language more than anyone. You're right about Phreaker, but who knows that term beyond geeks? The term hacker and pirate are completely corrupted from their rightful meanings (along with acronym, utilize and impact). Whenever i try to point out the correct use of words i'm met with apologists and insults.
Chick isn't inherently derogatory on the part of the speaker. i use it to mean 'a female who is neither a girl, nor an old lady'. My girlfriend uses it the same way. Think of it as the English equivalent to Mademoiselle. On it's own it is as derogatory as dude. If the speaker uses it as a pejorative or to be dismissive, that it the speaker, not the word. People can do that with any word. Just as anything can be taken too far or misused. Put in the hands of humans and something bad might happen. If a listener takes offense when none is intended, that's on the listener. Sometimes people LIKE to be offended. They get off on it. Some people act offended to impress their friends, or some chick at the bar. "Oh, he's a feminist".
And it is odd that we make special note of achievement when a 'minority' does something. For some reason we care that [person] is the first [label] to do something. If a white guy does something, so what? If it is novel that someone of x group did something, like say, a child composing a concerto, then sure... mention away. Otherwise i think by now we as a culture should be over it. Never underestimate the power of guilt.
If the No Fly List is bad and we scrap it, what then should we do to thwart future hijackings?
How do we go from security theatre to security?
- Aside from strategic efforts like... trying to make them hate us less, how do you guys recommend that we protect ourselves from the next attack on the tactical level? If some group has decided to crash a plane into the Hoover Dam, how do we prevent it? Or do we say "Life is hard, wear a cup. Our liberties are more important"?
- Also, if investigating potential terrorists is bad, what about our investigations into organized crime? Should the law wait until a crime is already committed to do something? When does someone cross the line between innocent to suspect? After there's a smoldering crater, or when they do something a would be terrorist is likely to do/that previous terrorists have done?
i wonder what such practices do to the gene pool. You'd have fewer genetic combinations, less diversity.
And what if the wives felt they wanted to bring in an extra husband? i'd have less trouble with polygamy if it worked both ways. Or, why bother with marriage at all? Just live with whomever, breed with whomever and keep rituals and paperwork out of it.
Still, there is the matter of what do the unmarried men in such cultures do?
In my own life, the happiest i've ever been was dating two or more women at a time. Each addressed different needs that neither could meet individually. For a few months between the two of them, i had it all. Twas a wonderful time for me. No one was being used or lied to, or even prevented from doing what they wanted (it wasn't a double standard of I can but they can't).
One bit worth noting is that of the 30,000 albums released in a year, only about 30 go platinum (1 million?). To me that suggests that there are many talented artists who just haven't been blessed by the powers that be. Some of those 30 platinum albums might have utterly flopped without massive marketing campaigns.
i can't vouch for it being literally nothing, but 2M sales should net them something.
As i said yesterday, data (and anything that can be converted to data) is worthless. Finite Demand/Virtually Infinite Supply = $0.00 Value. Sell something that is finite, like t-shirts and tickets to shows.
While we're at it, stop forcing artists to make albums. Release a few singles with B-sides (another obsolete idea, but that's what we call them), then once in while bundle them and call it an album. There is no reason to require a band to record 3 singles and 8 tracks of crap no one wants to hear. If the artists wants to do some kind of conceptual album like Santana's Supernatural of Floyd's "The Wall", so be it. But there is no *real* need to record an hour of music when all you have is 3 singles. Abandoning the album requirement will take pressure off the artists. Release something when it is ready. Think of all the studio time wasted on one hit wonders. For the listener, it means buying only what you want instead of the other stuff. Win/Win!
This is one area of life where letting the market decide might be the right thing to do. Get the RIAA out of the picture. Let artists retain the copyright of their own work (novel idea, huh?). Treat the cost of recording as part of the advertising budget. Let file sharing be your marketing campaign. Let servers be your warehouse. If you're worth a shit, your next show will be sold out and angsty teens will be buying your shirt at hot topic.
btw: piracy is armed robbery on a boat. Pirates often killed people. Napster and Torrent haven't, AFAIK. Well, aside from Kid Rock: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28467
Not preheated specifically, but the general abuse of pre-. It's in advertising and board rooms across the US. Watch a few commercials. Go to a meeting. Read a cookbook.
Instead of having text books, the prof could just post a series of links to sites that offer the desired info. Maybe it's a wikipedia article, maybe it's a google doc he or a colleague wrote.
Ubuntu can run on a spiral ring notebook? It would make more sense to install it on a laptop. If it is pre-installed, that would mean that it is NOT installed. Pre means before (not 'in advance'). As in... not yet. Pre Civil War means before the Civil War, not Civil War already in progress. Pre- is for events... not verbs. A machine with no operating system installed at all would be "pre"-installed. A "pre"-heated oven would be room temperature.
Marketing and MBA speak is killing the English language faster than a failing education system and buggy spell check programs.
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals... zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.
Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work... they can pay the mortgage forever but they'll never own the house. Like I said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a
1) That's not our intention, or at least the intention of most anti-RIAA folk. i want the artist to be paid. The major labels gives the artist a tiny slice of the record sales. New artists often end up OWING money from the album's production and only make money when they tour. i WANT the artist to get the money i pay, not the label and not the lawyers and the RIAA. Artists can shift their income source to merch and ticket sales. Jonathon Coulton gives his music away and is making a good living off tix and merch.
2) Are you republican or libertarian? Willingly signed != understood. And does not mean that the contract was fair. If someone waved wealth, fame and hot chicks under your nose you'd sign your lungs away. If you struggled for years to be discovered and finally had a chance to reach a bigger audience, you'd take it because their lawyers would tell you "it's a standard contract".
3) It is harassment. It's also extortion. "Pay us 10K$ now, or we'll keep you in court and out of work for a year or two and then take the 10K$".
4) First of all, it's not piracy. It's copyright infringement. Piracy is armed robbery on a boat. It IS free advertising. Many artists are realizing that getting people to HEAR their work is the first step to getting people to buy it, to buy tickets and merch.
5) What about people who mindlessly blather about the RIAA protecting artists when very little of what RIAA collects will go to the artist? The RIAA cares about RIAA, not the artist. The best thing RIAA could do for artist is to disband and let the industry move into the late 20th century.
6) Data is WORTHLESS. If it can be made into data, it is WORTHLESS. Music, no matter how much it costs to produce, is worth one second of FiOS band width. Data can be reproduced with perfect fidelity, infinitely. As the cost of storage and bandwidth decline, so too must the value of data. If i sent a song to 30 people, and they sent it to 30 people and so on and so on, it could reach a metric fuck ton of people in a matter of days. No trucks, no stock boys, no cashiers, no lawyers, no middlemen trying to profit off the talent of the artist. Any finite demand divided by infinite supply equals a cost as near to zero as makes no odds. Sell me something i can't download, like the experience of seeing them live or an autographed copy of the album. Something that is, you know... worth something.
It's OVER. It was over in 1998, it's just taken a decade for an antiquated and exploitative industry to realize it.
And the artists will be fine. Those that deserve wealth and fame will have it. The only people losing are the label executives and stock holders.
PlanetSide manages the 'vault' thing by saying everything is built out of nanites that arrange themselves into the desired pattern.
Also, everything is very replaceable (spawn another one, or take someone else's) and everyone has access to same stuff, more or less. A newbie can get a tank, a 5 year vet can get a tank. And it's the same tank per empire (faction). The difference is that the 5 year vet can also get an Air to Ground attack fighter, hack enemy vehicles and so on. Rank gives you flexibility. This way there's no ganking of the n00bs, the n00b's tank is just as good. Whether he knows what to do with it and if he has friends, determines the outcome.
Death is fairly meaningless in PS, it just sends you to the back of the battle and delays you a bit. But it is an FPS. Death comes pretty quickly in 100+ vs. 100+ vs. 100+ battles.
i've heard that in Eve one spends most of their time gathering and flying through empty space with bugger all to do. When you've built your bad ass ship that took you weeks, someone can destroy it in a matter of minutes. Is that the case? i've mostly heard about it from people who disliked it. Can't recall talking to anyone who did like it.
Is that the same 'Band of Brothers' as the 'Band of Failures' in PlanetSide?
Yeah, cause going to the moon 16 times is way more important that forming two new democracies in the middle east, or overthrowing brutally repressive regimes, one of which invaded two neighbors and gave the UN the finger for 12 years and the other harbored Al Queda.
Quick, mod me troll/flamebait so no one can read this!
Slashdot Mirror
All of that could true (i'm not going to get into the details of your delusional post)... AND Iran could be up to something that violates the NPT they signed. There was an Iran before Bush, and (just maybe) there will be one after. Just because you hate Bush, doesn't mean that the Iranian gov't doesn't mean us harm. Bush's idiocy and Iran's theocracy seeking WMD are not mutually exclusive.
If Bush did nothing about Iran, and Iran does something bad in 2009... "Bush let Iran build nukes!". Looks like a lose/lose proposition. Act, and he's an evil dolt. Do nothing, calamity strikes, and Bush is still an evil dolt.
Are you an brilliant troll or are you really that blinded by partisanship?
Not for several years. So far we have a design and a plan, but no actual sites.
Russia is pissed at Poland because they've sided with the West and Russia can't be loved so they'll go for feared. Russia needs an enemy too, it seems.
"And snooping is almost strictly detrimental. If you feel the need to snoop, you have another concern to address."
So true.
i had a gf a few years ago who was fidelity challenged (manic-depressive or bi-polar) and from time to time i'd snoop. Every time i did, i found something bad. What i should have done is thought... if i'm about to do this, it's either because i smell smoke or because i want to. Either way, it bodes poorly.
+1 Informative for you (if i had points handy)!
See? Apologism and insults.
As if the rightness or wrongness of something depends upon how many people accept it. The majority can be wrong. Just because a use is accepted in everyday use, doesn't make it right. If you have to cite definition 3 to defend use of a word....
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
- George Orwell
http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html
'But languages change'
There's evolution and there's corruption. By allowing the corruption of the word hacker, people who are hackers in the correct sense are lumped in with those in the incorrect sense. Now we have to come up with another word for those who are hackers in the original sense... when we already had words for both! By allowing copyright infringement to be called piracy, they are associating it with something far more sinister than kids swapping files. If some Germans were Nazis, it would be wrong to call all Germans Nazis, wouldn't it? Unless we water down what we originally meant by Nazi.
We think in language. Propagandists use this against us all the time. "It's not murder... it's execution."
Another clip from Orwell:
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
____
An Anonymous Coward saying something silly throwing in some childish ad hominem passes for insightful?
At least have the courage of your convictions. If you're you going to slam someone, don't hide behind anonymity where you can't be held accountable. You could try posting like an adult, and then you could make your point without cowering.
Alas, the ignorant shape the use of our language more than anyone. You're right about Phreaker, but who knows that term beyond geeks? The term hacker and pirate are completely corrupted from their rightful meanings (along with acronym, utilize and impact). Whenever i try to point out the correct use of words i'm met with apologists and insults.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=650135&cid=24658053
Chick isn't inherently derogatory on the part of the speaker. i use it to mean 'a female who is neither a girl, nor an old lady'. My girlfriend uses it the same way. Think of it as the English equivalent to Mademoiselle. On it's own it is as derogatory as dude. If the speaker uses it as a pejorative or to be dismissive, that it the speaker, not the word. People can do that with any word. Just as anything can be taken too far or misused. Put in the hands of humans and something bad might happen. If a listener takes offense when none is intended, that's on the listener. Sometimes people LIKE to be offended. They get off on it. Some people act offended to impress their friends, or some chick at the bar. "Oh, he's a feminist".
And it is odd that we make special note of achievement when a 'minority' does something. For some reason we care that [person] is the first [label] to do something. If a white guy does something, so what? If it is novel that someone of x group did something, like say, a child composing a concerto, then sure... mention away. Otherwise i think by now we as a culture should be over it. Never underestimate the power of guilt.
If the No Fly List is bad and we scrap it, what then should we do to thwart future hijackings?
How do we go from security theatre to security?
- Aside from strategic efforts like... trying to make them hate us less, how do you guys recommend that we protect ourselves from the next attack on the tactical level? If some group has decided to crash a plane into the Hoover Dam, how do we prevent it? Or do we say "Life is hard, wear a cup. Our liberties are more important"?
- Also, if investigating potential terrorists is bad, what about our investigations into organized crime? Should the law wait until a crime is already committed to do something? When does someone cross the line between innocent to suspect? After there's a smoldering crater, or when they do something a would be terrorist is likely to do/that previous terrorists have done?
i wonder what such practices do to the gene pool. You'd have fewer genetic combinations, less diversity.
And what if the wives felt they wanted to bring in an extra husband? i'd have less trouble with polygamy if it worked both ways. Or, why bother with marriage at all? Just live with whomever, breed with whomever and keep rituals and paperwork out of it.
Still, there is the matter of what do the unmarried men in such cultures do?
In my own life, the happiest i've ever been was dating two or more women at a time. Each addressed different needs that neither could meet individually. For a few months between the two of them, i had it all. Twas a wonderful time for me. No one was being used or lied to, or even prevented from doing what they wanted (it wasn't a double standard of I can but they can't).
What was that joke?
The late [so and so] had 17 wives.
Wow, he must have been happy.
I said WIVES, not girlfriends.
Jerbs!
i always heard that as god, not gun.
Ah well. Excuse me while i kiss this guy.
The sky... kiss the sky. My bad.
Has Maury Markowitz shown up to tell us how bad we are for wanting to steal music and about how artists will starve without the RIAA?
Here's a link to Courtney Love's rant that i posted yesterday in the Electra v Barker thread:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
One bit worth noting is that of the 30,000 albums released in a year, only about 30 go platinum (1 million?). To me that suggests that there are many talented artists who just haven't been blessed by the powers that be. Some of those 30 platinum albums might have utterly flopped without massive marketing campaigns.
In other news, Jared Leto's band sold 2 million copies of its album and received nothing for it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7569924.stm
i can't vouch for it being literally nothing, but 2M sales should net them something.
As i said yesterday, data (and anything that can be converted to data) is worthless. Finite Demand/Virtually Infinite Supply = $0.00 Value. Sell something that is finite, like t-shirts and tickets to shows.
While we're at it, stop forcing artists to make albums. Release a few singles with B-sides (another obsolete idea, but that's what we call them), then once in while bundle them and call it an album. There is no reason to require a band to record 3 singles and 8 tracks of crap no one wants to hear. If the artists wants to do some kind of conceptual album like Santana's Supernatural of Floyd's "The Wall", so be it. But there is no *real* need to record an hour of music when all you have is 3 singles. Abandoning the album requirement will take pressure off the artists. Release something when it is ready. Think of all the studio time wasted on one hit wonders. For the listener, it means buying only what you want instead of the other stuff. Win/Win!
This is one area of life where letting the market decide might be the right thing to do. Get the RIAA out of the picture. Let artists retain the copyright of their own work (novel idea, huh?). Treat the cost of recording as part of the advertising budget. Let file sharing be your marketing campaign. Let servers be your warehouse. If you're worth a shit, your next show will be sold out and angsty teens will be buying your shirt at hot topic.
btw: piracy is armed robbery on a boat. Pirates often killed people. Napster and Torrent haven't, AFAIK. Well, aside from Kid Rock:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28467
Not preheated specifically, but the general abuse of pre-. It's in advertising and board rooms across the US. Watch a few commercials. Go to a meeting. Read a cookbook.
Instead of having text books, the prof could just post a series of links to sites that offer the desired info. Maybe it's a wikipedia article, maybe it's a google doc he or a colleague wrote.
{Off topic pedantry}
Ubuntu can run on a spiral ring notebook? It would make more sense to install it on a laptop. If it is pre-installed, that would mean that it is NOT installed. Pre means before (not 'in advance'). As in... not yet. Pre Civil War means before the Civil War, not Civil War already in progress. Pre- is for events... not verbs. A machine with no operating system installed at all would be "pre"-installed. A "pre"-heated oven would be room temperature.
Marketing and MBA speak is killing the English language faster than a failing education system and buggy spell check programs.
Courtney Love
June 14, 2000
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.
Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work ... they can pay the mortgage forever but they'll never own the house. Like I said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a
1) That's not our intention, or at least the intention of most anti-RIAA folk. i want the artist to be paid. The major labels gives the artist a tiny slice of the record sales. New artists often end up OWING money from the album's production and only make money when they tour. i WANT the artist to get the money i pay, not the label and not the lawyers and the RIAA. Artists can shift their income source to merch and ticket sales. Jonathon Coulton gives his music away and is making a good living off tix and merch.
2) Are you republican or libertarian? Willingly signed != understood. And does not mean that the contract was fair. If someone waved wealth, fame and hot chicks under your nose you'd sign your lungs away. If you struggled for years to be discovered and finally had a chance to reach a bigger audience, you'd take it because their lawyers would tell you "it's a standard contract".
3) It is harassment. It's also extortion. "Pay us 10K$ now, or we'll keep you in court and out of work for a year or two and then take the 10K$".
4) First of all, it's not piracy. It's copyright infringement. Piracy is armed robbery on a boat. It IS free advertising. Many artists are realizing that getting people to HEAR their work is the first step to getting people to buy it, to buy tickets and merch.
5) What about people who mindlessly blather about the RIAA protecting artists when very little of what RIAA collects will go to the artist? The RIAA cares about RIAA, not the artist. The best thing RIAA could do for artist is to disband and let the industry move into the late 20th century.
6) Data is WORTHLESS. If it can be made into data, it is WORTHLESS. Music, no matter how much it costs to produce, is worth one second of FiOS band width. Data can be reproduced with perfect fidelity, infinitely. As the cost of storage and bandwidth decline, so too must the value of data. If i sent a song to 30 people, and they sent it to 30 people and so on and so on, it could reach a metric fuck ton of people in a matter of days. No trucks, no stock boys, no cashiers, no lawyers, no middlemen trying to profit off the talent of the artist. Any finite demand divided by infinite supply equals a cost as near to zero as makes no odds. Sell me something i can't download, like the experience of seeing them live or an autographed copy of the album. Something that is, you know... worth something.
It's OVER. It was over in 1998, it's just taken a decade for an antiquated and exploitative industry to realize it.
And the artists will be fine. Those that deserve wealth and fame will have it. The only people losing are the label executives and stock holders.
But how will artists make a living if everyone is stealing music?!?! Have we learned nothing from the death of Kid Rock?
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28467
+1 Informative. Thanks :)
PlanetSide manages the 'vault' thing by saying everything is built out of nanites that arrange themselves into the desired pattern.
Also, everything is very replaceable (spawn another one, or take someone else's) and everyone has access to same stuff, more or less. A newbie can get a tank, a 5 year vet can get a tank. And it's the same tank per empire (faction). The difference is that the 5 year vet can also get an Air to Ground attack fighter, hack enemy vehicles and so on. Rank gives you flexibility. This way there's no ganking of the n00bs, the n00b's tank is just as good. Whether he knows what to do with it and if he has friends, determines the outcome.
Death is fairly meaningless in PS, it just sends you to the back of the battle and delays you a bit. But it is an FPS. Death comes pretty quickly in 100+ vs. 100+ vs. 100+ battles.
LoL. i'm going to share that with my PlanetSide outfit. They'll get a good laugh.
It would be interesting to see a time line showing subscribership change with markers for in and out of game events.
(btw, meteors and bullets impact things, events have an effect)
i've heard that in Eve one spends most of their time gathering and flying through empty space with bugger all to do. When you've built your bad ass ship that took you weeks, someone can destroy it in a matter of minutes. Is that the case? i've mostly heard about it from people who disliked it. Can't recall talking to anyone who did like it.
Is that the same 'Band of Brothers' as the 'Band of Failures' in PlanetSide?
1) Will Joey ever get a 1337 handle?
2) Would journalism improve if the organizations were non-profit?
Yeah, cause going to the moon 16 times is way more important that forming two new democracies in the middle east, or overthrowing brutally repressive regimes, one of which invaded two neighbors and gave the UN the finger for 12 years and the other harbored Al Queda.
Quick, mod me troll/flamebait so no one can read this!
A big thank you to the folks who responded to my question. i'd mod you all informative but i don't have any points and i've already posted.
Please hook up these folks with some karma if you have some handy!