Now, when I "pirate" an mp3 off of Napster, the only resource I'm using is bandwidth, and I already pay for all the bandwidth I can get by my monthly ISP fee (or college tuition fee, as the case may be).
A very cliched and fashionable - but very wrong - assertion. Since you are not knowledgeable about how the industry operates, and since you do not understand the difference between the physical media and the content, I'll inform you. Records are produced under a certain expectation of profits. Suppose it costs $500,000 to record an album (a typical symphonic recording). I am counting costs of professional musicians, recording studio costs, the conductor, royalties, and the like. Now this record may be cut on the expectation of selling 50,000 copies of the record (an outrageously high number for a symphonic record, but bear with me). So that is $10 to record, $1 to phyiscally reproduce, and $4 mark-up for the retailer (a typical scenario: see this site for all of the numbers.
So now when you go to pirate the MP3 of the record, the value you are stealing is $10 which is your share of the professional services which contributed to making the record. You are not stealing the $1 which it costs to physically produce, obviously. But you _are_ stealing recording resources, professional musician's services, and royalties. See, since the record had an expectation of a certain number of buyers, the costs were allocated to cover them.
Since you stole the content on the record, you have stolen the services which went into producing the music. This is not a tangible thing, but a semi-abstract thing - which is why it is difficult for you and so many other slashdot readers to comprehend, but it is every bit as much legitimate theft as stealing a physical artifact. You are affecting people just the same way: if the companies sell fewer records because people steal them, they will produce fewer new records, and then the professional musicians and recording engineers will have fewer gigs and will suffer all the same.
And advertising policy has exactly what do with production cost? Since you're really new to this, you may want to check out this site documenting the cost of CD production.
Record executives hate to admit that they essentially rape their artists. And I'm not talking about the Backstreet Boys and N Sync, who are no-talents and deserve to be raped, but real artists who produce great music and see most of the revenue from that music fall directly into the pockets of those execs that treat them like slaves.
A cliched, trendy, and fashionable view fueled out of ingorance. The music industry _built_ popular music. This genre of music, by definition, does not exist without records. Can you please rattle off a list of popular music stars before 1900? You can't because there were NOT any. You can argue about taste, but Metallica would not exist without the record industry (and they openly acknowledge this - Lars did in his interview). Without the record industry, rock would not exist. Jazz would not exist. Rap wouldn't exist. None of the artists who make these musics would exist. The music industry has made various talented artists extremely rich and also extremely popular and extremely famous. Is this raping? There is a cost to fame, to be sure, but that's what many in the industry are looking for.
The future, in executive minds is very clouded because they know that it's quite possible that some of their best, and most abused artists will up and leave them, starting up very profitable distribution channels via MP3.
You mean like Metallica and Dr. Dre?
A lot of artists are already making pretty good livings off of MP3 distribution and the record industry has no control over them.
Proof please? Name ONE musician who has achieved national stardom, without money from a record company.
As an aside, MP3.com actually does "get it" and understands the necessity of a record company, and is acting like one in that they do invest money into musicians for professional recording studios, promotion, and the like. MP3.com is not THAT different from a record company. Last I checked, nobody had any beef with independent artists putting out their own music.
They need to get our of the 1920's mentality and realize the digital age has new rules.
Yes, but the people who currently pirate MP3's need to learn the new rules also. I still come across people who are so clueless that they do not understand the cost of CD production independent of the physical media, and this is essentially the moral justification for stealing music. The pirates need to understand who is paying for their content, and the economic system which promotes it, or they won't have any more music to steal. Currently none of the people who steal music on-line understand how it got there.
One of the major attractions of the internet to some people is the prospect of anonymity - creating an online persona to experiment and discuss what you wouldn't normally in a public, non-anonymous forum. The whole idea of not knowing exactly who you're talking to is both a blessing and a curse (is that really a dog on the other end?), and it's what helps many people who are normally pretty introverted actually express themselves. Anonymity does not propagate stealing, it permits privacy and expression.
Ah, you don't "get it". Anonymity most deifintely DOES promote illegal activities. That's his point. Note that this doesn't mean anonymity should not be ALLOWED, but it is merely commenting on its effects. You have more expression, more freedom to experiment, and therefore more of a chance to do the illegal. I guarantee you that most of the people who download kiddie porn from the net are not the type of people who would have traded said pictures in dark allies 20 years ago. Likewise, most of the people who pirate MP3 would not go into Tower and hold the place up for CD's (the moral equivalent). Crime in the regular world would go up if there was anonymity in the real work also. Surely more people would resort to murder and rape and burglary if there was absolutely no way that your identity could be linked to the crime?
Fear of being caught is a major deterrent; with anonymity it is impossible to be caught (by definition). How many people who pirate MP3's would continue if their identity would be linked to each packet they transferred across the network, available to the public (including the copyright holder of the stolen work?)
Are we sure that the pricing isn't the issue? Food for thought: The price of a CD, in 1985 dollars is the same as the price of a CD today. Why? CD's were inflated in cost upon release to recouperate R&D. The supply was low, the price was high. Record execs promised CD prices would go down. Maybe they meant to say their profits would go up, as the cost of making CD's for them has gone DOWN.
The cost of a CD in 1985 dollars is most definitely quite LESS than a CD is 2000 dollars. In absolute dollars, the price of a CD has gown down in the last 15 years. Inflation was approximately 50% in that time, so CD prices have been lowered by approximately 50% in the last 15 years.
If you think that the cost of CD production should go down, then you do not understand the economics of the music industry. The cost of physically producing the CD is a tiny portion of the cost of the CD, and most certainly has gone down since 1985. However, in 1985 most CD's were merely transfers of albums. Almost none were even digitally remastered. Nowadays, any CD re-issue is digitally re-mastered, comes with extra bonus tracks, and has lavish carefully researched notes. You get considerably more than what you got 15 years ago, despite paying less. And that's just for re-issues. 15 years ago, most new albums were targetted at vinyl, not CD. Now they are all targeted at CD. This means twice the running length, as well as superior (and more expensive) recording techniques.
Basically, if you want the cost of producing a CD to remain constant (or go down) from 1985 to 2000, that means that we would all be listening to CD's 35 minutes long, record in analog, and not remastered for digital audio. You like that? Personally, I am happy with the nice 70 minute CD's, recorded in digital, with all of the extra bonus tracks, for a cost substantially less (with inflation) than it was 15 years ago. So what exactkt are you whining about?
You are mis-informed. The "big 5" companies sell 80% of the records, not 99%. Major difference. Additionally, even if one company had 80% that would not be considered a monopoly, but the fact that there are five companies shows that there is nothing close to a monopoly. At least when monopoly used to mean "only seller in market" instead of its present day definition of "corporation whose business practices I do not agree with".
4% is extremely severe when you are talking about the economy. When the NASDAQ drops 4% or more, it is considered a huge drop and cause for concern. If any big companies sales dropped by 4% there would be a major sell-off and the stock would absolutely tank. If a company's sales dropped any more than 4% in a year, the stock would probably drop to zero and be de-listed from the market. I'd sure like to know how you get off saying 4% is not severe.
Nice theory, but that doesn't explain why the most frequently pirated artists on Napster are Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Britney Spears. If people think that the music is crap and won't buy it, then why are they still listening to it and illegally stealing it?
You need to be beaten with a cluestick if you think Napster is the only significant way of pirating MP3's. I knew people who stopped buying CD's in 1997, and there used to be all sorts of web sites with MP3 wares, and they have always been transferred over chat rooms and the like. Not to mention CD copying (which became a mass-mainstream activity around that time also)
The most compelling statistic in the article was the fact that in the highest bandwidth areas, sales were down over double what they were down in the lowest bandwidth areas. This sounds like a smoking gun to me. You can't use the on-line sales argument because it doesn't take significant bandwidth to access CDNOW and the like.
Of course you are comparing 1985 money to 2000 money. In the US, in 1985, records cost $10. Now in the US in 2000, CD's cost $15. Inflation in the past 15 years has been about 50%. Which makes the cost exactly on target.
This is not to mention that CD's hold substantially more music. A record could only handle 40 minutes, and a CD can handle 80 minutes. Most new albums take advantage of this, and most old albums include extra bonus tracks. So you could even argue that on a dollar/music basis, CD's are twice as cheap as records.
The price of recorded music has dropped significantly since its introduction a century ago. At the turn of the century an edison cylinder of Enrico Caruso cost a significant portion of a working man's one-week income. When 78's were introduced, only the rich could aford the 20-volume set which made up Beethoven's Ninth. When Hi-Fi records became available in the 50's, high quality music became available to the masses for dirt cheap. And the CD even more so. Nobody has a problem paying $10 for a movie (which is temporary pleasure), but whine about paying $15 for a CD (a lifetime of listening pleasure).
You need to provide proof that MP3's are helping record sales. This study suggests the opposite. Anecdotal evidence about what you bought and haven't bought does not constitute evidence. Other conclusions based on available data (c.f. my post about Metallica above) suggest that the overwhelming vast majority of Napster users do not buy the CD's distributed on-line.
You are correct. Most MP3 apologists (such as Hemos, inthe topof the article) see only one side of the issue, and consider anything remotely counter to the mass-cultural mainstream opinion that "MP3's help artists" to be FUD. Most have not thought critically about the effect that online piracy will have on the music industry, and most do not understand the industry. They just think that any new technology is good because it is new technology. By that logic, nuclear weapons should be available for anyone to buy on every street corner.
As I mentioned in a previous article, anybody who needs evidence that most people who download MP3's do not buy the CD need only look at the 300,000 people who illegally downloaded Metallica songs in the course of two days. This translates to 1,000,0000 CD's in one week, which is absolutely unprecedented. The actual sales of Metallica albums in that week was probably aout 50,000 which would mean that 1:60 Napster users bought Metallica.
And Napster is a tiny portion of the new ways to steal music. There is also rampant CD copying as well as other forms of online piracy, such as chat rooms, web sites, etc., etc.
I can name 1000 different record labels off of the top of my head, 995 of which are small, indepdent, and in no way associated with the RIAA. So how do you figure that there is "monopoly pricing"? One of the record stores featured in the article, Amoeba, sells records primarily from small companies.
Someone could write an OS which could read your mind and correctly predict your next action, have built in AI to be solve your personal problems, run on every architecture ever built, be completely scalable and reliable, and fit into 2k of RAM, and the first question out of everybody's mouth will be, "Duh...Is it POSIX compliant?"
Personally, POSIX compliance turns me off. Basically, POSIX is a euphemism for "Yet Another Unix Clone and the only applications which run on me are the same old boring Unix programs". You choose a new OS for new applications - if you want to run the same old POSIX crap, why not just use an existing POSIX platform?
But we all know that's a bunch of crap. Most people who are downloading MP3s aren't likely to buy the album at the price that the RIAA wants to charge for it. Many of the people who download the music and decide that they would be willing to pay full price for it do so.
Metallica claimed that 330,000 people downloaded their songs over the course of the weekend. 30,000 claimed it was a mistake, so let's assume that 300,000 were guilty as charged. A weekend is 2/7 of a week, so that 1,050,000 people who downloaded Metallica songs that week. Now, in the industry, selling 1,000,000 units in one _week_ is an _extremely_ hard task. This has only been done 3-4 times in the past, and only for brand new albums. I'm am not sure what the weekly sales for catalog albums in, but I would say 10,000 is probably a fairly liberal figure. So let's assume 10,000 of each Metallica album was sold that week. They have about 8 albums, so that's 80,000, compared to 1,000,000. That means the ratio of buyers:pirates is about 12:1. That's pretty damn significant. Using this data, I would give very little credence to the fact that "most people who pirate on Napster go out and buy the album".
This is actually the classic reason that monopolies are bad for consumers: the price for a good that maximizes profit for the monopoly results in fewer people getting the good than would receive it in a competitive market. Illegal music copying undoes some of the harm to consumers, albeit at cost to the RIAA monopoly.
There is no such corporation as the RIAA. Of the widest mis-conceptions of the music industry heard on slashdot, it is perhaps most clueless to talk about RIAA as a corporation. It makes just as much sense to say that the SPAA has a monopoly on software. The RIAA represents some of the members who are large record companies. OK - maybe they are a monopoly in representation.
Anybody who thinks there is a monopoloy in the music industry is seriously out of touch and needs a cluestick whopped across their head. Go to an independent music store and there are literally hundreds of different labels and 10,000's of different artists. The music industry is probably the most diverse of all mature industries in terms of the number of participants. I guess it is trendy and fashionable to label any company perceived as bad and evil as a monopoly even if it is completely baseless in reality.
On the other hand, most new CD's today only have one or two good songs.
Boulez' Mahler's Ninth has only one piece of music, but it is damn good. Of the over 1000 CD's I own, about 80% have no more than 1-2 bad songs. If you can't find CD's with good songs, you are probably listen to top 40 radio pop/rock music. Just because you are unable to take the effort to invesitgate the huge quantity of high quality music which is being produced today, doesn't mean the rest of us should suffer.
Why should I pay full price for a CD?
You do not set the price for a product. The manufacturer has a right to charge whatever price he sees fit. If you think an item is too expensive, don't buy it. The market will adjust.
Second, I think CD's are overpriced.
CD's are IMHO by far the best deal in entertainement. It's funny how people have no problem paying $7 for a 90 minute movie, or $30 for a two hour concert, or $100 for a three hour opera, but won't pay $15-$20 for a lifetime of listening pleasure. Some of the best memories of my life are of listening to recorded music. I paid $15 for Julie Miller's Broken Things, but it is easliy worth $1500 to me.
Drop the price a bit, bite the bone, and instead of making more profit/unit, make more profit/quantity.
It is amusing that every Slashdot poster knows more about the music industry, and how it should operate than the highly paid executives whose job it is to make the business profitable. For starters, demand of music is not infinite. If you lower the price to one cent, the demand will not increase 1500-fold. I am certain that years of marketing research have gone into the $15-$20 price point. It's called market equilbrium.
Even better, where are the genius record companies when you're looking for a place to _buy_ your MP3's? Nope, I can't find ane MP3's for sale on Metallica's website. Well gosh darn, instead of crying, DO SOMETHING!
You (again) do not seem to understand the basic fundamentals of economics. You cannot in a free society force an entity to sell something that he doesn't want to. You desire to cheap free downloadable music does not translate into a dictum that the music companies have to make all their music avaialble for free in MP3 format. Somehow I think the record companies know a lot more about what there doing that some little dork on slashdot does.
Most music does not consist of "songs" - that is a pop/rock thing. How about symphonies, concertos, sonatas, reels, and so forth? Or do you think all music besides pop/rock should be banned?
Should read : "I know it's unpopular with the record companies that musicians actually get paid for what they create. It's also unpopular with the record companies that their stranglehold on the means of distribution is eroding out from under them. Lowers cost of entry, democratizes exposure and distributions methods, yadda yadda yadda."
This is the case in EVERY line of work. Why does Ford profit from the cars that the engineers and auto-workers build? Why does IBM profit from computers than its engineers do? In any business, the people who own the business profit, and the workers simply get paid (and in some cases, stock, and then they are able profit also). The music industry is no different. The role of the profit-takers is the same as the record companies as it is for IBM and Ford: they invest money into projects which have the potential to be profitable (it is a risk). There is evidence to suggest that it is impossible for the recorded music industry to exist without large financial backers (c.f. the fact that nobody from MP3.com has become a star yet).
If MP3's seriously make a big dent in CD sales (say 20%), two businesses will be hurt the most:
(a) Record stores
Most record stores are small businesses, and independent. These record stores will go out of business, and only the super-mega-stores such as Tower and Virgin will exist if there is a downturn in CD sales.
(b) Independent record labels
These are also small businesses. Most survive on razor thin margins, and if a large dent in CD sales is made, only the Big 5 (or whatever it is this week) record companies will exist.
History shows that when a market shrinks, the big players are profitable enough to miss a few dollars, but the independents aren't (c.f. the computer industry in the 1980's). Anybody who is suggesting that people buy fewer CD's and pirate things off napster is promoting a musical world where only boy bands exist, only major record companies exist, and only big record stores exist.
Bands don't make their money from CD sales, record companies do.
Proof please?
Cds and videos are promotional tools to get people to go to CONCERTS, which is where the band makes their living.
Proof please? Every concert I have been to in the past five years has cost much less than a CD, and at the concert the artist is always selling their CD, and telling everybody in the audience, "Please buy my CD to support us".
No, it is necessary! The law is too complex for developers to understand. You guys are smart, I won't try to take that away from you, but I admit I don't know how to program, so why can't you admit that you don't know the first damn thing about law practice?
What you need to understand is that the average Slashdot reader thinks that he is Really Smart(tm), because he knows how to install Linux, write a PERL script, etc. Most of the readers tend to believe that they have crude computer skills which are better than some of the population, that they know more than EVERYBODY about EVERYTHING. The whole DeCSS/Napster fiascos are a perfect example, where the typical Slashdotter - despite having absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the entertainment industry - thinks fit to gauge the entire future of the how media should be consumed for all time. The readers believe because they understand the technical workings of a system, they somehow have the right to dictate how it will be used. This is somewhat akin to someone believing that we should bomb Sierra Leone, because he understands how a nuclear reaction works.
I've always wondered if other professions were similarly elitist. Do doctors sit around and talk about how stupid the non-doctors are, and how people are so stupid that they can't even figure out how to cure cancer, so they have to pay big bucks to doctors? Or is this pheonomenon unique among computer people?
What he doesn't get is that at the heart of free software is the contributions of lots of people. Users choose free software over commercial software, and users test that software and contribute bug fixes.
Proof please? Please prepare a breakdown of features in a major free software project (such as GCC or EMACS), and demonstrate that the "heart" of the project (let's define this as majority of features) is implemented by ordinary end-users and not the core development team (who are listed in the credits file). Please submit your response using lines of code, or major feature sets on a feature list, as indicators.
If you have no evidence, please retract your statement.
The whole fiasco with M$ concerns Win9x/NT's inadequacy, not its monopoly status as such.
Nothing could be further from the truth! This case has absolutely nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with locking competitors out. None of the allegations have anything to do whatsoever with quality. Linux itself is not of any more higher quality than Windows, and both are toys compared to VMS. Linux thrives on hype, marketing, unfair business practices (GNU license) just as much as Windows ever did.
I guarantee you people wouldn't be screaming 'Monopoly!' nearly as loudly if Red Hat or SuSe were taking Microsoft's place in the defendant's chair.
I would be shouting ten times as hard as the most vocal Microsoft hater, if Bug Hat were in the defendent's chair instead of Microsoft. Microsoft's software at least has some semblance of what the general masses want to use, but Bug Hat's doesn't. I think the average user would be much more repelled if forced to use Linux instead of Linux. There is a MASSIVE force of Unix and Linux haters in the technical/scientific community, and many of their arguments against it will be considerably more pronounced when it reaches the public.
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Now, when I "pirate" an mp3 off of Napster, the only resource I'm using is bandwidth, and I already pay for all the bandwidth I can get by my monthly ISP fee (or college tuition fee, as the case may be).
A very cliched and fashionable - but very wrong - assertion. Since you are not knowledgeable about how the industry operates, and since you do not understand the difference between the physical media and the content, I'll inform you. Records are produced under a certain expectation of profits. Suppose it costs $500,000 to record an album (a typical symphonic recording). I am counting costs of professional musicians, recording studio costs, the conductor, royalties, and the like. Now this record may be cut on the expectation of selling 50,000 copies of the record (an outrageously high number for a symphonic record, but bear with me). So that is $10 to record, $1 to phyiscally reproduce, and $4 mark-up for the retailer (a typical scenario: see this site for all of the numbers.
So now when you go to pirate the MP3 of the record, the value you are stealing is $10 which is your share of the professional services which contributed to making the record. You are not stealing the $1 which it costs to physically produce, obviously. But you _are_ stealing recording resources, professional musician's services, and royalties. See, since the record had an expectation of a certain number of buyers, the costs were allocated to cover them.
Since you stole the content on the record, you have stolen the services which went into producing the music. This is not a tangible thing, but a semi-abstract thing - which is why it is difficult for you and so many other slashdot readers to comprehend, but it is every bit as much legitimate theft as stealing a physical artifact. You are affecting people just the same way: if the companies sell fewer records because people steal them, they will produce fewer new records, and then the professional musicians and recording engineers will have fewer gigs and will suffer all the same.
And advertising policy has exactly what do with production cost? Since you're really new to this, you may want to check out this site documenting the cost of CD production.
Record executives hate to admit that they essentially rape their artists. And I'm not talking about the Backstreet Boys and N Sync, who are no-talents and deserve to be raped, but real artists who produce great music and see most of the revenue from that music fall directly into the pockets of those execs that treat them like slaves.
A cliched, trendy, and fashionable view fueled out of ingorance. The music industry _built_ popular music. This genre of music, by definition, does not exist without records. Can you please rattle off a list of popular music stars before 1900? You can't because there were NOT any. You can argue about taste, but Metallica would not exist without the record industry (and they openly acknowledge this - Lars did in his interview). Without the record industry, rock would not exist. Jazz would not exist. Rap wouldn't exist. None of the artists who make these musics would exist. The music industry has made various talented artists extremely rich and also extremely popular and extremely famous. Is this raping? There is a cost to fame, to be sure, but that's what many in the industry are looking for.
The future, in executive minds is very clouded because they know that it's quite possible that some of their best, and most abused artists will up and leave them, starting up very profitable distribution channels via MP3.
You mean like Metallica and Dr. Dre?
A lot of artists are already making pretty good livings off of MP3 distribution and the record industry has no control over them.
Proof please? Name ONE musician who has achieved national stardom, without money from a record company.
As an aside, MP3.com actually does "get it" and understands the necessity of a record company, and is acting like one in that they do invest money into musicians for professional recording studios, promotion, and the like. MP3.com is not THAT different from a record company. Last I checked, nobody had any beef with independent artists putting out their own music.
They need to get our of the 1920's mentality and realize the digital age has new rules.
Yes, but the people who currently pirate MP3's need to learn the new rules also. I still come across people who are so clueless that they do not understand the cost of CD production independent of the physical media, and this is essentially the moral justification for stealing music. The pirates need to understand who is paying for their content, and the economic system which promotes it, or they won't have any more music to steal. Currently none of the people who steal music on-line understand how it got there.
One of the major attractions of the internet to some people is the prospect of anonymity - creating an online persona to experiment and discuss what you wouldn't normally in a public, non-anonymous forum. The whole idea of not knowing exactly who you're talking to is both a blessing and a curse (is that really a dog on the other end?), and it's what helps many people who are normally pretty introverted actually express themselves. Anonymity does not propagate stealing, it permits privacy and expression.
Ah, you don't "get it". Anonymity most deifintely DOES promote illegal activities. That's his point. Note that this doesn't mean anonymity should not be ALLOWED, but it is merely commenting on its effects. You have more expression, more freedom to experiment, and therefore more of a chance to do the illegal. I guarantee you that most of the people who download kiddie porn from the net are not the type of people who would have traded said pictures in dark allies 20 years ago. Likewise, most of the people who pirate MP3 would not go into Tower and hold the place up for CD's (the moral equivalent). Crime in the regular world would go up if there was anonymity in the real work also. Surely more people would resort to murder and rape and burglary if there was absolutely no way that your identity could be linked to the crime?
Fear of being caught is a major deterrent; with anonymity it is impossible to be caught (by definition). How many people who pirate MP3's would continue if their identity would be linked to each packet they transferred across the network, available to the public (including the copyright holder of the stolen work?)
Are we sure that the pricing isn't the issue? Food for thought: The price of a CD, in 1985 dollars is the same as the price of a CD today. Why? CD's were inflated in cost upon release to recouperate R&D. The supply was low, the price was high. Record execs promised CD prices would go down. Maybe they meant to say their profits would go up, as the cost of making CD's for them has gone DOWN.
The cost of a CD in 1985 dollars is most definitely quite LESS than a CD is 2000 dollars. In absolute dollars, the price of a CD has gown down in the last 15 years. Inflation was approximately 50% in that time, so CD prices have been lowered by approximately 50% in the last 15 years.
If you think that the cost of CD production should go down, then you do not understand the economics of the music industry. The cost of physically producing the CD is a tiny portion of the cost of the CD, and most certainly has gone down since 1985. However, in 1985 most CD's were merely transfers of albums. Almost none were even digitally remastered. Nowadays, any CD re-issue is digitally re-mastered, comes with extra bonus tracks, and has lavish carefully researched notes. You get considerably more than what you got 15 years ago, despite paying less. And that's just for re-issues. 15 years ago, most new albums were targetted at vinyl, not CD. Now they are all targeted at CD. This means twice the running length, as well as superior (and more expensive) recording techniques.
Basically, if you want the cost of producing a CD to remain constant (or go down) from 1985 to 2000, that means that we would all be listening to CD's 35 minutes long, record in analog, and not remastered for digital audio. You like that? Personally, I am happy with the nice 70 minute CD's, recorded in digital, with all of the extra bonus tracks, for a cost substantially less (with inflation) than it was 15 years ago. So what exactkt are you whining about?
You are mis-informed. The "big 5" companies sell 80% of the records, not 99%. Major difference. Additionally, even if one company had 80% that would not be considered a monopoly, but the fact that there are five companies shows that there is nothing close to a monopoly. At least when monopoly used to mean "only seller in market" instead of its present day definition of "corporation whose business practices I do not agree with".
4% is extremely severe when you are talking about the economy. When the NASDAQ drops 4% or more, it is considered a huge drop and cause for concern. If any big companies sales dropped by 4% there would be a major sell-off and the stock would absolutely tank. If a company's sales dropped any more than 4% in a year, the stock would probably drop to zero and be de-listed from the market. I'd sure like to know how you get off saying 4% is not severe.
Nice theory, but that doesn't explain why the most frequently pirated artists on Napster are Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Britney Spears. If people think that the music is crap and won't buy it, then why are they still listening to it and illegally stealing it?
You need to be beaten with a cluestick if you think Napster is the only significant way of pirating MP3's. I knew people who stopped buying CD's in 1997, and there used to be all sorts of web sites with MP3 wares, and they have always been transferred over chat rooms and the like. Not to mention CD copying (which became a mass-mainstream activity around that time also)
The most compelling statistic in the article was the fact that in the highest bandwidth areas, sales were down over double what they were down in the lowest bandwidth areas. This sounds like a smoking gun to me. You can't use the on-line sales argument because it doesn't take significant bandwidth to access CDNOW and the like.
Of course you are comparing 1985 money to 2000 money. In the US, in 1985, records cost $10. Now in the US in 2000, CD's cost $15. Inflation in the past 15 years has been about 50%. Which makes the cost exactly on target.
This is not to mention that CD's hold substantially more music. A record could only handle 40 minutes, and a CD can handle 80 minutes. Most new albums take advantage of this, and most old albums include extra bonus tracks. So you could even argue that on a dollar/music basis, CD's are twice as cheap as records.
The price of recorded music has dropped significantly since its introduction a century ago. At the turn of the century an edison cylinder of Enrico Caruso cost a significant portion of a working man's one-week income. When 78's were introduced, only the rich could aford the 20-volume set which made up Beethoven's Ninth. When Hi-Fi records became available in the 50's, high quality music became available to the masses for dirt cheap. And the CD even more so. Nobody has a problem paying $10 for a movie (which is temporary pleasure), but whine about paying $15 for a CD (a lifetime of listening pleasure).
You need to provide proof that MP3's are helping record sales. This study suggests the opposite. Anecdotal evidence about what you bought and haven't bought does not constitute evidence. Other conclusions based on available data (c.f. my post about Metallica above) suggest that the overwhelming vast majority of Napster users do not buy the CD's distributed on-line.
You are correct. Most MP3 apologists (such as Hemos, inthe topof the article) see only one side of the issue, and consider anything remotely counter to the mass-cultural mainstream opinion that "MP3's help artists" to be FUD. Most have not thought critically about the effect that online piracy will have on the music industry, and most do not understand the industry. They just think that any new technology is good because it is new technology. By that logic, nuclear weapons should be available for anyone to buy on every street corner.
As I mentioned in a previous article, anybody who needs evidence that most people who download MP3's do not buy the CD need only look at the 300,000 people who illegally downloaded Metallica songs in the course of two days. This translates to 1,000,0000 CD's in one week, which is absolutely unprecedented. The actual sales of Metallica albums in that week was probably aout 50,000 which would mean that 1:60 Napster users bought Metallica.
And Napster is a tiny portion of the new ways to steal music. There is also rampant CD copying as well as other forms of online piracy, such as chat rooms, web sites, etc., etc.
I can name 1000 different record labels off of the top of my head, 995 of which are small, indepdent, and in no way associated with the RIAA. So how do you figure that there is "monopoly pricing"? One of the record stores featured in the article, Amoeba, sells records primarily from small companies.
You're a moron.
Why does POSIX compiance matter?
Someone could write an OS which could read your mind and correctly predict your next action, have built in AI to be solve your personal problems, run on every architecture ever built, be completely scalable and reliable, and fit into 2k of RAM, and the first question out of everybody's mouth will be, "Duh...Is it POSIX compliant?"
Personally, POSIX compliance turns me off. Basically, POSIX is a euphemism for "Yet Another Unix Clone and the only applications which run on me are the same old boring Unix programs". You choose a new OS for new applications - if you want to run the same old POSIX crap, why not just use an existing POSIX platform?
But we all know that's a bunch of crap. Most people who are downloading MP3s aren't likely to buy the album at the price that the RIAA wants to charge for it. Many of the people who download the music and decide that they would be willing to pay full price for it do so.
Metallica claimed that 330,000 people downloaded their songs over the course of the weekend. 30,000 claimed it was a mistake, so let's assume that 300,000 were guilty as charged. A weekend is 2/7 of a week, so that 1,050,000 people who downloaded Metallica songs that week. Now, in the industry, selling 1,000,000 units in one _week_ is an _extremely_ hard task. This has only been done 3-4 times in the past, and only for brand new albums. I'm am not sure what the weekly sales for catalog albums in, but I would say 10,000 is probably a fairly liberal figure. So let's assume 10,000 of each Metallica album was sold that week. They have about 8 albums, so that's 80,000, compared to 1,000,000. That means the ratio of buyers:pirates is about 12:1. That's pretty damn significant. Using this data, I would give very little credence to the fact that "most people who pirate on Napster go out and buy the album".
This is actually the classic reason that monopolies are bad for consumers: the price for a good that maximizes profit for the monopoly results in fewer people getting the good than would receive it in a competitive market. Illegal music copying undoes some of the harm to consumers, albeit at cost to the RIAA monopoly.
There is no such corporation as the RIAA. Of the widest mis-conceptions of the music industry heard on slashdot, it is perhaps most clueless to talk about RIAA as a corporation. It makes just as much sense to say that the SPAA has a monopoly on software. The RIAA represents some of the members who are large record companies. OK - maybe they are a monopoly in representation.
Anybody who thinks there is a monopoloy in the music industry is seriously out of touch and needs a cluestick whopped across their head. Go to an independent music store and there are literally hundreds of different labels and 10,000's of different artists. The music industry is probably the most diverse of all mature industries in terms of the number of participants. I guess it is trendy and fashionable to label any company perceived as bad and evil as a monopoly even if it is completely baseless in reality.
On the other hand, most new CD's today only have one or two good songs.
Boulez' Mahler's Ninth has only one piece of music, but it is damn good. Of the over 1000 CD's I own, about 80% have no more than 1-2 bad songs. If you can't find CD's with good songs, you are probably listen to top 40 radio pop/rock music. Just because you are unable to take the effort to invesitgate the huge quantity of high quality music which is being produced today, doesn't mean the rest of us should suffer.
Why should I pay full price for a CD?
You do not set the price for a product. The manufacturer has a right to charge whatever price he sees fit. If you think an item is too expensive, don't buy it. The market will adjust.
Second, I think CD's are overpriced.
CD's are IMHO by far the best deal in entertainement. It's funny how people have no problem paying $7 for a 90 minute movie, or $30 for a two hour concert, or $100 for a three hour opera, but won't pay $15-$20 for a lifetime of listening pleasure. Some of the best memories of my life are of listening to recorded music. I paid $15 for Julie Miller's Broken Things, but it is easliy worth $1500 to me.
Drop the price a bit, bite the bone, and instead of making more profit/unit, make more profit/quantity.
It is amusing that every Slashdot poster knows more about the music industry, and how it should operate than the highly paid executives whose job it is to make the business profitable. For starters, demand of music is not infinite. If you lower the price to one cent, the demand will not increase 1500-fold. I am certain that years of marketing research have gone into the $15-$20 price point. It's called market equilbrium.
Even better, where are the genius record companies when you're looking for a place to _buy_ your MP3's? Nope, I can't find ane MP3's for sale on Metallica's website. Well gosh darn, instead of crying, DO SOMETHING!
You (again) do not seem to understand the basic fundamentals of economics. You cannot in a free society force an entity to sell something that he doesn't want to. You desire to cheap free downloadable music does not translate into a dictum that the music companies have to make all their music avaialble for free in MP3 format. Somehow I think the record companies know a lot more about what there doing that some little dork on slashdot does.
Most music does not consist of "songs" - that is a pop/rock thing. How about symphonies, concertos, sonatas, reels, and so forth? Or do you think all music besides pop/rock should be banned?
Should read : "I know it's unpopular with the record companies that musicians actually get paid for what they create. It's also unpopular with the record companies that their stranglehold on the means of distribution is eroding out from under them. Lowers cost of entry, democratizes exposure and distributions methods, yadda yadda yadda."
This is the case in EVERY line of work. Why does Ford profit from the cars that the engineers and auto-workers build? Why does IBM profit from computers than its engineers do? In any business, the people who own the business profit, and the workers simply get paid (and in some cases, stock, and then they are able profit also). The music industry is no different. The role of the profit-takers is the same as the record companies as it is for IBM and Ford: they invest money into projects which have the potential to be profitable (it is a risk). There is evidence to suggest that it is impossible for the recorded music industry to exist without large financial backers (c.f. the fact that nobody from MP3.com has become a star yet).
If MP3's seriously make a big dent in CD sales (say 20%), two businesses will be hurt the most:
(a) Record stores
Most record stores are small businesses, and independent. These record stores will go out of business, and only the super-mega-stores such as Tower and Virgin will exist if there is a downturn in CD sales.
(b) Independent record labels
These are also small businesses. Most survive on razor thin margins, and if a large dent in CD sales is made, only the Big 5 (or whatever it is this week) record companies will exist.
History shows that when a market shrinks, the big players are profitable enough to miss a few dollars, but the independents aren't (c.f. the computer industry in the 1980's). Anybody who is suggesting that people buy fewer CD's and pirate things off napster is promoting a musical world where only boy bands exist, only major record companies exist, and only big record stores exist.
Bands don't make their money from CD sales, record companies do.
Proof please?
Cds and videos are promotional tools to get people to go to CONCERTS, which is where the band makes their living.
Proof please? Every concert I have been to in the past five years has cost much less than a CD, and at the concert the artist is always selling their CD, and telling everybody in the audience, "Please buy my CD to support us".
No, it is necessary! The law is too complex for developers to understand. You guys are smart, I won't try to take that away from you, but I admit I don't know how to program, so why can't you admit that you don't know the first damn thing about law practice?
What you need to understand is that the average Slashdot reader thinks that he is Really Smart(tm), because he knows how to install Linux, write a PERL script, etc. Most of the readers tend to believe that they have crude computer skills which are better than some of the population, that they know more than EVERYBODY about EVERYTHING. The whole DeCSS/Napster fiascos are a perfect example, where the typical Slashdotter - despite having absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the entertainment industry - thinks fit to gauge the entire future of the how media should be consumed for all time. The readers believe because they understand the technical workings of a system, they somehow have the right to dictate how it will be used. This is somewhat akin to someone believing that we should bomb Sierra Leone, because he understands how a nuclear reaction works.
I've always wondered if other professions were similarly elitist. Do doctors sit around and talk about how stupid the non-doctors are, and how people are so stupid that they can't even figure out how to cure cancer, so they have to pay big bucks to doctors? Or is this pheonomenon unique among computer people?
What he doesn't get is that at the heart of free software is the contributions of lots of people. Users choose free software over commercial software, and users test that software and contribute bug fixes.
Proof please? Please prepare a breakdown of features in a major free software project (such as GCC or EMACS), and demonstrate that the "heart" of the project (let's define this as majority of features) is implemented by ordinary end-users and not the core development team (who are listed in the credits file). Please submit your response using lines of code, or major feature sets on a feature list, as indicators.
If you have no evidence, please retract your statement.
The whole fiasco with M$ concerns Win9x/NT's inadequacy, not its monopoly status as such.
Nothing could be further from the truth! This case has absolutely nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with locking competitors out. None of the allegations have anything to do whatsoever with quality. Linux itself is not of any more higher quality than Windows, and both are toys compared to VMS. Linux thrives on hype, marketing, unfair business practices (GNU license) just as much as Windows ever did.
I guarantee you people wouldn't be screaming 'Monopoly!' nearly as loudly if Red Hat or SuSe were taking Microsoft's place in the defendant's chair.
I would be shouting ten times as hard as the most vocal Microsoft hater, if Bug Hat were in the defendent's chair instead of Microsoft. Microsoft's software at least has some semblance of what the general masses want to use, but Bug Hat's doesn't. I think the average user would be much more repelled if forced to use Linux instead of Linux. There is a MASSIVE force of Unix and Linux haters in the technical/scientific community, and many of their arguments against it will be considerably more pronounced when it reaches the public.