99.44% of self-proclaimed computer geeks do not know how the microprocessors in their computers work. Most will know something about the computer architecture, and will know the general details about their computer such as how many pipeline stages it has, how many pipelines there are, the associativity of the cache, and almost all of them know assembly language for the machine they use, but none of them have knowledge of the path an instruction takes through the machine, the exceptional cases for each operand, the implementation of the ALU units, the circuit issues encountered during design of the microprocessor, et cetera, ad nauseum.
A microprocessor is closed and extremely proprietary. It is a black box. You have no idea what any one circuit in it looks like. You literally cannot take it apart, aside from dissolving the layers off one by one, and using an electron microscope (but no "geeks" do this - it is very expensive and only companies do it). It is not your little Star Wars action figure. It is a complicated piece of machinery.
So, since you do not understand how the microprocessor in your computer works, how can you claim to demand knowledge of how the encryption technology works? A microprocessor is a general purpose device, and performs all operations your computer does. It appears that you should be more interested in demanding knowledge of this since it is more integral (and more interesting) than an encryption algorithm. Besides, encryption algorithms are a dime a dozen; if one is closed, what is all the fuss about? Just look at others. Every microprocessor is closed and proprietary so you cannot look at others for examples.
If CD piracy continues (due to its unprotected nature) and starts to cut into profitability of CD's, clearly the CD manufacturers will turn to a copy-protected medium such as DVD-Audio. If technologies such as Napster continue to take off, and music piracy continues to escalate to the point where distributing copy unprotected music no longer makes sense, clearly the companies will no longer issue copy unprotected music and will turn to a closed, proprietary media for distribution.
As for the quality issue, I think anybody will notice the different between CD's and DVD audio (which will approach, and possibly exceed the quality of vinyl). Only the people who own a few CD's and just listen to them in the car cannot tell between tapes and CD's (or CD's and vinyl). Any music customer who approaches seriousness will much prefer DVD. Most people agree that because of CD's very limited frequency that CD's sound dry, and DVD will fix this.
It is a tactic used by the immature Linux advocates to make fun of how Microsoft added long filenames to Windows 95. It has nothing to do with programming (most of the Linux advocates don't know how to program, besides Perl)
It would be just as valid to e.g. call "Linus Torvalds" as "LinusTor" since Linux has a limit of 8 character login names. However, most of the people who dislike Linux tend to be more mature than the Linux-loving counterparts so you never see this in practice.
Compaq bought DEC for $9.6 billion. Included in this packages was Altavista which has since blossomed into a $5 billion enterprise. If Altavista is really worth that much, then DEC without Altavista was worth only $4.6 billion. The most successful computing enterprise in history was worth less than 1/3 of some startup which presses Linux CD's. Absolutely frightening...
The advantage of Altavista is that it gives you exactly what you type. The search engines such as Excite and Lycos try to actually figure out what you want, and Google goes one step farther and finds the "net consensus" for what you typed, and the pages are often totally unrelated to what you typed. I am experienced, and I know what I'm looking for, so I prefer Altavista, because it doesn't try to change my search on me like Google does.
If you are searching for a technical term, Altavista is by leaps and bounds better than the other search engines. You can specify exactly what you want, and you will get back exactly what you typed. It has extremely powerful features such as quotes searching which Google and the others STILL do not have.
Google thinks it knows more than you and does things behnd your back. If you are new to the web or are looking for pages which about something you do not know much about, it is useful, but when you are more experienced, Altavista is the source.
I just hope Altavista isn't turned into a "smart" search engine like all of the others. It really is the last pure search engine left today.
Are you really, really new to the microprocessor industry or just trolling? Timna is the code name - just like Merced, Willamette, Deschutes, etc. It will be marketed as something else.
So, the Germans want the whole EU to boycott the Pentium III. There is one company which would benefit from this, and that is AMD. And what company just built a huge new fab and design center in, of all places, Germany? So for each and every Athlon which is sold in place of the Pentium III, which country benefits? Germany! It smells quite suspicious to me.
There are already lots of us who use non-Microsoft and non-Linux/Unix systems which are far superior to either one, who hate both of them, and who chuckle at those who are involved in the Unix/Linux vs. Windows wars - why choose between a Honda and a Saturn when you can have a BMW?
What is funny about "char broiled", and the other variable names? Maybe to somebody who is reall, REALLY new to C, it would be funny, but after that it seems pretty standard.
The Vaxorcist was pretty funny though. I've never seen that one before.
If the record companies were knowingly putting out music that they don't expect to profit off, I will go buy a stock in Sony and then sue the fuck out of them. Public companies do not, should not, and can not act benevolently.
They do not KNOWINGLY put out music that won't sell per se. They put out LOTS of music in the hope that ONE will sell well. They understand that in order to develop one superstar artist, they need to bring up ten artists, one of which will succeed. They invest millions of dollars in each one, but only one brings back any profit at all. As far as the classical and jazz is concerned, it is a little bit less clear about why they do it, but they don't show any signs of stopping.
Risk is inherent in the music industry considerably more than any other industry. A record company has absolutely no idea if a product will succeed when it is produced. The market is essentially irrational.
I love your example of using Christina Aguilera as the new artist, since she is the perfect example of the bad side. Everything but a young creative talent who got a chance, she is more the result of record company thinking "Hey, we ought to put out a star like Britney Spears since that worked so well."
But, again, I can name about three dozen girl singers off the top of my head who came out in the last year and failed. Aguilera is the one who succeeded. The profit made of Aguilera is not (profit_made_from_aguilera - cost_of_producing_aguilera), but rather (profit_made_from_aguilera - cost_of_producing_a_dozen_girl_acts) -- and that it not a huge sum.
I am not interested in qrguing aesthetics of pop music, but if you don't like her, the industry similarly brough up Pearl Jam, Metallica, etc., etc. These artists would not have existed if the record industry did not have excess capital to spend on new/risky artists.
And your right about these bands not making the most money (Pearl Jam haven't had a monster hit since Ten, and NiN have never been real profitable) for the studios. Artist like N'sync and Britney Spears, who the companies can sell 10 million bland albums by, throw them a few scraps (cars and fucks and glittery parties), and then throw them back in the studio to record more music on the companies terms are.
Here you seem to be admitting the existence of the subsidizing phenomenon I described above. And your position seems even more extreme than my take on it.
Pearl Jam is a mega-successful band. They are one of the very best selling acts of the 90's, and "Ten" in particular, is one of the best selling albums of any genre, of all time. I am not convinced that they do not make much money (as you suggest above), but if you think they don't, that emphasizes my point even more.
Even if you don't like Backstreet Boys and N*Sync, and the like, you admit that they help the artists you are interested in. So, basically you admit, that without them, there couldn't be more serious artists. This is why it's important to support the system: because it works so well. Complex music such as most classical and jazz will never reach a mass audience; but that's OK, it still thrives under the current system.
I personally am not interested in either Backstreet Boys or Pearl Jam, but the music which sells few copies -- fewer than 100,000 copies. This is the music which is at most risk in the new information age. In the new market, I am afraid that any music which does not sell 1,000,000 copies will not exist. Our only choice will be Backstreet Boys and Pearl Jam, both of which, in my opinion, are watered down, simplistic, and not very musical.
Producing cds is so cheap (and even studio technology nowadays), that minus promotion putting out album that only sells 10,000 copies can still be a good idea.
What gives you the idea that producing CD's is cheap? A classical CD costs $250,000-$500,000 to produce. It sells 2,000-3,000 copies in its lifetime. The profit comes from the Pearl Jam and N*Sync albums.
(though you are wrong when you speak of the margins being used for unprofitable artists, music companies only sign artist for profit, though sometimes the gamble turns out wrong (and trust me, you will get dropped)).
You are forgetting that all of the major record companies also support classical and jazz music (in addition to pop). Most of these records sell in very, very small quantities -- fewer than 10,000 copies per title. On an title-by-title basis, they lose money off of classical and jazz, except for the VERY occasional title which sells 100,000 copies (Gorecki Symphony #3, for example). Part of the importance of pop music is that it funds classical music and jazz for the major record companies.
As for the occasional gamble: MOST of the gambles turn out to be wrong. I forget the statistics, but they say that about one in ten new artists makes it big time. For every Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, there are ten other artists (which receive equal investment) which turn out to be losses. YES, they are dropped, but that doesn't mean the record company gets their money back.
Basically, a record companies catalog looks like this (proportionally):
One established superstar artist (e.g. Pearl Jam) who is guaranteed to sell millions of copies. Investment: $5 million. Units sold: 5 million
One new artist "gamble" who makes it (e.g. Christina Aguilera). Investment: $1 million. Units sold: 5 million.
Ten new artist "gambles" who don't make it. Investment: $1 million per artist. Units sold: 10,000 copies per artist.
2 jazz albums. Investment: $500,000 per album. Units sold: 10,000 per album.
3 classical albums. Investment: $500,000 per album. Units sold: 10,000 per album.
Etc.
Most people just loook at the Pearl Jam and assume that the company is raking in money OFF OF THAT ARTIST. But it's not true: no record company consists soley of Pearl Jam calibre selling artists. These high profile artists make up perhaps about 5%-10% of the companies catalog. The other 90%-95% of projects fail to make money. Most of the money which is made from the pop superstars is used to fund the unprofitable projects.
People will say to the companies: cut costs. This means cutting the less selling genres (e.g. classical and jazz) which is detrimental to serious aesthetics (which is bad for consumers). Alternatively, it means cutting "gamble" artists: but this essentially means no new artists will get exposure (which is also bad for consumers).
The record industry is nearly as rosy as it looks. There were times in the not so distant past that the industry was not doing well at all, and was considering quitting. If piracy continues, we will no doubt see that again.
I am of the firm belief that the relatively high margins on CD's (for superstar artists) has more aggressively promoted new music than ever before, and I point to the absolutely thriving music scene of the 90's as evidence. In the 80's, vinyl was the primary format, which was more expensive to manufacture, but sold for less. The 80's was a relatively quiet period for music, and fewer new artists got the chance to record. There were fewer ambitious projects, many fewer independent labels, and certainly fewer new and exciting genres than in the 90's, which has been the biggest renaissance in music in a long, long time. I believe that electronic distribution will bring us back to the essentially more conservative 1980's, with a lower manufacturing cost, but also a lower profit margin. With a lower profit margin, the companies have less of a chance to recoup money lost on risky projects, and will undertake fewer risky projects, which means that us consumers will have to live with fewer music choices, and music which is more and more homogenized.
Er, you're assuming that $2 is the maximum profit-generating price point for a movie. The current price for a DVD is $20-$25, and I'm sure the companies know what they are doing in pricing these, assuming they are half-way rational. I also think you are underestimating the costs of electronic distribution. The cost of delivering say 1,000,000 copies of Titanic (which would be, what, about 1 GB in size?) electronically would be massive, and certainly not economically feasible under current bandwidth limitations. In 10 years, when everybody has 2.4 GB connections to their homes, things may be different, but now most people have just 56k.
If you are "lucky", the economy will generate something much more efficient than the "free market" defined by copyright law and patents. There will be gobs of cash available for those who know how to direct focus groups and shift paradigms: don't worry, you'll be able to watch more great, soul-searching films like "Titanic", "Jurassic Park", and "Lion King" and listen to great, ground-breaking music like N-Sync, BackStreet Boys, Menudo, and Brittany Spears.
But where will this gobs of cache come from? Currently these things get money from distribution of the product, basically on a pay-per-use basis, which is fair: the people who want the service pay for it. However, in the new economy, who will pay for this? It costs literally millions of dollars to film movies and record music albums. If nobody can make money off it, who will invest in it? The only solution I can see is government subsidies; however, this is highly communistic, because we all pay for it, regardless of it we want it. What is wrong with the current system, and how will the new system improves things? If you are a typical slashdotter, you enjoy movies such as The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek... All of which are extremely expensive to produce, but all of which did extremely well in the theaters and on video. It is simply not true to propose that these works can be produced without the money that was put into them. Nor would they have been produced if there wasn't a possibility of making millions and millions of dollars off of it. If funding for making movies is cut off -- who pays for development of movies?
Every time I hear "this will kill the music industry" I tend to think "good riddance". I'm simply not sure that there should be a music _industry_, I tend to prefer the idea of music as art. At worst, we may see Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, replaced by say (the horror) another Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Bach. Watch me weep.
One thing to keep in mind is the difference of economy today as back then. Today, art is almost completely capitalistic. The NEA is getting smaller and smaller. However, both Bach and Mozart (I don't know about Shakespeare and Sophocles) were funded by the government. Artists have to make money somehow. If we stop supporting them through the current system (mainly records), we will have to support them through other means (such as government subsidies). To us, the consumers, it won't make much difference in the amount we actually pay. It will be unfair because it is harder to judge who should be compensated in a non-captialistic music system.
While the current music industry isn't perfect, it is absolutely thriving. There has been by far more music produced (and, perhaps more importantly, more variety of music produced) in this decade than any decade in the past, largely due to the CD technology (which absolutely saved the independent labels). I am not convinced that electronic distribution would scale to this, since it will tend to sigficantly lower the profit margin (which is currently used to subsidize unprofitable music), and make music much, much more commoditized (because it will raise the risk, and only artists such as The Backstreet Bots which are guaranteed to sell fifty gazillion records will be produced).
Sooner or later they need to wake up and realize its all just bits.
This assertion demonstrates that we technical people should have as little say as possible when it comes to legislation of these matters. To us technical people -- to a CPU designer, a network administrator, a software engineer -- these are simply bits flowing through the device, but we do not have understanding of what this bits represent. Some other things which are "just bits" are personal medical histories, credit card numbers, credit reports, electronic money, and other things, which clearly should not be made public.
Wake up and smell the coffee: if you rely on the law to restrict/control information transmission for an income, you may want to consider a different line of work.
It is easy for you to say this and easy for me (a professional chip designer) to say this, as we having nothing to lose in the economy you propose. However, I would be interested in talking especially to producers of the content which you propose be free such as authors and musicians.
I'm talking about the cost of PRODUCTION (recording, mixing), you are talking about MANUFACTURING.
The cost of producing in the digital age is more than in the analog age because digital equipment is more expensive, and it is harder to get desirable results with digital equipment.
This is why the CD transition resulted in a price hike. One reason why casettes are still less expensive today is because only the tried-and-true performers are released on cassette now, so there is less risk.
So in the MP3 world, only MTV music will exist?
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Oh, in this new model, MTV will fund new music? Oh boy...
MTV's playlist consists of what? Less than a hundred songs at any given point? So basically, only MTV music will be generated? So my choice in music will be what kind of top-40 music I want to listen to?
What if I don't like MTV music? The current music system supports diverse genres of music, such as jazz, classical, and folk quite well. Who will fund these in the future? Currently, these are funded by the record companies, even though they lose money off of them, they are paid for by the top-40 music. So in the new model, who pays for them?
So basically, your goal is to give more and more power to one single entity (the media), take away production rights from everybody except a select few, and make music even more homogenized and watered down than it is today?
Your only valid point is the high cost of old music. I do agree that the record companies are making a substantial profit off of old CD's for several reasons: (a) the production cost is lower. Just do some digital re-mastering, and you're set. (b) There is less risk. It doesn't take a genius to predict that a Beatles re-issue is going to sell millions and millions of copies, whereas of all the new bands which come out today, less than 5% sell millions and millions of copies, so they end up losing money on most new acts.
However, much of your post is from a gross simplifcation of the industry. Your claim that production costs can be lowered to 0 is absurd, because it costs millions of dollars to produce albums today (by producing, I mean recording, and mixing, not manufacturing).
Record companies DO produce music, because they invest the required money in the studio. The new acts which come out costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to put through the studio to generate professional sounding recordings and music.
If it wasn't for the record companies, we'd just have a slosh of poorly-recorded, garage-type bands because nobody could afford to professionally produce the music.
Why are CD's more expensive than cassettes? Easy. They are much more expensive to produce. The upgrade of equipment from analog to digital in recording studios during the (tape,vinyl)->CD transition in the late '80's more than justified the cost of CD's vs. cassettes. It costs more to master a CD than it does a cassette, and the greater profits are in part used to offset the cost of cassettes.
Yes, people who pirate MP3's are clueless. They are conning the machine that produces the very music they listen to out of their profits. They don't understand the difference between owning a CD of music, and owning the rights to the music. As I show in another post in this topic, it is far, far more cost effective to purchase the CD's than it is to pirate them.
If you are a serious music lover: look out, because the MP3 warez boyz are about to destroy the industry. I hope the RIAA puts them all behind bars before they succeed, but that chance is diminishing when technologies such as naspter, which were created explicitly for illegal pirating, are promoted in the mass popular culture like they are today.
The most serious problem with MP3's is the ill-informed "logic" which accompanies it: in some of the pirate communities it is common to hear "facts" such as "it costs fifty cents to make a CD" and the like. Anybody with any knowledge at all of the industry, knows that the cost of producing an album is quite high -- in the millions of dollars (think: production cost, music video, marketing, distribution, etc., etc.). The break even point is 500,000 and all of the artists which do not reach that (> 95%) are paid for by those who do.
It takes SIX MONTHS to find a particular MP3?!
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The fact that you spent SIX MONTHS looking for one MP3 shows how cost ineffective MP3's are. Supposing you are a computer professional, your time is worth $50-$100 per hour. If it took six months, suppose you spent fifteen minutes per day trying to find the MP3. That means you spent $4,000-$8,000 to just get that one MP3. Now you could have got the CD for $15-$20. So not only did you con yourself out of $3,980-$7,980 but you also conned the hard-working artists and A&R people out of their share also.
I am a serious music lover and buy 5-10 CD's per week. If I were to switch to pirating MP3's instead of buying CD's, it would take me umpteen hours just to locate the music, download it, and burn it into CD's. I can buy 10 CD's in a one hour trip to CD store, for the cost of less than $200. It would cost me literally thousands of dollars to pirate the equivalent amount.
In my opinion, MP3's are only for the most casual music fans. Most of the specialized music is not available. I hope the RIAA takes agressive actions to end MP3 pirating, and I hope pirates are put behind bars. The people who pirate MP3's aren't doing anybody any favors: they waste network bandwidth like nobody else, they cheat artists out of their money, they raise prices for people who honestly buy CD's (not to mention put the whole concept of the music industry under question), and are spitting on the notion of property rights.
Please, for the sake of the future of music, for the sake of common sense, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of not wasting your life away waiting for your next batch of warez to arrive, please stop being a moron and STOP pirating MP3's. Thank you.
silicon - sili-kin not sili-khan gigabyte - soft first "g" (think "gigantic") gigaherz - ditto GIF - soft "g" (CompuServ said so)... The most four commonly mis-pronunced words in the industry (especially gigabyte)
Most of the framers of this seem to believe that the major issue here is security, but it seems like reliability is possibly even a bigger showstopper.
No vote can be lost no matter what the circumstances. People are apathetic about voting once, so how would they feel about voting TWICE? For example, a power outage would be very problematic. So would a fire in the building which housed the computers. So would a hard drive crash. It seems like if you had a multi-site VMS or Tandem cluster, it would come close to working, but it is still not absolutely 100% (e.g. if there is a power outage in BOTH sites, which would be possible if an entire region was wiped out.), plus it would be VERY expensive.
How reliable is the current system? If there is disaster on voting day (such as an earthquake or a power outage), is voting ever post-poned, due to likely low turnout, or loss of functionality of the voting machines? Has there ever been a disaster which affected the actual ballots cast (such as a building which held ballots catching fire?) Can computers compete with paper ballots insofar as reliability?
A VMS cluster can take all morning to boot. But once it boots it will stay up until your UPS's fail for the next time.
What's the point of having a short boot time? Does Linux crash so often that it matters that it boots in only a few seconds? Or is this yet another meaningless benchmark that the Linuxer's are bringing out?
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99.44% of self-proclaimed computer geeks do not know how the microprocessors in their computers work. Most will know something about the computer architecture, and will know the general details about their computer such as how many pipeline stages it has, how many pipelines there are, the associativity of the cache, and almost all of them know assembly language for the machine they use, but none of them have knowledge of the path an instruction takes through the machine, the exceptional cases for each operand, the implementation of the ALU units, the circuit issues encountered during design of the microprocessor, et cetera, ad nauseum.
A microprocessor is closed and extremely proprietary. It is a black box. You have no idea what any one circuit in it looks like. You literally cannot take it apart, aside from dissolving the layers off one by one, and using an electron microscope (but no "geeks" do this - it is very expensive and only companies do it). It is not your little Star Wars action figure. It is a complicated piece of machinery.
So, since you do not understand how the microprocessor in your computer works, how can you claim to demand knowledge of how the encryption technology works? A microprocessor is a general purpose device, and performs all operations your computer does. It appears that you should be more interested in demanding knowledge of this since it is more integral (and more interesting) than an encryption algorithm. Besides, encryption algorithms are a dime a dozen; if one is closed, what is all the fuss about? Just look at others. Every microprocessor is closed and proprietary so you cannot look at others for examples.
If CD piracy continues (due to its unprotected nature) and starts to cut into profitability of CD's, clearly the CD manufacturers will turn to a copy-protected medium such as DVD-Audio. If technologies such as Napster continue to take off, and music piracy continues to escalate to the point where distributing copy unprotected music no longer makes sense, clearly the companies will no longer issue copy unprotected music and will turn to a closed, proprietary media for distribution.
As for the quality issue, I think anybody will notice the different between CD's and DVD audio (which will approach, and possibly exceed the quality of vinyl). Only the people who own a few CD's and just listen to them in the car cannot tell between tapes and CD's (or CD's and vinyl). Any music customer who approaches seriousness will much prefer DVD. Most people agree that because of CD's very limited frequency that CD's sound dry, and DVD will fix this.
It is a tactic used by the immature Linux advocates to make fun of how Microsoft added long filenames to Windows 95. It has nothing to do with programming (most of the Linux advocates don't know how to program, besides Perl)
It would be just as valid to e.g. call "Linus Torvalds" as "LinusTor" since Linux has a limit of 8 character login names. However, most of the people who dislike Linux tend to be more mature than the Linux-loving counterparts so you never see this in practice.
Compaq bought DEC for $9.6 billion. Included in this packages was Altavista which has since blossomed into a $5 billion enterprise. If Altavista is really worth that much, then DEC without Altavista was worth only $4.6 billion. The most successful computing enterprise in history was worth less than 1/3 of some startup which presses Linux CD's. Absolutely frightening...
The advantage of Altavista is that it gives you exactly what you type. The search engines such as Excite and Lycos try to actually figure out what you want, and Google goes one step farther and finds the "net consensus" for what you typed, and the pages are often totally unrelated to what you typed. I am experienced, and I know what I'm looking for, so I prefer Altavista, because it doesn't try to change my search on me like Google does.
If you are searching for a technical term, Altavista is by leaps and bounds better than the other search engines. You can specify exactly what you want, and you will get back exactly what you typed. It has extremely powerful features such as quotes searching which Google and the others STILL do not have.
Google thinks it knows more than you and does things behnd your back. If you are new to the web or are looking for pages which about something you do not know much about, it is useful, but when you are more experienced, Altavista is the source.
I just hope Altavista isn't turned into a "smart" search engine like all of the others. It really is the last pure search engine left today.
Are you really, really new to the microprocessor industry or just trolling? Timna is the code name - just like Merced, Willamette, Deschutes, etc. It will be marketed as something else.
So, the Germans want the whole EU to boycott the Pentium III. There is one company which would benefit from this, and that is AMD. And what company just built a huge new fab and design center in, of all places, Germany? So for each and every Athlon which is sold in place of the Pentium III, which country benefits? Germany! It smells quite suspicious to me.
There are already lots of us who use non-Microsoft and non-Linux/Unix systems which are far superior to either one, who hate both of them, and who chuckle at those who are involved in the Unix/Linux vs. Windows wars - why choose between a Honda and a Saturn when you can have a BMW?
What is funny about "char broiled", and the other variable names? Maybe to somebody who is reall, REALLY new to C, it would be funny, but after that it seems pretty standard.
The Vaxorcist was pretty funny though. I've never seen that one before.
If the record companies were knowingly putting out music that they don't expect to profit off, I will go buy a stock in Sony and then sue the fuck out of them. Public companies do not, should not, and can not act benevolently.
They do not KNOWINGLY put out music that won't sell per se. They put out LOTS of music in the hope that ONE will sell well. They understand that in order to develop one superstar artist, they need to bring up ten artists, one of which will succeed. They invest millions of dollars in each one, but only one brings back any profit at all. As far as the classical and jazz is concerned, it is a little bit less clear about why they do it, but they don't show any signs of stopping.
Risk is inherent in the music industry considerably more than any other industry. A record company has absolutely no idea if a product will succeed when it is produced. The market is essentially irrational.
I love your example of using Christina Aguilera as the new artist, since she is the perfect example of the bad side. Everything but a young creative talent who got a chance, she is more the result of record company thinking "Hey, we ought to put out a star like Britney Spears since that worked so well."
But, again, I can name about three dozen girl singers off the top of my head who came out in the last year and failed. Aguilera is the one who succeeded. The profit made of Aguilera is not (profit_made_from_aguilera - cost_of_producing_aguilera), but rather (profit_made_from_aguilera - cost_of_producing_a_dozen_girl_acts) -- and that it not a huge sum.
I am not interested in qrguing aesthetics of pop music, but if you don't like her, the industry similarly brough up Pearl Jam, Metallica, etc., etc. These artists would not have existed if the record industry did not have excess capital to spend on new/risky artists.
And your right about these bands not making the most money (Pearl Jam haven't had a monster hit since Ten, and NiN have never been real profitable) for the studios. Artist like N'sync and Britney Spears, who the companies can sell 10 million bland albums by, throw them a few scraps (cars and fucks and glittery parties), and then throw them back in the studio to record more music on the companies terms are.
Here you seem to be admitting the existence of the subsidizing phenomenon I described above. And your position seems even more extreme than my take on it.
Pearl Jam is a mega-successful band. They are one of the very best selling acts of the 90's, and "Ten" in particular, is one of the best selling albums of any genre, of all time. I am not convinced that they do not make much money (as you suggest above), but if you think they don't, that emphasizes my point even more.
Even if you don't like Backstreet Boys and N*Sync, and the like, you admit that they help the artists you are interested in. So, basically you admit, that without them, there couldn't be more serious artists. This is why it's important to support the system: because it works so well. Complex music such as most classical and jazz will never reach a mass audience; but that's OK, it still thrives under the current system.
I personally am not interested in either Backstreet Boys or Pearl Jam, but the music which sells few copies -- fewer than 100,000 copies. This is the music which is at most risk in the new information age. In the new market, I am afraid that any music which does not sell 1,000,000 copies will not exist. Our only choice will be Backstreet Boys and Pearl Jam, both of which, in my opinion, are watered down, simplistic, and not very musical.
Producing cds is so cheap (and even studio technology nowadays), that minus promotion putting out album that only sells 10,000 copies can still be a good idea.
What gives you the idea that producing CD's is cheap? A classical CD costs $250,000-$500,000 to produce. It sells 2,000-3,000 copies in its lifetime. The profit comes from the Pearl Jam and N*Sync albums.
(though you are wrong when you speak of the margins being used for unprofitable artists, music companies only sign artist for profit, though sometimes the gamble turns out wrong (and trust me, you will get dropped)).
You are forgetting that all of the major record companies also support classical and jazz music (in addition to pop). Most of these records sell in very, very small quantities -- fewer than 10,000 copies per title. On an title-by-title basis, they lose money off of classical and jazz, except for the VERY occasional title which sells 100,000 copies (Gorecki Symphony #3, for example). Part of the importance of pop music is that it funds classical music and jazz for the major record companies.
As for the occasional gamble: MOST of the gambles turn out to be wrong. I forget the statistics, but they say that about one in ten new artists makes it big time. For every Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, there are ten other artists (which receive equal investment) which turn out to be losses. YES, they are dropped, but that doesn't mean the record company gets their money back.
Basically, a record companies catalog looks like this (proportionally):
Most people just loook at the Pearl Jam and assume that the company is raking in money OFF OF THAT ARTIST. But it's not true: no record company consists soley of Pearl Jam calibre selling artists. These high profile artists make up perhaps about 5%-10% of the companies catalog. The other 90%-95% of projects fail to make money. Most of the money which is made from the pop superstars is used to fund the unprofitable projects.
People will say to the companies: cut costs. This means cutting the less selling genres (e.g. classical and jazz) which is detrimental to serious aesthetics (which is bad for consumers). Alternatively, it means cutting "gamble" artists: but this essentially means no new artists will get exposure (which is also bad for consumers).
The record industry is nearly as rosy as it looks. There were times in the not so distant past that the industry was not doing well at all, and was considering quitting. If piracy continues, we will no doubt see that again.
I am of the firm belief that the relatively high margins on CD's (for superstar artists) has more aggressively promoted new music than ever before, and I point to the absolutely thriving music scene of the 90's as evidence. In the 80's, vinyl was the primary format, which was more expensive to manufacture, but sold for less. The 80's was a relatively quiet period for music, and fewer new artists got the chance to record. There were fewer ambitious projects, many fewer independent labels, and certainly fewer new and exciting genres than in the 90's, which has been the biggest renaissance in music in a long, long time. I believe that electronic distribution will bring us back to the essentially more conservative 1980's, with a lower manufacturing cost, but also a lower profit margin. With a lower profit margin, the companies have less of a chance to recoup money lost on risky projects, and will undertake fewer risky projects, which means that us consumers will have to live with fewer music choices, and music which is more and more homogenized.
Er, you're assuming that $2 is the maximum profit-generating price point for a movie. The current price for a DVD is $20-$25, and I'm sure the companies know what they are doing in pricing these, assuming they are half-way rational. I also think you are underestimating the costs of electronic distribution. The cost of delivering say 1,000,000 copies of Titanic (which would be, what, about 1 GB in size?) electronically would be massive, and certainly not economically feasible under current bandwidth limitations. In 10 years, when everybody has 2.4 GB connections to their homes, things may be different, but now most people have just 56k.
If you are "lucky", the economy will generate something much more efficient than the "free market" defined by copyright law and patents. There will be gobs of cash available for those who know how to direct focus groups and shift paradigms: don't worry, you'll be able to watch more great, soul-searching films like "Titanic", "Jurassic Park", and "Lion King" and listen to great, ground-breaking music like N-Sync, BackStreet Boys, Menudo, and Brittany Spears.
But where will this gobs of cache come from? Currently these things get money from distribution of the product, basically on a pay-per-use basis, which is fair: the people who want the service pay for it. However, in the new economy, who will pay for this? It costs literally millions of dollars to film movies and record music albums. If nobody can make money off it, who will invest in it? The only solution I can see is government subsidies; however, this is highly communistic, because we all pay for it, regardless of it we want it. What is wrong with the current system, and how will the new system improves things? If you are a typical slashdotter, you enjoy movies such as The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek... All of which are extremely expensive to produce, but all of which did extremely well in the theaters and on video. It is simply not true to propose that these works can be produced without the money that was put into them. Nor would they have been produced if there wasn't a possibility of making millions and millions of dollars off of it. If funding for making movies is cut off -- who pays for development of movies?
Every time I hear "this will kill the music industry" I tend to think "good riddance". I'm simply not sure that there should be a music _industry_, I tend to prefer the idea of music as art. At worst, we may see Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, replaced by say (the horror) another Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Bach. Watch me weep.
One thing to keep in mind is the difference of economy today as back then. Today, art is almost completely capitalistic. The NEA is getting smaller and smaller. However, both Bach and Mozart (I don't know about Shakespeare and Sophocles) were funded by the government. Artists have to make money somehow. If we stop supporting them through the current system (mainly records), we will have to support them through other means (such as government subsidies). To us, the consumers, it won't make much difference in the amount we actually pay. It will be unfair because it is harder to judge who should be compensated in a non-captialistic music system.
While the current music industry isn't perfect, it is absolutely thriving. There has been by far more music produced (and, perhaps more importantly, more variety of music produced) in this decade than any decade in the past, largely due to the CD technology (which absolutely saved the independent labels). I am not convinced that electronic distribution would scale to this, since it will tend to sigficantly lower the profit margin (which is currently used to subsidize unprofitable music), and make music much, much more commoditized (because it will raise the risk, and only artists such as The Backstreet Bots which are guaranteed to sell fifty gazillion records will be produced).
Sooner or later they need to wake up and realize its all just bits.
This assertion demonstrates that we technical people should have as little say as possible when it comes to legislation of these matters. To us technical people -- to a CPU designer, a network administrator, a software engineer -- these are simply bits flowing through the device, but we do not have understanding of what this bits represent. Some other things which are "just bits" are personal medical histories, credit card numbers, credit reports, electronic money, and other things, which clearly should not be made public.
Wake up and smell the coffee: if you rely on the law to restrict/control information transmission for an income, you may want to consider a different line of work.
It is easy for you to say this and easy for me (a professional chip designer) to say this, as we having nothing to lose in the economy you propose. However, I would be interested in talking especially to producers of the content which you propose be free such as authors and musicians.
I'm talking about the cost of PRODUCTION (recording, mixing), you are talking about MANUFACTURING.
The cost of producing in the digital age is more than in the analog age because digital equipment is more expensive, and it is harder to get desirable results with digital equipment.
This is why the CD transition resulted in a price hike. One reason why casettes are still less expensive today is because only the tried-and-true performers are released on cassette now, so there is less risk.
Oh, in this new model, MTV will fund new music? Oh boy...
MTV's playlist consists of what? Less than a hundred songs at any given point? So basically, only MTV music will be generated? So my choice in music will be what kind of top-40 music I want to listen to?
What if I don't like MTV music? The current music system supports diverse genres of music, such as jazz, classical, and folk quite well. Who will fund these in the future? Currently, these are funded by the record companies, even though they lose money off of them, they are paid for by the top-40 music. So in the new model, who pays for them?
So basically, your goal is to give more and more power to one single entity (the media), take away production rights from everybody except a select few, and make music even more homogenized and watered down than it is today?
Your only valid point is the high cost of old music. I do agree that the record companies are making a substantial profit off of old CD's for several reasons: (a) the production cost is lower. Just do some digital re-mastering, and you're set. (b) There is less risk. It doesn't take a genius to predict that a Beatles re-issue is going to sell millions and millions of copies, whereas of all the new bands which come out today, less than 5% sell millions and millions of copies, so they end up losing money on most new acts.
However, much of your post is from a gross simplifcation of the industry. Your claim that production costs can be lowered to 0 is absurd, because it costs millions of dollars to produce albums today (by producing, I mean recording, and mixing, not manufacturing).
Record companies DO produce music, because they invest the required money in the studio. The new acts which come out costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to put through the studio to generate professional sounding recordings and music.
If it wasn't for the record companies, we'd just have a slosh of poorly-recorded, garage-type bands because nobody could afford to professionally produce the music.
Why are CD's more expensive than cassettes? Easy. They are much more expensive to produce. The upgrade of equipment from analog to digital in recording studios during the (tape,vinyl)->CD transition in the late '80's more than justified the cost of CD's vs. cassettes. It costs more to master a CD than it does a cassette, and the greater profits are in part used to offset the cost of cassettes.
Yes, people who pirate MP3's are clueless. They are conning the machine that produces the very music they listen to out of their profits. They don't understand the difference between owning a CD of music, and owning the rights to the music. As I show in another post in this topic, it is far, far more cost effective to purchase the CD's than it is to pirate them.
If you are a serious music lover: look out, because the MP3 warez boyz are about to destroy the industry. I hope the RIAA puts them all behind bars before they succeed, but that chance is diminishing when technologies such as naspter, which were created explicitly for illegal pirating, are promoted in the mass popular culture like they are today.
The most serious problem with MP3's is the ill-informed "logic" which accompanies it: in some of the pirate communities it is common to hear "facts" such as "it costs fifty cents to make a CD" and the like. Anybody with any knowledge at all of the industry, knows that the cost of producing an album is quite high -- in the millions of dollars (think: production cost, music video, marketing, distribution, etc., etc.). The break even point is 500,000 and all of the artists which do not reach that (> 95%) are paid for by those who do.
The fact that you spent SIX MONTHS looking for one MP3 shows how cost ineffective MP3's are. Supposing you are a computer professional, your time is worth $50-$100 per hour. If it took six months, suppose you spent fifteen minutes per day trying to find the MP3. That means you spent $4,000-$8,000 to just get that one MP3. Now you could have got the CD for $15-$20. So not only did you con yourself out of $3,980-$7,980 but you also conned the hard-working artists and A&R people out of their share also.
I am a serious music lover and buy 5-10 CD's per week. If I were to switch to pirating MP3's instead of buying CD's, it would take me umpteen hours just to locate the music, download it, and burn it into CD's. I can buy 10 CD's in a one hour trip to CD store, for the cost of less than $200. It would cost me literally thousands of dollars to pirate the equivalent amount.
In my opinion, MP3's are only for the most casual music fans. Most of the specialized music is not available. I hope the RIAA takes agressive actions to end MP3 pirating, and I hope pirates are put behind bars. The people who pirate MP3's aren't doing anybody any favors: they waste network bandwidth like nobody else, they cheat artists out of their money, they raise prices for people who honestly buy CD's (not to mention put the whole concept of the music industry under question), and are spitting on the notion of property rights.
Please, for the sake of the future of music, for the sake of common sense, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of not wasting your life away waiting for your next batch of warez to arrive, please stop being a moron and STOP pirating MP3's. Thank you.
silicon - sili-kin not sili-khan
gigabyte - soft first "g" (think "gigantic")
gigaherz - ditto
GIF - soft "g" (CompuServ said so)
... The most four commonly mis-pronunced words in the industry (especially gigabyte)
silicon - sili-kin not sili-khan gigabyte - soft first "g" (think "gigantic") gigaherz - ditto GIF - soft "g" (CompuServ said so) ... The most four commonly mis-pronunced words in the industry (especially gigabyte)
Most of the framers of this seem to believe that the major issue here is security, but it seems like reliability is possibly even a bigger showstopper.
No vote can be lost no matter what the circumstances. People are apathetic about voting once, so how would they feel about voting TWICE? For example, a power outage would be very problematic. So would a fire in the building which housed the computers. So would a hard drive crash. It seems like if you had a multi-site VMS or Tandem cluster, it would come close to working, but it is still not absolutely 100% (e.g. if there is a power outage in BOTH sites, which would be possible if an entire region was wiped out.), plus it would be VERY expensive.
How reliable is the current system? If there is disaster on voting day (such as an earthquake or a power outage), is voting ever post-poned, due to likely low turnout, or loss of functionality of the voting machines? Has there ever been a disaster which affected the actual ballots cast (such as a building which held ballots catching fire?) Can computers compete with paper ballots insofar as reliability?
A VMS cluster can take all morning to boot. But once it boots it will stay up until your UPS's fail for the next time.
What's the point of having a short boot time? Does Linux crash so often that it matters that it boots in only a few seconds? Or is this yet another meaningless benchmark that the Linuxer's are bringing out?