And with that post, I have finally given up on Slashdot. I will allow it to continue to sink into the small echo chamber of people spouting illogical arguments and unquestioned articles of faith at each other that it is determined to become.
What if they just bought half the music industry, fixed it, then massacred the other half in the market place? That other half would soon change their ways to become competitive, given no other choice.
I have to ask what "fixing it" means. Because if it means making less money, then artists don't have a good financial incentive to sign on with Google's label and that would very quickly lead to the collapse of Google's music label.
Okay. There exist "natural monopolies" which is the usual term for these things. I'll rephrase my comment to the more accurate, but less pithy: "Except in the case of natural monopolies, of which the music industry is not one, monopolies are bad."
If there were only one company that artists, sound engineers, et al, could go to for employment, that would be a seriously fucked up situation.
True, but we already have an oligopoly (major labels) that only exists because of state-backed monopolies (copyright)
Well, copyright law and the public's general willingness to pay the asked for price for the music. Copyright law does not produce a mandatory tax that everyone must pay. The companies exist because people have considered their product something they are willing to give money for.
Also, monopoly isn't really the right word. Copyright law doesn't grant a monopoly on producing music to anyone. It limits the rights to reproduce specific pieces of music. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on O/Ss because copyright law grants only them the right to reproduce their own O/S. They can't call up Bill Gates or Linus and tell them they're not allowed to produce an O/S. A "monopoly" on reproducing a particular song is no more a "monopoly" than that given to Oracle being the only company allowed to distribute the Oracle database.
and the purposes of the acquisition would be to reverse the harm that said oligopoly has caused. In this hypothetical, Google might not even be trying to make any money off of the acquisition,
I think your faith in Google's benevolance is quite alarming if you're suggesting they might buy a major music label without the intent to make money off it. I also think you'd be very disappointed to learn that music still cost money as if Google wasn't making a decent profit of it, the artists would sign up with a different label that did make them some money.
True...but if they are pricing themselves out of the casual listeners ballpark, yet adding restrictions to the extent that the ad-supported service is...well...useless, then they are effectively narrowing their revenue stream to only those people who do listen to music all day every day.
I consider the "if" in the above statement a pretty big one. I doubt at £5 a month, they're pricing themselves out of many people's ballpark. I'm an extremely casual listener. I mostly have the subscription for parties and dates. It's been really good to just have the World's music sitting there for anyone to pick from. I think £5 a month puts it well inside the casual bracket for most people.
The owner of sex.xxx is going to make a fortunequote>
They might make some money from selling it due to the high perceived value of the domain, but in practice, are many more people likely to visit a site their for their porn than any other site? So I doubt they'll make a fortune. The only ones going to make money out of this, are ICANN and the domain registries. It's just a money making stunt. It has very limited practical value and the potential for considerable destructiveness.
Wow! You seriously got modded down for that post. And yet it's one of the first comments that actually is informative about what was actually said. Slashdot Hivemind is in full-force tonight!
Well software makes selling "different products" often just a case of enabling or disabling different features so the only way to differentiate different licensing terms is with these sorts of limitations. Market differentiation can be a good thing. Instead of everyone paying £8, some can pay £5 and some can pay £10. Nobody's paying for more than they need and nobody's free-loading off those who would be paying for features they didn't want. I'm not saying this is always the perfect case once marketing people get hold of it, but the idea is sound and a useful one. If you were buying something physical and you bought a more expensive version with extra features you needed, you wouldn't feel cheated because you'd look at the extra bits and think "this cost more to produce than the version without these features". With digital products, those limitations seem arbitrary, but it's just a matter of perception: it still took more to add those extra features and they still add value and pricing is still based on people buying that which they want.
Slight correction, btw. The £5 version is available for Linux. I know because I had it. Though I upgraded to Premium to get the better bit-rates.
Well, it kind of depends on there cost and value compared to competitors
No, that determines whether they are the best deal. What determines whether or not they are worth purchasing a service from, is whether you value the service. Suzuki might offer great cost and value compared to Harley Davidson, but unless I'm in the market for a motorbike, it's irrelevant.
I wish people would stop comparing music to movies. There different things.
It's not useful to compare things to themselves! You have to compare them to something else. In order to show other things that you could get for the same money, I picked on rented movies. I could pick a lot of other examples, too. The idea is to try and gauge the value of €10 so that the cost of streaming music can be properly calibrated. Not everyone values renting movies. Some people might value beer and I could have said: it's the cost of a couple of beers. But enough people rent movies that it's a decent enough tool to use to draw a value comparison. 10 is just a number. It could be a lot or a little. By pegging other items that are found at position "10" however, we can get a feel for where 10 is on the scale of things.
Okay. If you feel £5 a month is unreasonable for endless music, two questions. One, what would you say is a reasonable price for endless music? Two, do you feel that endless music is of less value than, for example, a pizza and a beer once a month, a couple of movie rentals once a month, a few pairs of socks from a department store each month?A couple of pre-packed sandwiches from a supermarket or local deli? Music is a luxury good, not a necessity, so it's easy to compare it to lots of other things and see how it rates. I honestly believe that anyone making the argument that £5 a month is too much, who isn't actually hard up for money (i.e. they spend money on other things they don't require), is really not going to impress anyone with their position.
It was the BBC news (Funded in the UK by a compulsory [for those with TVs that can receive broadcast programming] subscription/tax) article that highlighted the "So long, guess I'll go back to pirating music" comment.
This is why my first sentence was a warning against conflation. You're conflating talent with knowledge.
I don't believe I am. Firstly, "knowledge" isn't a good word to use for playing an instrument. Skill would be. Secondly, I don't see this clear distinction between "talent" and skill. Do some people have a greater or lesser aptitude for music? Yes. But it's misguided to put that aptitude on a pedestal above practice and study. Do you play an instrument? Because myself and my friends who are professional musicians - I know that they would disagree with your stance. Being a great musician is a little bit raw aptitude and an overwhelming amout of study and practice. The bald statement that "talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught" sounds very hollow to me. As I said earlier, I don't know of any really good musician that wasn't taught. I suppose there might be an example out there somewhere, but they'd be a massive exception.
If they cannot transcend the mechanical aspect of music and play (let alone compose!) in a way that connects them emotionally with their audience (which is a talent)
Actually, that is something largely learned and also a false dichotomy. I strongly suspect that you haven't played music professionally and would be interested to know what experience as a musician you have.
For a lot of people - like me - music isn't all that important. [...] Perhaps when you manage to look beyond your own situation you will see that Spotify for many people no longer makes sense.
I don't think Spotify should be basing their pricing around what appeals to people who don't have much interest in music.;)
The average person doesn't have a clue about this media vs copyright war that has been happening since before the internet even existed.
I don't know what this "average person" is to whom you refer, but outside of Slashdot, I think most people think the notion of copyright is reasonably fair. Inside of Slashdot, you get modded down for being anti-piracy.
€10 a month isn't an "awful lot of money" to most people. It's the price of a pizza and a beer. I'm not going to pick on people to whom it is a lot of money. But I would certainly tell people who have that money available for other things but somehow value music so low that they think this is overpriced, that their expectations are skewed. You'd probably pay around this to rent a couple of movies over a month. And this you can listen to 24/7.
Don't have to trust you - I'm another paying customer. Honestly, I pay the £10 per month to get pretty much any music I've ever heard of almost instantly available. And if you don't want the high bit-rate or mobile service, it's half that. High bit-rate is 320Kbps Ogg, standard is, from memory, 160kbps, so unless you have good speakers, you might not even care about the bit rate.
Trust Slashdot to highlight the "So long, guess I'll go back to pirating music comment". Honestly - is it really that horrifyingly out of whack to charge £5 a month for endless music? I don't think many people have the right to be outraged about someone wanting £5 a month for that. It just makes them sound stupid and / or greedy.
Paid Spotify won't pay the bills. This is a death knell for Spotify--they don't know it, but it is.
What are your figures for this and why do you believe that Spotify don't know something about their business model that you do? The idea that paid spotify wont pay the bills seems rather arbitrary when you consider that a digital service like Spotify can scale up or down its infrastructure and costs according to demand. Costs and demand move in quick step with each other unlike physical manufacturing where if you invest heavily at a certain productivity and demand falls, you may be stuffed.
I had to scale up a digital service recently (not music). It involved clicking some buttons on a hosting company's website, configuring a server and putting several hundred dollars on my card. In two months time, if I don't need it anymore, I'll cancel. I have cost of X per user, and profit of Y per user. So long as X
However talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught
I've yet to meet a really good musician who wasn't taught their skills by other musicians. Perhaps one or two self-taught types are out there and are a success story. The rest all got taught. Often those lessons were paid for.
Slashdot Mirror
And with that post, I have finally given up on Slashdot. I will allow it to continue to sink into the small echo chamber of people spouting illogical arguments and unquestioned articles of faith at each other that it is determined to become.
Adios, Slashdot. I'm done here.
H.
Well the only modding seems to have been a -1 so I guess not everyone feels that way. You have my permission to sig it if you like. ;) :D
Cheers,
H.
What if they just bought half the music industry, fixed it, then massacred the other half in the market place? That other half would soon change their ways to become competitive, given no other choice.
I have to ask what "fixing it" means. Because if it means making less money, then artists don't have a good financial incentive to sign on with Google's label and that would very quickly lead to the collapse of Google's music label.
Okay. There exist "natural monopolies" which is the usual term for these things. I'll rephrase my comment to the more accurate, but less pithy: "Except in the case of natural monopolies, of which the music industry is not one, monopolies are bad."
If there were only one company that artists, sound engineers, et al, could go to for employment, that would be a seriously fucked up situation.
True, but we already have an oligopoly (major labels) that only exists because of state-backed monopolies (copyright)
Well, copyright law and the public's general willingness to pay the asked for price for the music. Copyright law does not produce a mandatory tax that everyone must pay. The companies exist because people have considered their product something they are willing to give money for.
Also, monopoly isn't really the right word. Copyright law doesn't grant a monopoly on producing music to anyone. It limits the rights to reproduce specific pieces of music. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on O/Ss because copyright law grants only them the right to reproduce their own O/S. They can't call up Bill Gates or Linus and tell them they're not allowed to produce an O/S. A "monopoly" on reproducing a particular song is no more a "monopoly" than that given to Oracle being the only company allowed to distribute the Oracle database.
and the purposes of the acquisition would be to reverse the harm that said oligopoly has caused. In this hypothetical, Google might not even be trying to make any money off of the acquisition,
I think your faith in Google's benevolance is quite alarming if you're suggesting they might buy a major music label without the intent to make money off it. I also think you'd be very disappointed to learn that music still cost money as if Google wasn't making a decent profit of it, the artists would sign up with a different label that did make them some money.
True...but if they are pricing themselves out of the casual listeners ballpark, yet adding restrictions to the extent that the ad-supported service is...well...useless, then they are effectively narrowing their revenue stream to only those people who do listen to music all day every day.
I consider the "if" in the above statement a pretty big one. I doubt at £5 a month, they're pricing themselves out of many people's ballpark. I'm an extremely casual listener. I mostly have the subscription for parties and dates. It's been really good to just have the World's music sitting there for anyone to pick from. I think £5 a month puts it well inside the casual bracket for most people.
The owner of sex.xxx is going to make a fortunequote> They might make some money from selling it due to the high perceived value of the domain, but in practice, are many more people likely to visit a site their for their porn than any other site? So I doubt they'll make a fortune. The only ones going to make money out of this, are ICANN and the domain registries. It's just a money making stunt. It has very limited practical value and the potential for considerable destructiveness.
Wow! You seriously got modded down for that post. And yet it's one of the first comments that actually is informative about what was actually said. Slashdot Hivemind is in full-force tonight!
Well software makes selling "different products" often just a case of enabling or disabling different features so the only way to differentiate different licensing terms is with these sorts of limitations. Market differentiation can be a good thing. Instead of everyone paying £8, some can pay £5 and some can pay £10. Nobody's paying for more than they need and nobody's free-loading off those who would be paying for features they didn't want. I'm not saying this is always the perfect case once marketing people get hold of it, but the idea is sound and a useful one. If you were buying something physical and you bought a more expensive version with extra features you needed, you wouldn't feel cheated because you'd look at the extra bits and think "this cost more to produce than the version without these features". With digital products, those limitations seem arbitrary, but it's just a matter of perception: it still took more to add those extra features and they still add value and pricing is still based on people buying that which they want.
Slight correction, btw. The £5 version is available for Linux. I know because I had it. Though I upgraded to Premium to get the better bit-rates.
Monopolies are bad.
Well, it kind of depends on there cost and value compared to competitors
No, that determines whether they are the best deal. What determines whether or not they are worth purchasing a service from, is whether you value the service. Suzuki might offer great cost and value compared to Harley Davidson, but unless I'm in the market for a motorbike, it's irrelevant.
I wish people would stop comparing music to movies. There different things.
It's not useful to compare things to themselves! You have to compare them to something else. In order to show other things that you could get for the same money, I picked on rented movies. I could pick a lot of other examples, too. The idea is to try and gauge the value of €10 so that the cost of streaming music can be properly calibrated. Not everyone values renting movies. Some people might value beer and I could have said: it's the cost of a couple of beers. But enough people rent movies that it's a decent enough tool to use to draw a value comparison. 10 is just a number. It could be a lot or a little. By pegging other items that are found at position "10" however, we can get a feel for where 10 is on the scale of things.
For the price of pizza and beer you get pizza and beer. If you buy spotify you get a "virtual service".
What's virtual about it? I pay the money and music comes out of my speakers. If you'll pardon me for the phrasing, it sounds pretty real to me.
Okay. If you feel £5 a month is unreasonable for endless music, two questions. One, what would you say is a reasonable price for endless music? Two, do you feel that endless music is of less value than, for example, a pizza and a beer once a month, a couple of movie rentals once a month, a few pairs of socks from a department store each month?A couple of pre-packed sandwiches from a supermarket or local deli? Music is a luxury good, not a necessity, so it's easy to compare it to lots of other things and see how it rates. I honestly believe that anyone making the argument that £5 a month is too much, who isn't actually hard up for money (i.e. they spend money on other things they don't require), is really not going to impress anyone with their position.
It was the BBC news (Funded in the UK by a compulsory [for those with TVs that can receive broadcast programming] subscription/tax) article that highlighted the "So long, guess I'll go back to pirating music" comment.
Both the BBC and Slashdot did.
This is why my first sentence was a warning against conflation. You're conflating talent with knowledge.
I don't believe I am. Firstly, "knowledge" isn't a good word to use for playing an instrument. Skill would be. Secondly, I don't see this clear distinction between "talent" and skill. Do some people have a greater or lesser aptitude for music? Yes. But it's misguided to put that aptitude on a pedestal above practice and study. Do you play an instrument? Because myself and my friends who are professional musicians - I know that they would disagree with your stance. Being a great musician is a little bit raw aptitude and an overwhelming amout of study and practice. The bald statement that "talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught" sounds very hollow to me. As I said earlier, I don't know of any really good musician that wasn't taught. I suppose there might be an example out there somewhere, but they'd be a massive exception.
If they cannot transcend the mechanical aspect of music and play (let alone compose!) in a way that connects them emotionally with their audience (which is a talent)
Actually, that is something largely learned and also a false dichotomy. I strongly suspect that you haven't played music professionally and would be interested to know what experience as a musician you have.
I think you were replying to ElectricTurtle.
Well, I was meaning to... ;)
For a lot of people - like me - music isn't all that important. [...] Perhaps when you manage to look beyond your own situation you will see that Spotify for many people no longer makes sense.
I don't think Spotify should be basing their pricing around what appeals to people who don't have much interest in music. ;)
50p per year for unlimited streaming is about the maximum that I'd be willing to pay.
Then you are either phenomenally cheap or your have no interest in streaming music. Neither of which apply to most of the people in this discussion.
The average person doesn't have a clue about this media vs copyright war that has been happening since before the internet even existed.
I don't know what this "average person" is to whom you refer, but outside of Slashdot, I think most people think the notion of copyright is reasonably fair. Inside of Slashdot, you get modded down for being anti-piracy.
Well Spotify isn't available in Canada so I guess that this particular excuse doesn't apply for this poster.
€10 a month isn't an "awful lot of money" to most people. It's the price of a pizza and a beer. I'm not going to pick on people to whom it is a lot of money. But I would certainly tell people who have that money available for other things but somehow value music so low that they think this is overpriced, that their expectations are skewed. You'd probably pay around this to rent a couple of movies over a month. And this you can listen to 24/7.
Don't have to trust you - I'm another paying customer. Honestly, I pay the £10 per month to get pretty much any music I've ever heard of almost instantly available. And if you don't want the high bit-rate or mobile service, it's half that. High bit-rate is 320Kbps Ogg, standard is, from memory, 160kbps, so unless you have good speakers, you might not even care about the bit rate.
Trust Slashdot to highlight the "So long, guess I'll go back to pirating music comment". Honestly - is it really that horrifyingly out of whack to charge £5 a month for endless music? I don't think many people have the right to be outraged about someone wanting £5 a month for that. It just makes them sound stupid and / or greedy.
Paid Spotify won't pay the bills. This is a death knell for Spotify--they don't know it, but it is.
What are your figures for this and why do you believe that Spotify don't know something about their business model that you do? The idea that paid spotify wont pay the bills seems rather arbitrary when you consider that a digital service like Spotify can scale up or down its infrastructure and costs according to demand. Costs and demand move in quick step with each other unlike physical manufacturing where if you invest heavily at a certain productivity and demand falls, you may be stuffed.
I had to scale up a digital service recently (not music). It involved clicking some buttons on a hosting company's website, configuring a server and putting several hundred dollars on my card. In two months time, if I don't need it anymore, I'll cancel. I have cost of X per user, and profit of Y per user. So long as X
However talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught
I've yet to meet a really good musician who wasn't taught their skills by other musicians. Perhaps one or two self-taught types are out there and are a success story. The rest all got taught. Often those lessons were paid for.
Well, he's experienced now.