Someone ends up with something they didn’t pay for by breaking the law.
Not a perfect analogy, but similar enough. And the analogy only gets wheeled out because some appear to not understand or appreciate the illegality of copyright infringement. So we have to spell it out for them.
By that logic, installing a Ten Commandments sculpture in a courthouse is equivalent to sodomy, because they both involve breaking the law to put something where it isn’t supposed to be. 
Nah, I don’t think anyone has expressed doubt that copyright infringement is illegal. Red herring.
Grizz wrote:
And none of them worth owning. (This from someone who’s been to the websites!)
If that’s your point, then yes, it is. Except an analogy is not equivalent to equivalence, if you follow me. 
No. But it was suggested that it was fair and inevitable practice if you want to protest that you can’t afford something. By which logic, stealing is ok too.
Do you really think most people who consider it OK to download songs from the internet would also consider it OK to steal CDs from a store? I sure don’t.
A CD costs $15 because that’s the economic “sweet spot” for that product. Take the number of consumers willing to buy a product for a given price, multiply that times the profit margin per unit, and you have the price model for that product. Repeat this for various price points, and you get a graph that usually looks like an inverted U, with profits lower at the left because of low profit margins, and lower at the right because of lower sales due to inflated prices. The high point of the graph is where the ideal price point is for the sellers. The larger the number of units sold by an industry, the easier it is for the producers to determine
exactly where that sweet spot is that represents the high point of the graph. Right now, that’s at about $13-$15 retail. If enough consumers stop paying that much, prices will come down to compensate.
On the other hand, DVD prices are dirt cheap when you compare what you get to what you pay. Fifteen bucks for a high-quality version of a movie, two commentaries, trailers, deleted scenes, surround sound at home, random access of features, etc. When VHS tapes were first made for sale 20 some years ago, they routinely retailed for between 80 and 120 dollars. That’s something like 150-250 in today’s money, for 1/4 the resolution, and a “bare-bones” movie only. Right now, a couple can buy a dvd for about the same cost as a trip to the theater. A family of four can buy two.
Which I guess is my way of saying, why spend $15 for a cd, when you can get a dvd for that price?
I’ll take it one further. A few weeks ago I bought the new Rob Zombie CD for abround 17 bucks, or so. Included was a DVD with 14 videos on it. That is a value! I use P2P a lot, but when I find an album worthy of $15, I buy it. Like the Evenescence CD, I downloaded the whole damn thing and decided I liked it, That day I went to buy it.
OTOH, I went to Best Buy to buy the new Kid Rock CD. I knew I’d like it, so no need for downloads to make sure. Paid $13.99. 3 days later it’s advertised at $7.99 for a sale. $6 dollar difference on the same copies they had when I bought it. Now tell me the retail prices aren’t overblown.
Nitpick. They didn’t lose exactly, they settled. I don’t think it even went to court, actually. And I bet that they’re still doing it. The 170 Mil (I think, not checking right now) they paid out is pittance, considering it was split between five companies.
(Note: Forgive lack of cites for facts and any spelling errors. It’s 3 in the morning here and I’m tired.)
The CD industry only has crazy prices because there are a dozen people that make profits before a 17$ CD gets into your hands. The artist only gets a tiny amount (11% was the % someone said earlier… but this 11% is the price that the distributor’s sell the CD for, not Circuit City. So it’s 11% of a smaller amount). Also the record labels, the manufacturers, the distributors, the stores, and the RIAA.
CD’s cost less than a dollar to make. I heard in the past that it was about 50 cents per CD, and it has probably gone done to like 25 cents since then.
Lets say the artists get a dollar an album (more than they get now). And manufacturer a dollar a CD. Distributor another dollar. Stores 2 dollars. No record labels or RIAA, they’re useless anyways… that only adds up to 4 dollars, so CD’s should only cost 5 bucks! Problem is everyone gets too greedy. Artists get the shaft, getting a few cents for each album.
We need to cut the fat here. I’ve heard these companies complain the industry is dying, and downloading music is impovrising the artists. NO. The whole system impovrishes the artists, give them next to nothing for CD’s and forcing them to live off tour earnings. And the CD industry is only suffering because of the absurd prices.
Sadly, many artists don’t realize just how shafted they are by the music industry. There needs to be a major company out there OUTSIDE of the RIAA, to give artists their rightful amount and to give us cheap CD’s. That’s how to bring back the CD industry.
Don’t forget the money going to the agents and lawyers of the band, and the same to the record label, the manufacturer, the RIAA, etc. In this shit industry, EVERYONE is making a buck off the band.
Indeed they are, and without that everyone, the band would not be making any bucks. The presumption that no-one else in this vast industry does any work worth compensating is an odd one, I must say.
I call bullshit. My brother’s band mastered their debut CD in the basement and had t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc made up at their expense to sell at the gigs they do. I thought we were talking about the Industry, where it’s set up that these extra payees are built in.
It’s patently false to say a band can’t make a profit on it’s own. I thought this debate was concerning the extraordinary amount of money being generated and teh miniscule amount getting to the people actually that actually make the music.
Pre-fab bands excluded, where the dickhead that coerces pre-teen girls to buy the crap should be named salesman of the year.
Well, I’m sure your brother’s band are absolutely the Eminems of the basement band world, but I’d be very surprised if they’re making very many bucks. The bands don’t have to employ agents or lawyers, as your brother’s band proves. Should your brother’s band ever make it out of the basement however, I think they will find that these people are actually quite startlingly useful. Otherwise, they would not exist.
Point taken, but I guess I didn’t clarify what I meant.
My point was that at some time, record labels, RIAA, and bands got into a contract pissing match. Thus the lawyers. I defy anyone to show me where getting a lawyer involved dropped overall costs. Hope this clears up what I was trying to say.
As to my brother’s band, I was just pointing out that they decide how much they want to invest in production (the eq is already owned so it’s mostly time it costs them), materials (t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc) and the rest is pure profit. When a band start’s out, the bigest investment is time, which is free if it’s what you want to spend every free second on following a dream.
That wasn’t supposed to be a rant, so please don’t take it as such.
one or two things missing here.
first the Riaa cries foul and moans about loss of sales and blames it all on illegal p2p.
some of the loss of sales is due to p2p, More or al least a decent chunk is lost to the absolute crap they are trying to sell as a CD, and the fact that people are more and more net savy. who is going to buy the new Brittney album when 15 out of 16 message boards are saying the entire thing is shit except for 2 tracks? people are more informed now than they were even 3 years ago when it comes to music and entertainment, its getting alot harder for the industry to make a profit off of a steaming heap of crap like they could even a few years ago. look at movies, 5 years ago the hulk would have been a decent selling flick, that movie TANKED, largely because people saw it and let others know how gimp it truly was. Sorry Riaa, we are pulling our collective heads out of our collective asses. if that costs you record sales then its just making up for all those lame cd’s in a box in storage with 1 or 2 tracks worth listening to each.
that brings me to my next point, the riaa’s all out attack on their very own customer base.
I am going to ask a question, you answer as if you were in charge of a large record company.
someone comes to you and tells you that for the price of a few servers and some fairly serious bandwidth you can put every single artist on your payroll out where people can hear it, for a few thousand bucks you can start marketing even your most obscure artists to a huge audience.
do you
(A) buy some servers and get to work ripping mp3’s and setting up net stations or
(B) take the internet to court and attempt to get every net station to pay royalties including back royalties for however long they have been online from the people who have been putting your most obscure bands out there where people can hear them at THEIR OWN COST?!?!?!!?!??!?!
does this make sense to anyone? why the Fuck would you deliberatly shut down net stations that are giving you FREE exposure? what am I missing? I just dont understand this at all.
basicly it looks like the riaa and the people they represent are dinosaurs, once they die off some new creatures will arise and hopefully welcome this crazy new technology stuff instead of trying to stuff it back in the magic box it came out of.
yes I DL music, no its never stopped me from making purchases of worthwhile cd’s, it has howerver saved me from many, MANY crappy ones.
Fair enough - it just depends how big you are. Eminem himself, for example, is well past the point where any one person could possibly manage his affairs (let alone make music at the same time), and while he’s an extreme example, it’s a line that is crossed fairly quickly. It’s like the difference between making and selling cushions (say) from your home, and being a world-wide textiles firm. Past a certain size you have to get other people involved, even if they’re not directly involved in making the music/cushions/better mousetrap. It’s silly to resent this, because they’re part and parcel of the decision you made, consciously or not, to try and make it big.
As for the lawyer thing, I think this is anti-lawyer bias, tbh. The only scenario I can envisage where lawyers would not be necessary is one in which everyone is nice, and everyone is fair. This is patently not going to happen; people do get screwed, and even if a contract is initially drawn up amicably, you can get shafted down the line if things change and the contract is badly drawn up. It’s not the lawyers’ fault that they’re necessary, it’s a fact of life. Again, resentment of this seems silly in the same way that resenting insurance premiums is silly - they’re saving you money in the long run.
I have a feeling i’ll be clarifying my position for a long time here. But you did help me make my point, I just hadn’t thought of putting it that way.
Yeah, a little anti-lawyer, but they’re not the ones I’m against here. The reason bands need lawyers, as you pointed out, is that the record labels try to screw the bands. I can’t imagine a lawyer being called in because the band was trying to screw BMG.
This brings it all back to the record labels, in effect, responsible for the costs of commercial music these days.
More than willing to expound on anything else I may have left out.
When Sharon Osbourne and DMX held a powwow recently railing aginst the music industry, in which Sharon suggests that young kids “Keep on downloading”, I knew the music industry is messed up.
Sharon’s the wife of Ozzy, who has the ability to mumble through an entrie album and have it sell 8 million copies. Granted, Ozzy is much more talented than that. And she is saying that? Wow. She must have figured out that the Oz was ripped off big time.
Obviously it is impossible for any major band to handle all of its affairs by itself.
That being said, I just think artists would benefit by avoiding signing with a Record Label and thus not working with the RIAA.
It would be very feasible to hire a dozen (or even less) business manager and PR type people, to work with manufacturers and distributors directly when producing CDs. It would also be possible to rent out recording studios indenpendently for a few hours to record the music itself. This would also allow the artists to avoid any long term contracts.
Granted, this would work best when an artists is well established and can fund this kind of project. But as SeekingTruth said, even up and coming artists can fund their own enterprises to a large extent.
Really, artists get pittance for their royalties, and make most of their money off touring. If they could work around the established system, they could make far more money from royalties and give us CD’s at a far lower price (and selling far more CD’s, thus increasing their royalties even more).
This is even funnier when you know that Sharon Osbourne was one of the greatest band managers (of the hair-metal set) of the 1980s.
For a while she was just GOLD.
If you’re really mad, there are absolutely legitimate alternatives to buying major-label CD’s at prices that I agree are tough to justify. If you have a good local record store, I’ll bet there are tons of CD’s by local bands other artists on small labels running $9-$12. Take a big old scary step and buy music from a band that isn’t mass-marketed and produced by an elite team of Swedes working around the clock in an underground bunker to make them sound halfway decent, and you’ll find that you don’t have to eat that cost.
Some of the larger labels that specialize in selling music that isn’t thought of as “commercial” (Epitaph and Matador come to mind) manage to make plenty selling CD’s that are often priced at $4-$9.
Not to worry, though. The music industry as we know it will collapse, and it’s about time. Recording and production gear continues to get cheaper and cheaper, meaning that a band no longer needs a label to be able to put down a decent-quality recording, and we’ve got the technology to produce high quality digital song files that can be put on a blank CD that costs you about 10 cents. I think we’ll see the level of variety available from legal download sites continue expand until it’s much better than any record store.
Say goodbye to paying $18 + tax for that Top 40 CD with one or two radio singles and a ton of utter shit. Instead, if you gotta have the single, buy it from iTunes for $1.
If you just keep coughing up the cash for your Britney Spears and Kid Rock, why the hell wouldn’t they continue to charge you high prices for it? To continue buying it while complaining that it costs too much is idiocy. If you’re too lazy to look at your options as a consumer, which in this case are plentiful and constantly expanding, you deserve to get ripped off.
LC