Let’s take Warner Brothers or Atlantic They should have all their artist’s stuff on a server, and a customer could order a number songs from WB artists (let’s say 12) on a CD for a standard price (let’s say $20.00) + shipping. Wouldn’t they make money on such a thing. wouldn’t you order a CD or two that way?
I mean, I am unlikely to buy a CD from a particular artist to get only one song, but would would be willing to buy the song in a package of others. IMO, the company has money to gain and nothing to lose.
Are any company’s doing this? I’m not talking about downloading a file, but actually ordering a custom CD (with minimal packaging) directly from the record company. If they aren’t, why not? What’s wrong with that idea?
I’ve heard of this system proposes for a music vending machine. One of the critisims is the ‘other’ tracks (not popular) would not be circulated as muc and less chance of them becomming popular. Then again it may be a selling point, if you didn’t get that track and it becasue popular you might have to order a 2nd CD.
I think that’s it. Does anybody wonder why nobody likes the record companies?
I mean, suppose you went into a grocery store. You want to buy bananas, but they’re packaged together with lemons, Brussels sprouts, and okra. You want bananas, you have to pay for the whole package. Who in the world would go along with that?
Yeah, but if I’m only interested in one track, they ain’t gonna get the money. If I but a couple of tracks, I might become interested enough to buy more…
K-Tel records used to do this a couple years ago (I think it was like $1 a song or something) but I just went to their site and it looks like they’re going after the corporate market now (min order 500!) Too bad!
I would. But I like brussel sprouts, lemons and okra
OT however, If we paid on a track to track basis, where is the incentive to the artist to try new or different things? Or the record company to offer or promote it?
IMHO We would lose a lot of interesting new material as most would conform to existing proven and safe types of music.
Not that its not that way already, but I think the problem would be enhanced.
They tried this with cassette tapes years ago–called it the “Personics” system. They had kiosks inside record stores, and you could choose which songs you want and have the cassette made right there in the store (complete with label). I can’t remember if the cost was per-song or per-tape (I think it was per-song) but it was comparable to a new music cassette at the time. I don’t know what happened to the system–probably died due to lack of interest.
Well, I can’t find too much on it, since it was a while back, but this and this seem to imply that Personics was killed off, rather than dying. (The second is a subscription site, so I don’t know what the article itself says.)
I used to wonder about this too. I think it would be a great idea (from my own point of view as a consumer of course) but a few good arguments have been put here as to why record companies don’t do it. I guess I should have thought of those arguments too. Now it makes sense
I’m sure I recall one London record store doing this years ago. They had a glass-walled “lab” in the basement floor, where you could request a CD to be be burned and they’d prepare it while you waited (not a vending machine or anything that simple). I’m sure I saw this on a kid’s TV news show in the late 1980s or early 1990s. If I remember rightly, it was Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus, or possibly either Virgin or HMV on Oxford Street.
I presume the costs are not worth it; if it was commonplace, it might hit album sales. If it’s not commonplace, is it worth setting up the machines and setting up whatever license arrangements are required? Maybe the record labels didn’t want people buying anything other than singles, albums or “official” compilations; maybe the technology wasn’t reliable; maybe the growth in home CD burning rendered it an unprofitable long-term vision.
But they do get the money from a lot of people. Or people buy singles. Consolidating hit songs would benefit the consumer, not the record company. They’d lose money.
I don’t see why it’s inherently different to them producing greatest hits CDs. Equally, I’d assume that they do deals, if you want to create a all greatest hits CD you’re going to pay through the nose, but if you go for less well-known ones, or a pre-made one, you’d pay a lot less.
While buying singles would be nice, how easy is it to find older ones? They only produce them for a short period, and not at all for many songs.
Singles are very expensive on a per-song basis, and almost any store will price albums based on demand \ quality. This is just an extention of that.
As to the argument that it’d deter invention, that just sounds like an excuse to force us to subsidise garbage. Other industries don’t get to do it.
Perhaps they’d have to encourage radio stations to play more than one song by an artist, or perhaps they’d have to support their own radio stations (surely not impossible for the bigger companies). I can’t see why advertising in general would be a worse idea than forcing us to buy sight-unseen (sound-unheard?).
But compliation disks are very common anyway. Epitaph puts one out every year that includes most of their bands. It’s a good way to see what you like, punk wise, and buy accordingly.
Now that we have Napster as a pay site to download music from, why couldn’t we buy a disk of songs from them? For us computer-illiterate types who just want the CD to play in our cars.
Wouldn’t it be a fairly risk free way for a person to sample other types artists? On one dick they could sample 2 songs from, say, 6 different acts on a non-returnable CD. That might keep folks from buying then returning stuff that they just didn’t like.
It might also keep some acts from including ‘filler’ songs on the CD’s, just to make it a standard length.
If the choice catalog were wide and varied enough, I myself would buy 8 or 9 CD’s worth of stuff that I wouldn’t now.
And I guess that would be the key. But with today’s technology, such a catalog is already available. I mean past stuff as well as present.
Try some back of the envelope figures. 750 megabits per album (were talking CD quality not MP3), 2 major releases per week per genre. 14 major genres.
Conservative 21000 megabytes per week that has to be added to every production library just to get the new stuff out. 52 weeks per year gives us 10920000 megabytes of songs we need to have on hand just for this years releases. That’s 11 terabytes of disk space per year. Add in all the old stuff so every one can have their favorites and the numbers get real big. Not necessarily undoable, but far too expensive for a record store with slim margins.
Some of the music companies are looking into providing Web or mail order options and Mac has the whole I-pod/I-tunes thing but don’t look for on demand custom CD production at your local mom and pop any time soon.
No, the stores don’t need to keep 11 terabytes around all the time. They’d have a fast link to a repository somewhere, and download tracks as needed. With a decent cache to hold popular stuff locally, they wouldn’t even need to download current hits more than once. Uncommon requests would take a while to get, but I’d wait half an hour for my own compilation of favourites.