I’m not downtown, but I’m suburban, either. I live in Vancouver’s “Little India”. The store I mentioned is Neptoon Records, which was, until recently, near the intersection of Fraser Street and 41[sup]st[/sup] Avenue.
Happily, I see that they have not vanished, after all, but just moved a bit further north, into generic East Van. Probably a much better location for them, especially since they were adjacent to a high school, and right next to a place that sells tasty but greasy samosas at four for a dollar, which of course meant that many of the folks who passed through the shop had sticky fingers of one sort or another.
I didn’t seriously mean to suggest that their (as it happens, non-existent) misfortune was caused by P2P technology. That location was really just wrong for them-- I’m surprised they toughed it out for as long as they did.
I thought you might have been talking about Neptoon–i was just thrown off by the (in)correct speeling in your earlier post. I knew a couple of people who used to buy some of their vinyl there, and i was rather disappointed to hear that it closed, but then i went online and found, like you, that they have actually just moved.
Larry, you need to understand that my last post was one where I was adopting the position of offering free advice to the RIAA. I’m personally not adopting a pro or negative position on the morality, or legality, or ethicality of this debate coz quite frankly it’s a no win debate to be sure.
However, my “theoretical advice” earlier was that the RIAA should adopt a position where (a) they should be suing the pants of Microsoft and Apple and all the people who perfected the mp3 standard for allowing this technology to run wild the way it has; and (b) they should be doing something real soon to stop releasing music which has already been converted into digital on behalf of all the pirates, coz that’s just fucking dumb man. If you know there are people out there trying to steal cars, you don’t leave your car keys on the fucking bonnet and then walk away and hope for the best.
Further, the RIAA should immediately adopt a position which actively works against pirating, at an initial release level. Sure, we all know that we could then create an mp3 by recording our PC input jacks - but in a way, that would be a bit of a technological impediment. All of a sudden you’d have all sorts of variable quality mp3’s all over the place - some from shitty turntables, some from wicked turntables, and others from who knows what technology in the future - but at least they would have to be converted via the Digital to Analog converter inside your PC’s sound card - and right there is a variable quality control which would steal the thunder out of mp3’s.
As it stands, the RIAA is releasing music which has already been converted into digital on behalf of the PC, and as such, the RIAA is making piracy a whole lot bloody easier than it should be.
Anyway, that’s the end of my “theoretical free advice” to the RIAA.
Boo Boo Foo: the record co.s have been trying to release CDs that can’t be copied. Go to a music store and you’ll see a copy protection symbol on all EMI releases. If you look at Jet’s latest album, you’ll also find a whiny rant about how filesharing hurts artists (apparently record co.s have a monopoly on this practice).
EMI releases are still being copied.
The record companies are stupid. All the copy-protection stuff has done is made the CDs not work in many players, pissing off their customers even more. The copy-protection isn’t even that good; it’s very easy to get around, and I even found out how to do it at a message board on an EMI website!!! (I’ll see if I can find it again).
As far as I’m concerned a company that is that stupid does not deserve to exist.
World Eater, I’ll respond to your drivel when I have time.
I guess that I really don’t understand your point of view. Are you saying that artists and record companies should donate their time, talents and facilities and not get compensated? Would you suggest that they just make one digital copy of their songs and make them available to everyone at no cost? That ain’t the way that a free-market, capitalist society does things. Put yourself in a musicians place, would you want to spend the time writing and producing an album if you weren’t going to make any money from it? Sure, a lot of people may enjoy the music you have created, but warm fuzzies don’t pay the rent.
To be honest, I just want to know what the RIAA’s agenda is. The fact that they are composed of a healthy portion of slime ISN’T justification to rip-off the artists. However, for the RIAA to say that royalties need to be collected so the artist do get paid is hypocritical given the ripping off of artists by the companies that make up the RIAA. It isn’t fair for them to come after file-sharers until they get their own house in order. I would also guess that if record companies are under-reporting sales to the artists, they may also be under-reporting revenue on their taxes.
Let’s talk about songwriters for a minute. You do realize that many artists do not write their own material right? They rely on songwriters. Songriters don’t earn any money from t-shirt sales, or touring. The only way they make money is when somebody purchases a CD. Many of the well known songwriters have come out against file sharing because it is literally putting them out of business. This is not ranting from the RIAA, this is from the people that make a living writing songs that people have enjoyed for many years. Some examples
Now, I’m sure some of you will respond with “What’s the proof that file sharing hurts anyone?” But personally, I think the remarks from the songwriters themselves are proof enough. I think they have a little better handle on the state of the songwriting industry than the average college kid who thinks he has the whole thing figured out.
And to those who gleefully hope that file-sharing puts those big bad record execs out of business, think about what you are saying. You do realize that this would mean literally thousands of people losing their jobs. Not just the execs, but everyone on down the line. Is that really what you desire, to put an end to this industry. Because you should be aware that damn near all of those files you are downloading are a result of a record company paying for them to be recorded. If there is no industry, who pays for these songs to be recorded? The artists themselves? Do really think that most up and coming artists have the funds available to put out a well recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered CD on ther own? And even if they do, can they afford to effectively market their product? What good is a great CD if nobody hears about it? And with the saturation of new artists trying to market their product through internet means, you are truly talking a needle in the haystack. Plus, what is the incentive for putting up all of this money yourself, if you are the artist, knowing that many people will choose to enjoy your product for free without paying you a cent for it. Are all artists supposed to become non-profit organizations and just do it for the love of doing it? They have bills to pay just like everyone else.
Actually, they already took that approach, and have been more-or-less shot down, which is why they are now going after individuals. The oft-cited RIAA v. Diamond is a case of the RIAA targeting specific technology. Didn’t work- largely because the technology has a legitimate use:
I dimly recall that at one time the RIAA was lobbying against any sort of technology that would facilitate quality audio being distributed over the internet with a managable filesize. Sort of like outlawing the sale of ceramic-head “Life Hammers” because they are more often used by criminals to get in to cars than by honest folks to get out. This luddite position naturally met with the scorn that it deserves, so they’ve moved on.
Um, you haven’t noticed that this describes the situation as it exists today? Mp3 quality is notoriously variable – some of the damn things are so poorly encoded that they sound like transmissions from Jupiter. Ever heard an .mp3 encoded with RealJukebox? Ugh. Some encoders seem to stagger the channels by a sample or two so you get that weird phase-cancellation effect.
Even with a quality encoder, there’s still plenty of room for user ineptitude. CD rips encoded at a bitrate that might be appropriate if you took it as a given that it was going to be transferred via a 300 baud modem – or encoded in mono, or with the levels way too low or too high, or truncated, or ripped from a CD-Rom drive that keeps losing sync, so you get pops, drop-outs, and skipovers, etc. etc.
The costs of switching the entire industry over to yet another entirely new format for distribution would be immense, and would likely have absolutely no effect on the number of copyrighted songs being distributed via P2P. It would put the consumer in the position of having to decide whether they’d rather buy an expensive new stereo component in order to listen to the latest releases, or just wait the hour-and-a-half it’s going to take for the albums to show up on P2P networks, and then burn a CD that will play on their existing equipment. Consumers have historically demonstrated a resistance to format changes, even when they represent a significant improvement in value for the end-user. The industry is not going to try to cram a new format down our throats where the main benefit is for the distributors – they would suffer massive short-term losses, and it’s doubtful that any long-term gains would come of it. Even if they did attempt to do something so foolish, it seems likely to me that they’d lose not just consumers, but their artists, en masse. Even the stunned drummer has more marketing sense than that.
If I were inclined to give the RIAA free advice, it would be more along the lines of embracing existing technology and using it to their benefit.
I’m not really inclined to give them any advice, though, because in my opinion they’re a pack of vampires. There was a time when artists needed to agree to be exploited by Big Money if they wanted to record, promote, and distribute their music. They needed pimps, not to put to fine a point on it. The only people who benefited from this arrangement were the record companies. They’ve enjoyed seventy years of prostituting artists because the artists had no other option, if they wanted to be heard. Don’t like your new producer? Tough, you signed a contract, and your pimps have decided that they’re going to force you to sound as much like what’s generating the Big Bucks as possible. Who’s fault is Captain Beefheart’s Unconditionally Guaranteed?
Now that your average Joe can afford their own multitrack studio equipment to record their own music, have means available to allow people to hear it, and can market it themselves, there’s no need to yoke themselves to anyone else. Once the music-pimps are properly relegated to the dustbin of history, I’m sure we’ll see less bitter artists turning their back on the whole scene and living in self-imposed exile in a shack in the freakin’ desert. And we’ll certainly have less over-produced, homogenized pap forced into our ears. Golly, a world where musicians’ worldwide success or failure is determined on the strength of their merit instead of the machinations of a bunch of suits – what a dystopian vision. For the RIAA, anyway.
I think this is a good point, and it raises another issue for me.
I’ve been defending file-sharing in this post, not really because i think it’s a particularly noble activity, but mainly because of my contempt for the RIAA. I would be happy if the industry was decentralized and became more abut producing music that people want to hear, and about artistic control remaining in the hands of the actual artists.
What we need to be careful of in the current environment, however, is that we are seeing the birth of a whole generation of people who think that music should be free under all circumstances. I can see a situation where, in the future, they will still expect to get all their music for free, even though it’s not the RIAA who is the main beneficiary.
We need to make sure that we maintain an attitude that the people who bring us the music–artists, technicians, etc.–deserve to get paid for their labor, and deserve to be able to pay the rent and put food on the table. While i see some moral justification for file-sharing now on the grounds that the RIAA is just as guilty of stiffing artists, we should try to remember that making music is work, and that people should be remunerated for it.
Stop releasing digital music? Only if they’re going to replace stretched cassette tapes and worn-out vinyl for free. Consumers are going to be pissed if they have to go back to buying replacement albums because they’ve listened to the ones they own too much.
The people with shitty turntables aren’t going to be thrilled about buying vinyl either. Why pay $1000 for a nice turntable just to get the same quality as a $100 CD player - and still have to deal with a medium that sounds different every time you play it, and wears out from too much use?
I’m saying they don’t have a right to make money just because they spend time making an album. I think we can all agree that no one has an inherent right to make money just because they’ve put effort into something.
I’m also saying, more controversially, that they don’t have a moral entitlement to control whether other people listen to their music. I don’t buy into the idea that information can be owned once it leaves the creator’s hands, or that an artist is harmed when you enjoy his work without paying for it. Harm only comes in when someone is deprived or has to replace what you used for free.
I’m not saying they should donate anything, only that I’d rather have 100 people buy an album and 500 listen for free, than have 100 people buy it and none listen for free.
Of course not. I think the system works the way it is now:
Artists release CDs. People who want to buy the CDs (because of convenience, quality, supporting the band, or whatever) do so. People who want to sample the music before they buy it download it, and either buy the CD or don’t. People who wouldn’t consider buying the CD enjoy the music for free.
Sales of good pop albums (Kid A, The Eminem Show) go up due to file sharing. Sales of indie artists who mainly get exposure from the internet go up due to file sharing. Sales of crappy albums go down. The result is a pressure to make good albums and expose good bands, instead of blasting the hit single flavor of the week on the radio twice an hour.
Larry? Thank you for that… I didn’t know that little bit of history. Much appreciated.
Good thing I’m a Systems Analyst and not a lawyer then, huh?
Gex Gex? Yes, I remember hearing about copy protection on CD’s a few years back. Remember the myth about thick black marker line around the outside ring of a burnt CD for instance? Indeed, I’m pretty sure Celine Dion’s album ciraca late 2001 was the first major album to feature such copy protection.
Of course, a cynic could argue that indeed, it was us the public, who needed protection from precisely such an album.
MR2001? Yes, you’re right… it’s extremely unlikely that cassettes and vinyl will ever assume top of the totem pole again. And this is where the digital copying becomes such a perilous case. At the end of the day, an mp3 in reality is just an intricate series of zero’s and one’s - and somehow it gets reconstituted into an audio wave. Same with the original wave file on the CD of course too.
But to make copies of zero’s and one’s - and perfect copies too - is just so incredibly easy in this day and age. It’s a pandora’s box. The RIAA’s profit margin went through the roof between 1987 and 1997 - that was the era when vinyl dropped off big time but it was before file sharing had taken off big time. During that 10 year period, the RIAA basically had a license to print money. But now, the very technology which enabled such stratospheric profits, is now that same technology which is coming back to bite them in the bum.
Quite ironic really.
As somebody noted, a full artwork 12" LP used to hover around $2.25 to create per unit - but a little plastic CD with teeny paper artwork sleeve comes in at about $0.38 I’m told.
You do the maths. CD’s were a huge profit cash cow for the RIAA. But the hilarious thing is that they use a digital format to work. And that very digital format is what allows them to be replicated infinitely without quality degradation.
With all due respect, your math left a few things out. The costs you cite are to physically create a CD and assumingly, print the artwork. Before that happens though, there are a few other things that cost money.
Renting studio time
Hiring a producer
Hiring an engineer and 2nd engineer
Backup musicians (?)
Recording media (any idea what a 15 min., 2" roll of tape costs?)
Mastering
Artwork
Promotion and Marketing
Photography
etc…
You can cut costs here and there, but ultimately, recording music in the quality that you are used to hearing it in, is not an inexpensive endeavor.
Now, factor those costs in with the $0.38 you heard someone mention. Sell a million units and it doesn’t raise that amount too much. Sell 10,000 units though and you have substantially increased the per unit cost. No, it doesn’t raise it to the outrageous price that they charge for CD’s but it isn’t $0.38 cents either.
It surprises me how many people think that making music is a quaint little hobby that takes little effort or resources. Rather, it takes a team of experienced, dedicated professionals to make a good sounding product and that costs large amounts of time and money.
Then, after putting out all of this time and money, artists aren’t supposed to expect any of that money back. It’s not like they created a product or anything. And surely their investors wouldn’t want any of it repayed. We are supposed to just give it away for free, out of the goodness of our hearts, because gosh darn it, people like to listen to it and should be able to distribute it to their hearts content. And once everyone that likes an artists music has their free copy, how is the artist supposed to eat again? Let alone, get anybody to invest in another CD. Sure, the band has plenty of fans, they just don’t feel that they should have to pay for music.
Musicguy? I knew all about that. Dave Grohl has mentioned many a time that if he didn’t have his own studio at his home in Virgina, then a typical Foos album would cost $300K in US dollars from beginning to end.
Hence, what we have here are the sliding economies of scale. My figures above are probably quite accurate for a million seller. Regardless, the initial costs of producing a polished album are largely static.
Accordingly, at some point in the numbers game you have a break even point. And then, probably at around half a million copies, you start to get serious profits. My point above is that the RIAA produced quite a lot of albums from 1987 onwards which sold at least half a million units. We don’t have to be talking about mega sellers like Nirvana’s Nevermind. Even just a half million seller would make some epic profits for the RIAA. And the lowering of costs associated with a CD, along with the raising of retail prices at the same time would have raised those profit margins exponentially.
Sadly for the artist though, their royalties didn’t raise as a percentage of increased profits. And THAT’s where the rip off took place. Everybody knows about the way major labels charge artists for everything - that’s a given. What isn’t so widely known is that there was such a huge jump in profit margins on albums which sold over about 300 to 400 hundred thousand copies - and these profits were never passed on to the artist.
That particular copy protection technique puts a garbage track around the outside of the disc to confuse CD-ROM drives. CD-ROMs use the last session on a disc, while audio CD players use the first session… but if you destroy the outer session with a marker, the drive reverts to the first one, where the audio is stored. One problem with that method is a lot of new CD players support multiple sessions, so you can’t play the “protected” disc in your DVD player or car MP3/CD player either.
I think it’s more of a double-edged sword. Yes, you can make perfect copies, but that also means the original disc sounds perfect every time you play it, even if it’s dusty or if you’ve listened to it ten times a day for ten years.
Of course there are costs to produce the information on a CD, in addition to the cost to produce the disc itself, but the recording and marketing costs are the same for all media. That still doesn’t explain the price difference between vinyl/cassettes and CDs.
Would this have made the Reuters reporter guilty of a felony for intentionally defeating an encryption system? Wasn’t this one of the ‘features’ of the DMCA?
Exactly. They DIDN’T create a product, they created music. Using the word “product” to describe art is pretty telling. It seems that a lot of “professional musicians” (another phrase that really peeves me) have forgotten that having people pay money to listen to your music is a privelege and not a right. To expect that you can make a living writing songs the same way you can make a living repairing plumbing or flying an airplane is absolutely ridiculous. Music is not a good or a service, it is art, and the rules are simply different.
The law notwhithstanding, the fact of the matter is that people copy songs, trade songs, dub songs, cover songs, steal songs, etc., have done so for years and will continue to do so. It is the nature of the medium. If you really put all of your hope for financial security into record sales, and your major label contract cannot guarantee you that people are not going to continue to listen to your music for free, then perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that alligning yourself with a record label is not the best way to succeed.
I hope that more and more musicians realize this and simply stop signing contracts with unfair labels. I remain unconvinced that filesharing has really resulted in any profit loss for artists I care about, but if that perception motivates more musicians to seek ways to act independently of record companies, I say gravy.
You don’t think that “professional” artists, musicians, writers, etc. have a right to get paid? Or is it just musicians that don’t have a “right” to get paid?
Hmm. Ya know, that reminds me all this time I’ve complained about the “professional” athletes making all the money they do for what amounts to chasing a ball around a field. It’s not a service, it doesn’t do me any good personally, and I would never dream of supporting it by spending money for it. But yet I have spent money for music. Am I a hypocrite if I think music is entertaining but sports aren’t?
The filesharing debate shows me that we are not in the information age just yet. In the information age, most if not all information known to humanity will be accessible to most if not all people. The focus on money is a strictly industrial concern. I’m not saying the transition is going to be easy, and I’m not saying I have all the answers, so don’t ask me how people will feed and clothe themselves in my utopian fantasy, but I know the world is far from a utopia.
Boo Boo Foo, I see your statement on the .mp3 format has already been addressed, but I have to add my $0.02. Would you sue the developer(s) of the ASCII format if somebody on the SDMB used it to flame you?
No… not the developers of the ASCII standard, but perhaps the proprietors of the message board in question if it could be shown that financial loss was incurred by myself due to said flaming. A long bow to draw though - certainly.
And therein lays the crunch - the RIAA has yet to conclusively prove, in my opinion, that they have suffered financial loss due to file sharing. It could easily be argued with just as much merit that the general range of product for sale nowadays is so poor that the drop in record sales reflects this. Something has to explain why Led Zeppelin and The Beatles still sell like hot cakes. Each new generation recognises that they were pretty bloody good - especially compared to a lot of modern stuff. So the astute buyer spreads their money across all genres and eras.
Boo Boo Foo, your hypothetical argument showed quite well that sales ought to be constantly increasing. As you rightly point out, good music never gets old, which is why I buy Beatles records and Beethoven recordings as well as my Radiohead etc. Now, I’m sure you’re not going to argue that no good music is being produced these days, because it’s flat-out not true. The canon of “good music” is therefore constantly increasing, and therefore the wealth of great music to which we have access is ever-expanding. Surely then, purchases should constantly be rising to reflect this improving catalogue?
Regarding the “it were all better in the old days” argument, I think that’s a perceptual myth. We’ve got our Beatles and our Zeppelins these days too, we just hear all the shit that’s produced too. You never hear the shit from the Beatles’ day because, well, it’s shit. We have enough modern shit to fill the airwaves. This will similarly drop from our consciousness in short order, to be replaced with something glossier yet still startlingly shit, while the ever-small percentage with actual talent will continue to produce wonderful stuff, which I will buy.
My opinion on whether loss was caused comes down to the following. If someone has illegally downloaded music, have they also purchased it, and if not, would they have had they not downloaded it? Speaking purely from anecdotal evidence, I would say that the enormous majority do not own the CDs. Would they have bought them but for downloads? IMO it’s very difficult to persuasively answer “no” here - after all, they went to the trouble of downloading it - clearly they want the music. To then argue that they have no interest in owning it is in direct contradiction to the one uncontrovertible fact - they downloaded it. The crux is not that they didn’t want to own the music, it’s that they didn’t want to pay. This is not an argument that the law is going to be very sympathetic towards.
I’ll grant you that arguments of this sort are no substitute for some sort of actual research, and I’d love to see such research done, although I think it’d be quite difficult to achieve. Anecdotally, I simply don’t see any of my file-sharing friends buying the CDs they download. They have no motivation to. I will freely admit that this is far from rigourous, but it’s enough for me.