Yeah, I knew someone would call me on the inflation thing. And maybe it makes sense now. But it was really irritating in the period from about 1986 to 1995 when CD’s stayed the exact same price yet the music companies raked in millions when everyone replaced their record collections. Older CDs were a major cash cow for the record companies as all the recording expenses and advertising costs had already been recouped and all they had to shell out for were some royalties and minor manufacturing costs.
They are charging what the market will bear. It isn’t ‘extortionate’ by any stretch, it is expensive, but you don’t have to buy it.
Hey, Gangster Octopus, how’s your garden?
There’s also a prestige issue. The Beatles’ catalog is unlikely to be reduced to a budget price point in the forseeable future because they’re the frickin’ Beatlegods, man, the most popular rock group in the history of the world. (Not the last time I will succumb to hyperbole in this post. Humor me, okay?) And the fundamental changes in popular culture and the music business that have occurred since the '60s guarantee that there never will be anything else quite like the phenomenon of the Beatles. They remain a unique case. (Yeah, there’s also Elvis, but he changed the world and then went and spoiled everything by pumping out a ton of crappy albums that no one cares about.) Naturally, the dozen or so “real” Beatles albums are a flagship property for EMI. For them to relegate these to a budget line would cheapen the lofty status that the Beatles occupy and damage the whole mystique. And in the long run, that might be bad for business.
Yeah, I know - I felt much the same way about DVDs, which stayed at £20 each for an awfully long time. They still haven’t finished publishing all of their back catalogues on DVD, and yet I’ve just picked up a beautiful transfer of Once Upon a Time in the West for under a tenner, so it’s just a matter of waiting for the initial rush of demand to die down, I guess.
Mind you, anyone who wants to argue that copyright terms ought to be such that at least some Beatles records should be public domain by now will get no argument from me. Patents are 20 years, why should copyrights be 90+?
My apologies, then. Reading the quoted section with your response to it led me to believe that you were snottily and succinctly telling me that you thought I’d gotten too far off topic for your taste. My post was my way, with some sense of humor, to tell you to stick it…again, sorry!
So who were you intending to quote, then?
I’ve recently been on a kick to fill up on old Bowie stuff in the CD format. Those are still going for full list price as well. I’ll wait to pick them up used or I’ll do without. In closing, fuck the record companies.
You’re not comparing like for like. Anybody is free to record their own version of Yesterday, and all that is owed is songwriter royalities, which are miniscule compared to the copyright of the original recording. And they’re free to do this from day one, without permission from the songwriter. So, in fact, music is less protected - to reproduce a patented item, you need permission first.
Books are initially higher when in hardcover but when sales start to slip they are released as cheaper softcovers. DVDs also start at a higher price when they are first released and demand is high but their price drops as the initial demand wears off. CDs stay at the same price for years after the initial demand has plummeted, which results in the preposterous situation of the soundtrack costing considerably more than the DVD.
And based on the popularity of P2P sharing a lot of people agree with you. People DON’T have to buy it. But Napster could’ve been clotheslined if, early on, the members of the RIAA had immediately dropped the prices of their products to something more people found acceptable and if the prices of their older products had been dropped even farther. I doubt the artists and composers are getting any more per unit sold than they did when the LPs sold for three or four dollars, the production costs were amortised decades ago, and there is no advertising to pay for so the current prices are almost 100% profit for the record companies. So while the prices may not be extortionate I see this continued blindness by the RIAA as only benefiting them today while they drive future customers into the arms of the P2P networks.
I realise they’re not exactly the same, and I didn’t advocate a 20-year copyright term (I think 40-50 would be sensible); nonetheless, I still think situation we have at present whereby copyright on recorded and written works is functionally indefinite for post 1920-ish works is ludicrous. Do you disagree? What purpose is served by extending the copyright on a Leadbelly recording by a further 10 years, when the artist himself (and everyone else involved in the recording) is wholly beyond benefiting from it?
As for the comparison between patents and songwriting rights, I don’t think that’s right either. Someone looking for a Louis Armstrong recording of “What a Wonderful World” is not going to be satisfied with Eva Cassidy (well, I wouldn’t :)), whereas a patent-violating product fulfils an identical function to that designed by the original rights-holder, and thus competes for sales in a much more direct manner. If we’re going to order the required strength of protection in each case, I would place it thusly:
songwriter rights < patent < copyright
which is indeed what we have now; I just think copyright is massively over-protected, and needs trimming back.
Dead Badger, you’re assuming that the copyright rules are exclusively aimed at commericial music. They’re not. It’s actually only one small part of what they cover.
However, what your argument is leading toward is some kind of multi-million-dollar ceiling, beyond which copyright disappears. That I could certainly live with.
I don’t see where I assumed this, and I’m well aware that copyright covers broader areas. I think copyright in general is overbearing. It just so happens that its duration is determined largely by the success of the music and film industries (particularly the latter) in lobbying legislators to extend it. 90 years is not, to my mind, a sensible amount of time to enforce exclusivity, since it goes far beyond the timeframe in which the originators of the work could possibly benefit from it. This goes for any form of copyrighted work, not just recorded music.
I disagree with the concept of defining a maximum amount of money one is allowed to make from one’s work. To do so would be to effectively make infinite the copyright on works that didn’t hit the mass market. This situation would be just as daft, and just as counter-productive, 50 years down the line. It would also be pretty hard to police, I think; studios are already creative enough at making paper losses with their movies in order to avoid paying monkey points. The winners would be those with the most creative accountants. I think it’s much more equitable to set a reasonable time horizon for commercial exploitation of the work, as is the case with patents.
You’re assuming that it’s all down to new technology. But the Berne Convention of 1886 set out the principle of copyright extending fifty years beyond an author/artist/musician’s death. You can’t claim that the record companies were in on that one, can you?
Because, as has been mentioned, the high price of early CDs was justified by the fact that they were new and production was still expensive. That no longer applies, yet prices have barely moved. They claimed the savings in production costs would be passed on to consumers, but it seems that was a lie.
Sure. I can buy the same music on cassette, CD, or as an internet download, for three different prices. The only difference is the media.
No, it was marketing bullshit. CDs are one of the unusual cases where people remember what they were promised. It’s already been pointed out that the manufacturing costs of CDs, then or now, are not great compared to the other ‘costs’ involved with the music industry.
No, I’m not, I’m just discussing what’s happening at present. I didn’t mention new technology anywhere. And the Berne Convention is all well and good, but I think their proposal for copyright is excessive, too. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what point you’re trying to argue; the reasons leading to excessive copyright are incidental details. I just think the terms are too long, and can think of no compelling reason why they should be so. Just because someone said so back in the 19th century is no good reason, and just because the movie industry lobbies effectively now is not a good reason either.
Whuh? This has been explained several times now. Prices have come down by a third in real terms for CDs, and when one looks at the dominant media of the time in each case (i.e. tapes in 1985, CDs in 2004), prices have stayed identical. In 1985, tapes were mass-market and thus extremely cheap to produce. Now, it’s CDs. In both cases, the manufacturing costs are a tiny proportion of the cost of production. Therefore, one expects the costs in real terms to be pretty much the same. And lo! they are pretty much the same.
As has been pointed out by two separate people, if prices for CDs had “hardly moved” since 1985, the average CD would now cost almost $30. Clearly, the price of a CD has fallen considerably in real terms. You can claim it hasn’t all you like, but you’re quite completely wrong.
Yes, I read that too. In fact, I mentioned it in my own post.
I still contend, however, that dropping the price of CDs by a third is barely dropping it at all, when you consider how much it costs to make and distribute a CD. Most of the cost is for marketing bullshit that’s completely worthless to folks like me.
And yet, CDs still cost more than tapes. Funny how that works.
So you acknowledge that production is only a tiny part of the cost, yet consider a drop in price of a third in real terms to be insufficient? Okay, but I shouldn’t need to tell you that there’s some logic missing there.
Well, we’re clearly blessed to have a telepath amongst us, who doesn’t need to be told about things to know about them. If you don’t “need” the marketing, perhaps you should buy solely works from tiny labels that never market. Those must be dead cheap, right? Fundamentally, if you don’t think a CD is worth $15, don’t bleeding well pay it. Lots of people do, that’s why they cost what they cost. Believe it or not, some people like the shiny packaging, the funky art-directed video, the MTV appearances and the fact that they’ve bought something popular. If you disdain such worldly, considerations, fine, but I don’t see why you’re complaining so heartily about everyone else for responding to simple reality.
You can hardly buy tapes at all any more (I haven’t seen them in a shop in years), and they’re cheap because no-one wants them, while the companies want to sell off their stock. Same for DVDs/videos. Tell me, are you at all conversant with the concept of supply and demand? On this evidence, I would have to suspect not.
Yep. Mainly, I just want to emphasize what a steaming crock of bullshit it was when they claimed the high price was due to production costs, but the price drop is insufficient regardless of the reasons behind it.
There’s this thing called radio… you might want to check it out sometime. Yes, many of the songs in radio playlists are placed there by well-paid promoters, but that doesn’t need to be the case. The labels could just offer a list of singles and let stations decide for themselves what they want to play. The cost of doing that over the internet would be trivial.
I’m already there, chief. Between Sirius and the internet, I can learn about and listen to all the music I could possibly want. I don’t buy a CD unless I already know I like everything on it. Now if only there were a way to send a few bucks to the artists, I could save money and the artists would earn more than they would from CD sales.
An insightful comment, sir. Kudos! Now there can be no complaints about the price of anything, ever again, since prices are controlled by supply and demand, and no one can argue with that. You have taken debate on the SDMB to a new level.
You’re only considering new, mainstream releases, and forgetting that the premise of this thread is that Beatles CDs should be cheaper, like most back catalog items are. A lot of indy artists sell their CDs cheap, too. There are thousands of good CDs out there that can be had new for under ten bucks. (I just paid seven-something for a Booker T. & the MGs disc from overstock.com the other day.)
Hmm… I think what I said applied to those as well. Producing a Beatles CD is even cheaper than producing a new, mainstream CD, since the recording itself was paid for decades ago, they don’t need to bribe any radio stations to play Beatles tracks, and they don’t need to take out ads to let consumers know about the band.