and another thing

[deathboy]

OH, PEOPLE JUST STEAL MUSIC, THEY'RE SUCH BASTARDS, WOES!

[as Irish ISPs fold to the will of people with big lawyers... cunts...]

Well, I just went to buy M.I.A.'s "Kala", as it reminds me of my bird, and ooh, lookie...

£4.98 for the CD. £6.99 for the mp3s.

MAYBE IT SHOULD COST LESS TO BUY THE MP3s OF A FUCKING ALBUM THAN TO BUY THE FUCKING PHYSICAL PRODUCT.

A single example, I know, but this happens all the fucking time. So! Yet again, I'll steal the mp3s so I can listen now, and order the CD to support the artist.

Same goes for fucking ebooks, that tend to be 90% of the price of the paper version, despite there being no fucking physical product to sit on your bookshelf.

YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

fucking morons.

[edit]: In fact, fuck y'all, I'll just listen to it on Spotify.

Comments

[the_axel]

M.I.A.'s "Kala"

Sio & I found a burn of that album in the last car we rented.
Hadn't heard of her before so that was a definite win.

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

it really got on my tits when I heard it played out on chav radio a bunch, then ynl thrust a few tracks at me a few times and I had to admit they were catchy if a bit juvenile / irritating... then kirsten mentioned her and I listened some more and realised "oh, some of those are tracks I'd been wishing I knew the name of for six months".

classic 'grows on you' shit, definitely.

[electricsnail.livejournal.com]

some of the songs aren't always my favorite, but they ARE catchy and very fun to drive to. :P

[adamw]

The other thing that is pissing me off at the moment is region restrictions on mp3s, after trying to buy the new Apop album online and finding I couldn't, as it was only available on iTune Germany. My full rant about it here.

As you put it: DOING IT WRONG.

[adonai-hure.livejournal.com]

Yep. I've tried to give Amazon.com my money for music, and because I'm not a Yank, they wouldn't let me. Trying to do the right thing here and they refuse to take my cash!

So stuff them.

[lee-chaos.livejournal.com]

The entertainment industry's message to the global economy: 'We're not ready for you yet! We'd rather deny your interest in our products and force you to obtain it illegally than take the tiny shift in policy to let you get hold of it legally!'

fucking tards.

[ephemera.livejournal.com]

Re e-books (seeing as I'm involved in the small press end of that) there's a deal of sense on both sides of this argument, of which this is a reasonable quick summery:
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1693

[deeteeuk.livejournal.com]

I have been saying similar things recently about digital delivery of games. Empire: Total War was £23.97 on Amazon recently. It's now gone back up to £28.99. On Steam? £39.99. £5 more than buying the all singing, all dancing, "Special Forces" edition from Play or Amazon, and having the hard copy with all the nice maps and manuals.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

They'll have figured that enough people want it NAO PLZ to make it worth pissing off a few people who let's face it will buy it anyway.

[deeteeuk.livejournal.com]

Only problem with that is that the Steam purchase won't start to unlock until 9am the day the game is released. If you pre-order with Play or Amazon, they'll get it to you in the post on that day, which will probably only be an hour or so later. As the unlock process can take a while, this could well be a dead heat.

[selectnone.livejournal.com]

I got a PC-DVD copy of GTA IV about a week before it was released - it insisted on waiting until the official release-date before it'd let me activate and run it though :P

(it wouldn't actually run on my machine anyway, but that's another thing entirely)

[deeteeuk.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, making sure your machine meets the specs is only half the battle with GTA 4. There then follows an arcane ritual of driver cleaning, option checking and unchecking, before prostrating yourself before the machine gods whilst the clock strikes thirteen.
I don't think I know anyone who has managed to install the game and then play it for a couple of weeks without issue.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Amen to that and the comments rant about regionally restricted purchasing. They'd rather have their insane system than your money.

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

I see your point but they're trying to save a dying market for physical music.

£6.99 is cheap compared to the £13.99 or whatever you used to have to pay for a CD album. But as less and less people are willing to pay for a disk, they're trying to make the price of physical media all the more appealing.

[the_axel]

CD's were overpriced from day one because they were cheaper to manufacture than LP's but record companies figured punters would pay more for a better format - which they did.

Basically record companies, like every other major organization in the entertainment industry (TicketMaster anyone), are complete & utter bastards out to shaft everyone to keep their exec's in cocaine and blowjobs.

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

Yeah... it always pissed me off that they had that mark up. It's not like they shifted much of the extra cash on to the artists!

What you say's pretty much the case with the majors, and that's a big contributor to the collapse of the industry.

[the_axel]

Quite the opposite - most standard contracts still assume 10% of the CD's break in transit because shellac is so brittle.

What with CD's not being made of shellac you'd have thought that deduction would have been eliminated so the artist would make a few extra pennies...

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

Well, the article says that 'some record companies still insist' rather than 'most standard contracts'. Not to say it doesn't go on, but I've never personally seen that clause on a contract. Maybe it's something more with the majors than indie labels.

[the_axel]

That's not the only place I've read about it, just the first one Google served up.

I gather it's pretty much the norm with American majors, who are a lot more polished at being complete and utter bastards than their British equivalents/subsidiaries/partners in crime.

I'd be shocked if indie labels included it, seeing as none of them existed when records were made out of shellac.

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, I hadn't heard about it going on before now. Doesn't make me think any less of them, it just fits into the picture I already have :-/
I can also see them being backwards enough to leave it in there for the sake of it...

Good point on indies not being around at the time, I didn't think of that!

[reddragdiva]

Dude. The contracts assume 10% of the MP3s break in transit 'cos the shellac's so fragile.

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

I would argue that 6.99 is still not a good price for a product that has no manufacturing, transport or warehousing costs (minimal server storage / upload costs aside), and that when CDs come down from their original high RRP, it's usually because they're not selling and they have to make them desirable enough to sell before keeping the stock begins to actually make them a loss.

There are lots of ways they could improve the demand for physical music - and one of them would be to make it so you got a free download copy as part of your physical purchase, so they'd regain the instant gratification fans while shifting the physical medium they're so heavily invested in.

Fucking dinosaurs have had a million opportunities to move into this millenium and have passed up each and every one.

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

There's still going to be quite a few costs - staffing at the download site, the record label costs, aggregators acting as middle men between the label and the download sites. And hopefully a bit to go to the artists ;-) While the costs are lower, the earnings are far lower as well.

Leaving aside the debate about what the 'real' value of music is, a single track tends to cost £1 to £1.50, and you're getting 10 or so for 7 quid, it's not all that bad really. Download sales are gradually going up, as people are becoming more willing to pay a quid for a track here and there.

It gets really stupid when there's things like a mate who went to buy the Stereo:Type album from Beatport. Meant to cost £9, but to buy the WAVs, it costs £26. Wrong again... there's no way that's £17 worth of bandwidth.

I'm with you that they should give the option to merge the physical and digital sales... the only reason you should have to pay for the same thing twice is if you want two of the fuckers. They could also do more to make paying for downloads more appealing - maybe including merchandise with a purchase or cheaper gig entry.

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

A great deal of those costs are equivalent to those already in place to run physical logistics.

if they can't make the cost of managing at most one website per country you do business in, plus the appropriate relationships with shipping / advertising / aggregators cost less than running the physical side, they're again Doing It Wrong.

I hate the scaling of prices as per the sound quality when it massively outstrips the bandwidth costs. If they reckon that argument works, cool, sell me a 64kbps WMA file for 10p a pop, there's albums I only ever want to listen to on my earphones on the tube that I'd happily pay fuck-all money for a proportionately tiny file. what a great idea! (as if!)

The multiformat thing sickens me. Buy the cassette. then the LP. then the CD. then the remastered CD. then on itunes for your ipod. then the 5.1 DVDA (awesome acronym) BUY IT AGAIN AND AGAIN FUCKERS.

the argument that they're different works (excluding remastering / 5.1 versions, I just mean different format releases from pretty much the same material) when they're on different formats is in stark contradiction to the concept that you're buying the music on a CD, not the physical item.

if you pirate stuff, the music is one copyrighted thing, regardless of the format it's in, but if you want to buy a track, they're all separate items, with a price tag on each. how very fucking convenient.

sorry, I can rant on this pretty much all fucking day.

for instance, if you're buying the music, then when your (initially sold as indestructible, lifetime-lasting) CD scratches, you should be able to buy a replacement CD for cost+post, exchanging your old one, right? then there'd be no copies-for-backup argument, right? course not...

i digress.


[edited to change a 'can' to a 'can't']

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

if they can't make the cost of managing at most one website per country you do business in, plus the appropriate relationships with shipping / advertising / aggregators cost less than running the physical side, they're again Doing It Wrong.

Well, they're probably taking just about enough cash to make it work for the time being (I'm probably thinking more Beatport etc than iTunes here), but shifting the units that they used to a decade ago just isn't going to happen. To me it seems more a case of Did It Wrong and Trying To Hold It Together. I'm reminded of that statistic where most businesses make a loss in the first 3 years, and I think that the digital sales market still has to get rolling properly, but certain elements of the industry need to wake up and move with the times.

Subscription models like Spotify might be the way it's going to go, to an extent, but I don't know how well that'll work for indie labels.

You know, the tiny file shop might even be a workable concept - tinny indistinct files? Perfect for playing on mobile phones that don't have the clarity for a 320.

Actually, I hate that a big chunk of a generation seems to think that's a reasonable medium for listening to music (especially music that's meant to be bass heavy), but that's another rant.


You've prob seen this already, but John Freese might have hit upon a good new idea for adding value:

http://soundcheck.freedomblogging.com/2009/02/20/want-josh-freese-to-join-your-band-got-75000/4962/

Nicely spotted on DVDA btw ;-)

[the_axel]

I can download 8GB of video game for $20 from Direct2Drive.

A full CD is 650MB.

US$20 = UKP14.3

So, if half the cost of that download is consumed by the website then it costs 0.09p per meg which means that for the same amount of data, a CD would cost 58p.

Assume 15 songs on an album that's 4p.

Hang on a minute tho'...

In NAm songs are $0.99 so if English songs go for a quid to 1.50 that means music costs 40 - 110% more in the UK now.
6 months ago songs cost 110% - 230% more in the UK than in the US.

So I guess prices in the UK will have to go up massively to support that drop in the exchange rate...

Or maybe the cost of downloading a song is pulled out of Sony Music's CEO's arse.

[doctor-bob.livejournal.com]

Well, we know that bandwidth isn't really that much of an overhead, plus the UK have often had to pay higher prices (I'm thinking consoles and computer games here).

Or maybe the cost of downloading a song is pulled out of Sony Music's CEO's arse.

Let's face it, that's where they got the price of a CD ;-)

[therealdrhyde.livejournal.com]

I'd just like to point out that Boing boing's URL for the story is "irish-isp-will-disco.html". Which is totally fucking awesome.