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

[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 ;-)