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]

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 ;-)