Parmenides
Supreme [H]ardness
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Let's pretend Bozo was right about what he said..... still... he's the wrong messenger. What a Bozo.
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Bono Calls for Tougher Download Controls
- Thread starter Terry Olaes
- Start date
It's irrelevant. An album has 2 sources of revenue: Sales of CDs and Digital sales (which cannibalize CD sales and generate far less revenue).
If Movies only came out on DVD/BD, prices would be higher.
If Avatar was a direct to video release it would not sell for $10.00. It would cost significantly more than a BD currently sells for.
And again, Movies generally sell for more than CD's, nevermind that people tend to listen to songs/albums far more times than they watch a favorite movie (unless, perhaps, you're a kid watching a disney flick (or Barney
) for the thousandth time).Only recently have 360 deals started. Up until a 2 or 3 years ago, labels didn't get a cut of the revenue. The only reason they are doing it now, is because of piracy.
A lot of people have broadband that has a 1mb down stream. Even if they have 6mb, a DVD is a big long download. An album, is less than an hour, assuming you download it as wave files. If you get it in flac, it's probably a 30 minute download. If you download high quality MP3s, it's takes a few minutes.
Not conflicted at all. The most popular cars are the ones that are most often stolen. Why would it be any different for Movies, Games or Music?
If a game isn't popular, most people won't bother to download it....they not have heard of it. OTOH, if a game is huge, while it will sell well, more people will download it for free.
If these were high ticket items, you could argue that most wouldn't buy it anyway (and clearly many of these wouldn't), but when the item costs 10-20 bucks, it's a certaintly that many would have bought it, or in the case of movies, rented it, which might increase sales to rental companies.
zombiebeat
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Bono is so far up his own arse his breath smells of brylcreem.
God, I wish you could put the preachy outpourings of hypocritical fuckwit "celebs" on ignore; you are a reasonably talented singer in what has become somewhat of a joke of a band, this has made you quite unreasonably wealthy, it has not made you one of the great thinkers of our time now STFU.
God, I wish you could put the preachy outpourings of hypocritical fuckwit "celebs" on ignore; you are a reasonably talented singer in what has become somewhat of a joke of a band, this has made you quite unreasonably wealthy, it has not made you one of the great thinkers of our time now STFU.
1) How can you disregard concerts? They do support CD sales. Your just throwing away data.
2) Please show how less revenue is generated for digital sales? No physical medium, no transportation fees, no B&M storefront to support, etc.
You are making my case for me- One one hand you state concerts don't support albums sales but on the other state movie theater shows support DVD sales!
I don't like these money hungry/power hungry people. I make music myself, but I give it away for free. I think that's the point of music, to share it. People just try to capitalize off everything they can. music shouldn't be one of those things. I dono it's just sacred to me...
Unless the movie is exceptional,which is a rarity these days,One can download a 700meg to 1.3 gig in a short time. A few frames missing per second, only noticeable on hi speed chase. Stereo instead of 5.1, doesn't take long at all to grab a movie. I'm from the "Try before you buy" consumer from years ago. Now I've added the "See before you buy a ticket" consumer. As I stated in another post I D/L Avatar, was impressed, and drove with my kids 350 km to watch it on the big screen in 3d.
ShuttleLuv
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edifyingkarma
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Yeah, South Park is all that comes to mind whenever someone mentions Bono. "Does Bono want the biddy?""Bono didn't take the biggest shit, he is the biggest shit."
Hilarious
Ban for what D/L a large Trailer. Poor quality at that.
I don't think you understood what I said. The argument is that piracy is becoming so rampant that it may not be worth producing certain forms of media, or that restrictive DRM are necessary to protect profits. How does that argument reconcile with the fact that increased rates of piracy almost always indicate increased sales rates as well? If your stuff got pirated more than anyone else, you also almost definitely sold more copies than anyone else. Since the pirated copies cost $0/each, you produced more revenue than anyone else. Piracy has therefore caused...what problem, exactly? Show me someone who failed "because of piracy" and I'll show you a product that nobody wanted to buy.
Another issue, the figures that show pirated copies of digital media as losses assumes that someone would have bought the real thing if they could not have pirated. Which is the biggest crock of shit. Just because I go out to a bar looking for ass and strike out, doesn't mean I'm going to get a hooker...
When U2 plays a concert, their label gets no money.
When Rush plays a concert, their label gets no money.
When JayZ plays a show his label gets nothing (unless, of course, Live Nation is his label).
Less money is generated from digital sales, because
1. People buy a single song, instead of an album (and keep in mind that when they had CD singles, the single typically sold for $3.00).
2. Apple (by far the biggest seller of digital music) gets 30-40% of the sale price on each song (at one time Apple got 50%)
It's lost revenue. Let's say you write a physics book. You're paid based on sales. If 20% of the students that take a class that uses your physics text book simply download a PDF of that book, that's money out of your pocket.
For the publisher, they may also pay you money up front. If enough people just download the book, they could lose money on the deal, even though the number of students reading your book is at or above their expectations.
Spare-Flair
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Go cure Aids and save Africa Bono, like you've been trying to do. The new generation artists know how to use online content and downloads and social websites and guerilla marketing to popularize themselves and to make money without having to deal with record companies and the RIAA.
You're are absolutely correct, but people that assume that there are not significant losses due to piracy are equally full of shit. The U.S. is not the 3rd world. 10-13 for a CD is not a lot of money.
People paid more than that (before inflation) 20 years ago. Wages have increased, while CD's have generally decreased in price.
When you're discussing high ticket items, I agree, but movies and music are not high ticket items for most people....certainly not to 20 somethings that make 50-80k/year (single income), yet they do d/l instead of buying.
Prove it- There are acts who the music companies DO get a cut.
Stating that concerts don't help & promote album sales is rediculous.
Next you will tell me that auto racing doesn't help auto sales.
Which has nothing to do with the fact many artists get NOTHING due to contract obligations, digital or physical media.
Prove what? I said in an earlier post, which you already replied to, that there was no such thing as a 360 deal (i.e. album, merchandise and touring) until Live Nation did it a couple of years ago (with Madonna, I believe). I didn't say they don't exist. They're currently the exception to the rule. Record companies are doing it, because piracy is driving down sales. If tours sold lots of CD's, U2 would have the biggest selling album of 2009 and the Rolling Stones would have dominated several of the last 20 years.
Concerts were once used to promote albums. Fact: the only reason Pink Floyd toured for the Wall album is because they were contractually obligated to do so.
Before virtually every recent tour, The Rolling Stones put out an album. None of those albums have sold well (they barely played anything from their last album).
Ah yes, the typical excuse for why it's OK to steal: the labels ripoff the artists. Maybe if people bought those poor new band's albums, they'd get out of debt, record a a second or 3rd album and become the next big thing. If you don't buy the music, those bands are forever in the hole. If you steal from U2, it's bad for their label, but they'll still make a ton on the road, but it may cost a new band their contract and leave them in debt.
I was rebutting what you stated about concerts not supporting albums which isn't the same as a "360 deal" I can state as such because I have personally attended concerts and purchased CD after doing so as have several friends of mine.
ZZ top, Eric Clapton, Black Crows, etc.
Perhaps the album is crap? I like AC/DC but thier last album has but one good song on it, maybe two.
I never stated such- I stated what the facts were which is the majority of the bands get nothing from the label who is giving them the shaft.
HardUp4HardWare
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I remember when I was a kid and vinyl records would cost around $12-$16 for a new LP.
Then CDs started coming out and everyone in the business said that the cost of music was going to go way down due to the cheaper production costs of CDs. Lo and behold nothing has changed.
I am not saying that artists need to give away their music, I actually think copywrites should be protected, but this BS tactic of suing families into ruin because a kid downloaded a few songs is outrageous.
Then you get comcast airing commercials where they proclaim how fast you can download music and movies, but of course they only mean *legal* downloads right? BS.
Yeah Bono that will change the world. I would be happy if you just took a shower.
Then CDs started coming out and everyone in the business said that the cost of music was going to go way down due to the cheaper production costs of CDs. Lo and behold nothing has changed.
I am not saying that artists need to give away their music, I actually think copywrites should be protected, but this BS tactic of suing families into ruin because a kid downloaded a few songs is outrageous.
Then you get comcast airing commercials where they proclaim how fast you can download music and movies, but of course they only mean *legal* downloads right? BS.
Yeah Bono that will change the world. I would be happy if you just took a shower.
HardUp4HardWare
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Actually I just read the rest of the article and am going to break my profanity rule.
Fuck you Bono. Psychopathic leftist prick.
Fuck you Bono. Psychopathic leftist prick.
Not accurate. In late 2006, I was assistant engineer on a small project for Capitol. The artist in question was on a 360. Madonna was perhaps the first true high profile 360, but certainly not the first.
12-16.00 for Vinyl? Where did you live? I never saw albums that cost that much. Hell, you'd have to go back to the mid 80's to find CD's typically selling for more than $16.00 (unless you shopped in the mall, where everything sold at full MSRP).
As for prices, considering most CD's sell for 10-$14.00, it would seem prices did go down. Factor in inflation, and a CD generally sells for less than half of what they sold for (outside of a mall) in 1986.
To put it in perspective, if you bought CDs for $15.00 in 1986 (I did), the inflation adjusted price (in 2008 dollars) is just under $30.00
I'll take your word for it, but it was certainly the exception to the rule, and is a reaction to the declining sales which are largely due to illegal downloads.
No disagreement about that. Still, not many people are on a need-to-know basis when it comes to knowing details of an artist's contracts (I certainly wasn't), so it's hard to gauge how much traction it's gained.
I really couldn't guess how [insert artist here] is set up with [insert label here], so you could argue either way, I suppose.
I really couldn't guess how [insert artist here] is set up with [insert label here], so you could argue either way, I suppose.
It's not about absolute price. It's about the value to the consumer, and value doesn't necessarily change with the income of the consumer. In fact, rich or poor, most people are more concerned with getting a "fair" deal than a "cheap" one. (Example: paying $90 for a 1TB WD hard-drive versus paying $50 for a random knockoff brand drive of the same capacity). If people aren't paying your asking price, you have two (and ONLY two) options.
1) Increase the value (I do not mean price, price is a measure of value) of the product. Either increase the quality of the included media (i.e. don't create crap songs just to fill space), increase the quantity of the media (throw in songs from older albums, covers/alternative versions of songs on album, or similar artists). You can also decrease the hassle of getting the content, this is what iTunes is, log-in, pay, listen.
2) Decrease the price. Make it cheaper.
The modern phenomenon of mass piracy is a distraction to the real problem. It is a symptom of the underlying overpricing of content, and a scapegoat for an industry that cannot maintain its current level of profit. If (correction, WHEN, you can't fight technology or economics forever) the music industry correct the valuation of their product, piracy will return to being a fringe activity.
To put it in a another way, you'd rather spend 10 minutes finding a good torrent than pay $10 for an album. You might choose differently if the album was $2.
I'm sorry, but the HD example only works if people simply don't buy or download music.
As soon as a person says, "it's not worth X, so i'll just steal it," everything breaks down. Again, there's no price that I can set that's cheaper than free.
Would you buy a WD 1TB Hard drive for $25.00 if you could just go to your PC and download an exact clone for free in 30 minutes?
The market on Music is being driven by piracy. 10 years ago (hell 5 years ago), people still bought CDs. The only thing that changed was the penetration of broadband. What took hours to download (for most people) in 2000 took much less (for many, if not most) in 2005 and takes even less time in 2010.
Prices have dropped, and the fact is they can't drop enough to compete with free.
If WD hard drives could be downloaded from Bit Torrent sites, WD Seagate and Samsung's Storage unit would all go out of business.
As I already pointed at least in my case there is nothing worth buying.
I use to buy hundreds of CDs, now one a year if that. The music being pushed out today sucks.
I don't say this often on [H]... but: Fuck you, Bono, and the horse you rode in on.
I love music. I pay $15/mo for my Zune Pass. But I refuse to sympathize for musicians who believe their music makes them worth five hundred times more than a person flipping burgers. If musicians made 30, 40, or even 50,000 dollars a year, then I'd believe the government should step in and help them out. But the way the system is setup now? Get bent, RIAA, Bono, and the US DoJ.
If you take Bono's stance, you can be sure I won't buy your music. Music is free. If people like it, they'll see you in concert. What? You thought you could make a CD and live on the residuals? You thought you could sit on your ass 300 days a year and reap your profits? Ha! Not if you're after my dollars.
I love music. I pay $15/mo for my Zune Pass. But I refuse to sympathize for musicians who believe their music makes them worth five hundred times more than a person flipping burgers. If musicians made 30, 40, or even 50,000 dollars a year, then I'd believe the government should step in and help them out. But the way the system is setup now? Get bent, RIAA, Bono, and the US DoJ.
If you take Bono's stance, you can be sure I won't buy your music. Music is free. If people like it, they'll see you in concert. What? You thought you could make a CD and live on the residuals? You thought you could sit on your ass 300 days a year and reap your profits? Ha! Not if you're after my dollars.
And if there wasn't so much outright theft, your actions (assuming that the general population feels the same about the current state of music) would have meaning. But so long as there's people saying music costs to much, so I just download it (for free), your actions are meaningless.
12 years ago people said labels are bad, but artists are good. Now Labels are bad, Artists are bad and fuck the greedy song writers who want to get paid when their songs are played.
I don't know how old you are, but IME as people get older, they generally say that music isn't as good as it was (at some point in time).
I bet there are plenty around here who love 80's music. Personally, i found most of it sucked (esp the first half). Many have fond memories of the 60's and 70's, but they're almost always listening to the best of those decades. There's plenty of music from those decades that now sounds blah.
I have no use for the songs with vocals that are largely (and sometimes entirely) atonal primal screams. But if that's not what people want, then radio wouldn't play it. Radio is all about ratings and they avoid songs that cause their listeners to change stations (which often leads to less than interesting radio). Certainly I don't buy as many CD's as I did when I was younger, but a lot of what I bought was catalog titles.
For me the key is that every year, the best and/or most popular albums sell less copies every year. I remember Pearl Jam's 2nd album selling almost 1 million copies in a week. this year, the top album, as I recall, sold less than 4 million copies.
I can't write that off as a case of music isn't as good as it was in the good old days. I was around in the good old days and plenty of music that I thought was crap sold like a ton of albums and people fondly remember that crap. Lots of music that I loved didn't sell as well.....today sales are low on all albums, regardless of the quality.
To give you a complete explanation of why I think you're wrong, I'd have to teach you a years worth of economics theory. I will attempt to give you the gist of the reality below.
I'm not going to say that piracy hasn't helped devalue music. It has, because it's a competing good. It is also an inferior good. That is a microeconomics term that means exactly what it sounds like it means. It's less convenient, since you have to spend more time finding the right software, configure it for your firewall and ISP and after all that you have to find the right track that isn't a spoof, or even just a bad rip. It's also less safe since you can A) easily get a computer virus and B) run the remote risk of getting sued. There is also the uncertainty that your service will be shut down tomorrow.
What I'm getting at here, is that people will pay to not deal with that. They will also pay for consistent quality. They'll also pay not to steal. Yes, I said it, not steal. Everyone on the entire internet, unless they're a sociopath, feels some kind of guilt about their "theft" of music. It's why you get post after post of people justifying it. People don't go out of their way to justify their actions unless they feel, deep down, it is wrong.
Now, you're not going to completely eliminate piracy. Just as you can't completely eliminate unemployment, even in the best of times. Both are byproducts of a market economy in the information age. The best you can do as a music provider is set a price that maximizes your revenue. This means striking a balance between the suckers that will pay a lot of money for music, and the cheapskates that will hardly pay anything. This price is probably quite a bit lower than the going rate today, which is why you get titles that are >2:1 pirated to purchased. Drop the price to $.25 or even a dime an track and you'll see a lot more people not willing to go through all the effort to get a torrent just to save a quarter.
It's always a conceit to think one lives in an age where all the rules have broken down and anarchy will reign, but this is a fairly simple economic issue. The powers-at-be just have to figure out what the right price is. The people need to make sure no more laws are passed that handicap them as a consumer, because that just delays the inevitable. The inevitable future is cheap music. Not free music, because people still think that a good song has some intrinsic value.
It kinda recovers what I'm saying here, but I go into more of what the music industry will look like in my previous post:
A VERY good point. The current system is an aberration, with excessive profits for work put in. Similar to the now-familiar "economic bubble." Traditional musicians didn't make what post-war mass market musicians have. Every business model, every industry has or had a point in which it made unholy amounts of money before crashing to earth, either because people woke up and realized it wasn't worth it, a new technology arrived, or the industry itself consumed itself through excess. I think we're seeing a combination of all of the above here.
Is that a joke? I've never EVER had to do anything to download music. Yes, setting the your firewall may improve results, but that it only matters if everyone is blocked. If I'm firewalled, I can't find someone who is firewalled. However, I can connect to someone that isn't firewalled. If you're downloading from a torrent with a small swarm and most/all are behind a firewall without port forwarding, it matters. But again, in practice, that's rarely an issue.
Software? Please. You download utorrent click on a link on a torrent site and download.
Virus? How many attacks have come from an MP3?
Shutting down your service isn't an option in the vast majority of countries.
Inferior?
How so? It's a digital copy. Sure, MP3 is inferior to CDs, but the folks that download don't buy CDs.
Dude, you just replied to the guy who says it's OK to steal music. Because Bono makes too much (never mind that the vast majority of musicians make significantly less and that stealing from more marginal artists has a far more negative effect than it does on a U2, Greenday or Eminem). There wasn't a hint of guilt.
I agree. $0.10 is close enough to 0 that more people will pay it. If $0.00 wasn't an option, current prices would be good enough. They'd be considered a bargain.
I don't think that, but there are plenty that believe that. I do believe that those that the actions of the pirates is leading us to increasingly draconian laws.
Oh let's go back to Smufette:
IRSmurf said:
That is a fairly constant reoccurring theme on these types of threads.
Look I was where you are 10 years ago...but the justifications for downloading went from finding new music, to avoiding bad music to CD's cost too much to legal downloads cost too much to Labels rip off musicians to musicians make too much, to music (and movies and software) should be free.
Parmenides
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Maybe I'm getting old, but the quality of the music seems to be getting worse. I probably bought only one new rock CD in the past decade. And no, I don't download. Am I tempted to? yes. Am I tempted to download anything later than 90's music? No. (though I did buy Muse's latest CD)
Maybe I'm getting old (29) and grouchy for the new stuff or maybe, just maybe, the real problem is the music industry. They push garbage. Music has become an industry. They make people. People like Brittney Spears. I don't know.... it seems before people and bands made themselves.
Maybe I'm getting old (29) and grouchy for the new stuff or maybe, just maybe, the real problem is the music industry. They push garbage. Music has become an industry. They make people. People like Brittney Spears. I don't know.... it seems before people and bands made themselves.
Guster, Muse, The last Oasis album, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Greenday's latest are all good...so was REM's accelerate. Ray Lamontagne's (sp) last album was good and although i don't have it, I'm told that the one before it was better still. I liked the Verve's last album and was pleasantly surprised by Counting Crows album.
FWIW, it was always an industry and there was always manufactured acts. There's plenty of music out there, but as was always the case, you have to look for it. If you're waiting for radio to find the gold, you're going to wait a long time. The early 90's was a great time for radio, and it was an exception to the rule. Nirvana/Grunge came along and turned the industry on it's head. By 1998, radio was back to the same old stuff.
Finding good music takes work and you don't always like it the first time around. I was anything but sold by Radioheads Kid A the first time i heard it. It was interesting. It was risky, but I wasn't sure I liked it. After 3 plays I quit listening. Fast forward one month and I was blown away.
Speaking of which, I think Radiohead's In Rainbows was their best since Kid A.
Parmenides
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They have 90's roots too. Rock from the 90's seemed less manufactured than stuff from today. I'm sure there's great stuff out there with '2000' roots, but they sure aren't being marketed very well by "The Industry." Most new stuff that is being made and marketed by the industry just sounds like music out of the music factory. Industry people get together and pick individuals to be their next stars. And it seems almost every new band tries to emulate that pattern, lest they get ignored by the industry.
I should be looking more other places (too lazy to shop for music) since the popular stuff is just junk.
As an aside, Radiohead did get tough to listen to with Kid A. I know I should be loving it... but I still can't get into it. Maybe if I listened through it 20 times, then I'd be keen to it's genius.