You Go RIAA!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Dean Roddey]

 

I think after 4 BILLION songs sold on iTunes, it shows that people aren't opposed to paying for music music - they are opposed to buying CD's.

 

 

That sounds impressive until you remember that that's after, what, 5 years of sales or something like that? There are that many downloads every two or three months. So it's hardly like providing online delivery is the answer to widespread theft of the product.

[Dean Roddey]

 

you can't live comfortably as a musician, or a journalist, or a writer or painter, these days. You don't do these things for the money. You do it for the art, for the love of the craft. When you start thinking about music only as profits and expenses, you lose the meaning of it all.

 

 

But it's different if you can't make a really good living because people don't really care for your product. It's quite another when lots of people want and enjoy your product and you still cannot make a living. That's a fundamental breaking of the system of incentives that capitalism is based on. And it's not like slavery in that it already is and has for centuries been considered illegal and wrong to steal.

[corbind]

Well said, Dean.

[flatfinger]

 

But it's different if you can't make a really good living because people don't really care for your product. It's quite another when lots of people want and enjoy your product and you still cannot make a living.

 

 

 

While there are times I feel you are a sychophant when defending some of the RIAA 's behaviours, with that statement you are spot on

Dean Roddey:thu:

[Dean Roddey]

A sycophant, BTW, is someone who flatters for personal gain, which would not be applicable to me in this case. I have nothing to gain from my position in this argument.

[BlackHatHunter]

{censored} the RIAA. Period.

[ShakaCthulu]

 

But here's another thing. . . Can the average musician on an independent label or self-produced really complain? There are a lot of people who make wages that low and survive. Let's face it...you can't live comfortably as a musician, or a journalist, or a writer or painter, these days. You don't do these things for the money. You do it for the art, for the love of the craft. When you start thinking about music only as profits and expenses, you lose the meaning of it all.

 

 

They could complain, but nobody would listen. Better to write a song about it than complain. It's not just a craft, but a form of communication for me. It's always been hard to live comfortably with a career in the arts. Going to be even harder with the effect the information age is having on intellectual property. I'm not very optimistic about the long-term ramifactions of this, though there are some high points to it.

 

I appreciate you deliberation and thoughts.

[the stranger]

 

A sycophant, BTW, is someone who flatters for personal gain, which would not be applicable to me in this case. I have nothing to gain from my position in this argument.

 

 

You get attention. You get interaction.

[ShakaCthulu]

 

But it's different if you can't make a really good living because people don't really care for your product. It's quite another when lots of people want and enjoy your product and you still cannot make a living. That's a fundamental breaking of the system of incentives that capitalism is based on. And it's not like slavery in that it already is and has for centuries been considered illegal and wrong to steal.

 

 

 

Very well said. There is a huge tinge of the basest type of communism to the "music should be free" idealists (not represented by anyone in this thread, really). I have noticed that I can count on one hand the number of artists who have benefited from downloading. You'd think if everyone thought about it as a way to discover people who normally wouldn't have exposure, they'd be downloading all sort of unknowns. But they don't, they download the knowns on known labels.

 

Not that I have much love for the majors. Their model on distribution of download sales is incredibly unfair, as their costs have been cut significantly by not having to manufacture a physical product.

[Dean Roddey]

 

You get attention. You get interaction

 

 

Hate to break it to you, but your attention isn't terribly high on my list of needs. It's more of a time sucker for me to fight this fight than anything else. But I just can't stand the illogic and lack of understanding that is so often thrown about in these and similar threads. So many people go off ranting and have no idea what the facts are.

[flatfinger]

1. sychophant = a brownnoser : someone who will seek to please a person of authority in order to obtain some grace, usually the grace is something as simple as a pat on the bottom, but can vary greatly.

 

I have it on good authority that Dean Roddey was the recipient of a firm pat on the bottom delivered by a representative ( or was it a reprehensible ?) of the RIAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Cry Logic]

Too cryptic flatfinger.

Spell it out for us please mate.....

[nerol1st]

iTunes is a joke who on earth wants to buy DRM encoded files (I have and pretty much think it sucks). I don't give a crap about owning a CD at all period, it's a dying technology. Even if I were to go buy a CD (which is a pain in the ass due to there being no record stores anymore) it would just get ripped down to mp.3 and thrown on my iPod.

 

Snocap is pretty cool I have bought quite a few albums that way. I haven't tried CD Baby yet but they seem to also have the right idea (although not all albums are available for paid download).

 

I did find one band that had the right idea. They sold both apple lossless tracks at a good rate (I think $13 for a 10 song CD) and mp.3 for a cheaper rate ($10 for the 10 song CD). I of course bought the lossless for $3 more.

 

 

The above senario is perfect, they need to go to that kind of model. Full quality tracks for paid download. Because at the moment you have free {censored}ty mp.3 or paid {censored}ty mp.3

[Dean Roddey]

BTW, Alanis Morrisette, in the very just before widespread theft era began, sold about four or five hundred million tracks all by herself world wide, possibly more, according to whose sales numbers you believe. That's like 12'ish percent of what iTunes has sold for every artist on the planet in all the years it's been going. So no one should fool themselves that iTunes' sales indicates that all people were waiting for is a way to get online sales legitimately.

 

Personally, I like CDs. I like to have the artwork and whatnot and I like having a physical copy.

[chu2]

BTW, Alanis Morrisette, in the very just before widespread theft era began, sold about four or five hundred million tracks all by herself world wide, possibly more, according to whose sales numbers you believe. That's like 12'ish percent of what iTunes has sold for every artist on the planet in all the years it's been going. So no one should fool themselves that iTunes' sales indicates that all people were waiting for is a way to get online sales legitimately. Personally, I like CDs. I like to have the artwork and whatnot and I like having a physical copy.

 

I'll agree with you on that one, man.

 

Although we may differ in opinion on other things, I do like having a piece of physical media. And the artwork and bios with many albums are sweet.

[rekrdskratcher]

 

The labels have never made anything like outrageous profits. This is what flips me out when people keep saying this. A few years back, the top five major labels (I think I'm remembering the right number) had GROSS revenues of something like $5B. GE, in that same year, had like four point something billion in PROFIT.

 

 

Funny enough, I wrote a paper on this very topic this past spring for a rhetoric class. At least one of my sources quoted figures like this:

 

1999 CD sales: (allegedly at their peak, and also during what I would consider one of Napster's biggest years) $14.58 billion.

2003 CD sales: $11.85 billion (Gordon 83).

 

...and you're going to tell me that there weren't tremendous profits in CD sales? No wonder they freaked out.

 

I also highly disagree with the idea that CDs are profitable on the retail end. I work for a large electronics retailer and I can promise you that CDs are generally a loss leader for us - new releases? We're selling those below costs. We're hoping you'll come in and buy something much more profitable from us while you're still in there. Even most of our regular CDs that we're selling for between 12 and 17 bucks are only making 1 -3 dollars at most. In addition, from what I've read about the business end of getting (for example) a label deal, artists see very little of the money in CD sales. And if retailers aren't seeing much of that either, who does that seem to leave?

 

Ignoring the issues of vinyl vs. CDs vs. digital distribution, has anybody considered that the problem may be deeper than in the distribution side of things? One assertion I made in my paper was that, not coincidentally, A&R budgets declined during the era of CDs and, of course, digital distribution. Why? There was/is no profit in slowly developing artists into slow and steady producers if you could score hot-selling one-hit-wonders with little effort. And even if those didn't work out, you could fall back on the sales of CDs that were replacing what people already had on vinyl, with no incentive and no foresight to develop artists that would continue to consistently bring in money, even if it wasn't in as high of volumes as they could get it with one-hit-quit artists. Eventually the cash cow ran out.

 

Works cited:

 

Gordon, Steve. The Future of the Music Business. San Francisco; Backbeat Books, 2005.

[Dean Roddey]

 

1999 CD sales: (allegedly at their peak, and also during what I would consider one of Napster's biggest years) $14.58 billion.

 

 

But you are talking about an industry that has an ~ 85% failure rate, so quoting gross revenues is not very meaningful in terms of what their actual profits were. And that's gross for a whole industry. There are plenty of single companies that have way higher grosses than that per year.

[slight-return]

 

Works cited: Gordon, Steve. The Future of the Music Business. San Francisco; Backbeat Books, 2005.

 

 

As a specific piece of data was offered from the source, a page/line citation would be advisable

 

As it looks to be collected, cumulative data, it would be good to check for source citation in the cited work itself (that way if the data for data that was extrinsic to the primary citation, data collection methods, interpretation, etc can be reviewed,verified, and is more open to comment)

[Cry Logic]

But you are talking about an industry that has an ~ 85% failure rate, so quoting gross revenues is not very meaningful in terms of what their actual profits were. And that's gross for a whole industry. There are plenty of single companies that have way higher grosses than that per year.

 

The music industry can be very gross at times.

[Billster]

 

One assertion I made in my paper was that, not coincidentally, A&R budgets declined during the era of CDs and, of course, digital distribution. Why? There was/is no profit in slowly developing artists into slow and steady producers if you could score hot-selling one-hit-wonders with little effort. And even if those didn't work out, you could fall back on the sales of CDs that were replacing what people already had on vinyl, with no incentive and no foresight to develop artists that would continue to consistently bring in money, even if it wasn't in as high of volumes as they could get it with one-hit-quit artists. Eventually the cash cow ran out.

 

 

Right. The peak of CD sales had a lot to do with the fact that a lot of the inventory was already amortized - classic rock and jazz reissued on CD = pure profit. There was no development of sustainable new acts.

[armenjc]

If iTunes, Media Player, WinAmp, Real, etc. allow me to rip CDs, why won't the RIAA be going after Apple, Microsoft and the rest with the same fervor they went after Napster or any individuals?

 

Kill the lawyers. Such pollution!

[slight-return]

 

If iTunes, Media Player, WinAmp, Real, etc. allow me to rip CDs, why won't the RIAA be going after Apple, Microsoft and the rest with the same fervor they went after Napster or any individuals?

 

 

The individuals were engaged in direct infringement

 

Napster was found to be a contributory and vicarious infringer (due to the structure and their ability to supervise the use model). Napster attempted a fair use defense (which is affirmative)

 

the technology itself could have signifigant legitimate use (which is, for instance, the stumbling block for injunctive relief against a peer-to-peer networks fail) which woul tend to weaken the claim of indirect infringement substantially

[Dean Roddey]

And the RIAA doesn't believe it's wrong for you to rip your own CDs to your hard drive, so they wouldn't have a problem with products that only do that. The issue are those products that clearly are used substantially or primarily for infringement.

[HCarlH]

I'll agree with you on that one, man. Although we may differ in opinion on other things, I do like having a piece of physical media. And the artwork and bios with many albums are sweet.

 

+1

 

The last thing I want is a virtual album on a POS iPod.

[DarthElvis]

With regards to copying a cd I already own, it's covered under fair-use. Any policy trying to limit that violates my fair-use rights and is null and void. RIAA can go pound sand if they try to go this way.

BTW, the story has been taken out of context. I haven't heard of RIAA trying to go this route. And I wouldn't trust a lawyer as far as I could throw them.