Here's Why Music Should Cost $4... per 400 songs... says guy who gets music for free

[Scafeets]

 

Pen Drives? Hello?? HELLO??? ...

 

 

Please check out Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, a seminal book on digital technology written in 1995. He points out that a whole lot of companies are in deep {censored} because they're thinking about atoms instead of bits. The smackdown the record industry took was because they thought they were in the business of selling little pieces of plastic instead of intellectual property. And the print media is swirling the drain because they think they're in the Dead Tree business.

 

"Pen Drives" is no more a panacea than the atoms that came before them. The business model for intellectual property, whether it's music, information or other forms of entertainment, needs to be hardware=neutral.

[PermaNoobie]

Scafeets brings up a good point - and a point that might be even stronger for the coming generations of people

 

"pen drive" is just another HW storage device.

It doesn't even mean "oh, pen drive...crappy MP3". It doesn't have the standards constraints on it like a redbook audio CD. Come to think of it, easier to "rip" as well (just a file xfer)

 

I think the older gens (and I'm a part of that, I think I'm probably the last gen to have used a typewriter) I think still tend to think in terms of hardware tokens, but I'm not sure that the newer gens do as much

[daddymack]

until they find a way to link your brain to the internet wirelessly, there will always be some form of hardware for both storage and playback.

[Scafeets]

until they find a way to link your brain to the internet wirelessly, there will always be some form of hardware for both storage and playback.

 

Yup...but the hardware is increasingly irrelevant. Once you concentrate on the creative work as "product" -- something the old-timers in the music biz used to call it anyway -- you get out of the syndrome of trying to attach the value to atoms. The paradigm shift isn't about the container - it's about putting a value on the composition and performance.

[Next Direct]

Many people still like owning things though. We hoard and collect material items out of some geeky pleasure (just look at eBay). A vast music collection is a prized possession for many music fans, though I know some don't get so attached and are happy with a digitized collection too. Do these people collect any DVDs too, I wonder.

It's hard to predict what will take off. They've been pushing e-books for a while now, which are starting to sell but I don't see the paperback/hardback becoming extinct anytime soon because people still like reading a physical book (even though some of us read text on a computer screen everyday that would fill a few chapters).

The point about cassette tapes is good. The quality is pants, yet I remember buying them back in the day and not caring. It's obvious 192kps is fine for people, who don't care about CD quality. And, when they don't care about owning music (just like none of us care about owning a daily newspaper copy) it's going to be difficult trying to sell both intellectual property and a material item to these people.

[PermaNoobie]

until they find a way to link your brain to the internet wirelessly, there will always be some form of hardware for both storage and playback.

 

then you've just moved to specialized HW "wetware" well, actually the interface unit might be some sort of quasi-organic synthetic)

 

I mean that's what a Medium is -- the substrate, the HW for the info

 

the diff though is treating the HW as integral, or closely associated with the application vs having the HW abstracted and the info itself portable.

 

Sort of like how abstraction layers work in OSs now. Remember in the bad old CoBOL days when we had the environment declaration up top? I do

[PermaNoobie]

 

Many people still like owning things though. We hoard and collect material items out of some geeky pleasure (just look at eBay).

 

 

Lanier kind of goes for a couple of proposed "art token" models in his last book.

And, for collectors and gifts, etc I think there's something to be said for that, but for the larger audience segments where the experiential component (the listening) is a bigger part of it and their material ownership of other things might satisfy that acquisition need.

 

 

 

A vast music collection is a prized possession for many music fans

 

 

"fans" is always a tough one b/c "fan" is, after all, just short for "fanatic" - they are by def outliers.

 

 

 

though I know some don't get so attached and are happy with a digitized collection too.

 

 

That's another part of it, I think some fans that self-identify as fans and pride themselves on collections are..."collectors" they dig the rarity, purity, in some ways perhaps the feeling of being a member of the musical literati ("high fidelity" was partially a grudging homage to hat, Keif discussed that aspect in London as the Stones were forming in his autobiog "Life")

 

and that's the weird thing about collectors, collection can in-and-of-itself become the goal and utility takes a back seat and other parameters (such as rarity and cosmetic condition, even sales packaging) become drivers -- we do occasionally see artificial markets of these develop (beanie babies) but that's a strange market to predict and to work to because you have to sort of anti-trend things.

 

Do these people collect any DVDs too, I wonder.

 

 

some do.."It's a rare Japanese film school import. You'll never find it, but I know this guy"

 

Weird Al has a little send up in "whit and Nerdy" with getting a bootleg of Star Wars Holiday Special (Lucas tried to suppress that b/c it's just that bad)

 

 

 

And, when they don't care about owning music (just like none of us care about owning a daily newspaper copy).

 

 

Oh, there are collectors there too.

 

 

e-books are a weird one - for one thing, the experience of reading a paper book and an ebook has been MARKEDLY different (LCD display, etc), but with recorded music we still have very similar playback interfaces (speakers, some playback device with amplifiers, etc)

and there was and continue to be format wars and fragmentation as vertical market development is a BFD for those sorts of things

[daddymack]

Yup...but the hardware is increasingly irrelevant. Once you concentrate on the creative work as "product" -- something the old-timers in the music biz used to call it anyway -- you get out of the syndrome of trying to attach the value to atoms. The paradigm shift isn't about the container - it's about putting a value on the composition and performance.

The nature of the hardware may ultimately be irrelevant, but from a business perspective, one can never afford to swallow the cost of the packaging of the product; it has to be passed along as an intrinsic component of the overall cost-of-goods, so somewhere down the pipeline, someone is paying for both the IP and the physical entity. There can be no separation of cost levys as they are still a single good...even if one is 'permanent' and is the key value, and the other one is essentially valueless once used and 'disposable'. When you buy a CD, the cost of the ~12 square inches of shrinkwrap protecting that product is embedded in the price the manufacturer charges the distributor, and so on down the line. As long as there is a physical presence, its total costs of manufacture is going to be accomodated in the pricing structure.

[uab9253]

Stealing music is a crime.I can not believe that people so casually commit this crime that cripples an industry. I can buy physical CDs because I think the poor quality of MP3. I can extract the songs on my computer and then put them on my phone, but just to listen to my desk at work and at a very low volume.

 

 

Agreed, and you would not believe the number of people who vehemently refuse to pay for music these days. It's disgusting - they see nothing wrong with it. They're killing the industry.