Metallica / Ice Cream / Taxes (1 Viewer)

[Dennis Nicholls]

You guys kill me.


When the music industry gets their act together, you can get great bargains. I ended up getting several of these sets for $26 from Amazon. That's for a 60 CD set. That's less than half a buck per CD. And the recordings are all really good. And it's a real Sony set too, not some unknown record label.

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/...euro-39-a.html

I'll never understand why popular music sells for such a huge premium price over the classics.

 

[Brian Dobbs]

Pardon me, but with all this talk on overpriced music, I'm curious if anyone digested my proposed pricing scheme on the first page. Thoughts?

 

[Al.Anderson]

Wouldn't that be 8 CDs?

I try my best to get non-DRM from either iTunes or Amazon; but if I can't I immediately do the burn/rip step right after buying the music. It doesn't take that long and it's not as if you have to stare at the screen while it's burning. Plus, you get to listen to the music you just bought.

As far as the OPs pricing scheme, it doesn't do anything for me in general (Meaning I might buy that way from an independant musician whose music I heard and liked; but would buy that way for the bulk of my music.) I'm old school, so take this in that light, but I still buy CDs so that I can re-rip at will. I like the idea of having the hard back-up. So having CDR-R or DVD-Rs would defeat that purpose; I could never be certain the particular burn would work on whatever equipment I had down the road. Your professional burn CDs are over $1 a track, so that doesn't excite me - I'd buy it if I liked enough of the tracks to be worth $6.

And again, being old school, stereo is good enough for me. Providing me 5.1 or anything else isn't going to swing me over by itself.

I think to make where you're heading work in the larger scale you'd need an entirely on-line distribution model where I could buy the high quality music directly at reduced prices.

I don't think your scheme is evolutionary enough to have much impact, if that's what you had in mind. Sorry. I think what the studios need to do is provide something additional with each purchase to make you want to go get your own copy. Of course, I have no idea what that something might be ...

 

[DaveF]

Half-price half-albums, means I pay full price for full albums and confuses me with pointless options. And Status quo on singles (e.g. $1 a song on iTunes). This doesn't help; it would make things worse: more SKUs for stores to carry, and additional but meaningless consumer choice.


Besides, I'm still waiting for you to un-infringe your copy/paste of the BBC article. Or is only music worthy of copyright protection?

 

[drobbins]

The price of anything is based on what someone is willing to pay for it. For example take a look at my website in my signature. I started creating it last January and it is a hobby that I enjoy. This is much like people who create music; it starts out as a hobby that they enjoy. Now I have money invested in my equipment, software and web hosting, not to mention many, many hours working on it. On average I get about 50 different people visiting a day and about 20-30 who visit regularly. At what point can I start charging someone for my service? Probably never. People expect websites to be free even if it is providing a service.

Now pretend that the weather was local for you and you would visit my page for weather information. If I had a Paypal donation button, after how many visits, would you make a donation? Would you ever? At this “amateur” level I don’t expect anyone to pay for visiting my site. The same goes for musicians. Everyone wants to get paid for time and money invested in their work. Now if my site went “big time” and I had 1,000-10,000 visitors per day, I could probably get some revenue from ads or if someone thought my local weather information was so important, I might be able to charge them to put a “sticker” on their website. But I don’t ever expect to reach that point. I just do it for fun.

If you are a musician and enjoy making music, you should do it for your and your audience’s enjoyment. If you happen to make money – great! If you are looking at it like a business and want to earn a living or make a career out of it, you have a lot of competition. Your product is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it. Why should someone buy your product? Is better then the next guys? Is different and have something that your competition does not have? How is the supply for your product vs. the demand? Who knows how many 10s of thousands of bands there out there who would love to make a living at it? Can some one get the same level of enjoyment from someone else’s music as they do yours? Is that other music free? If I started a big campaign about people using my weather information with out paying for it, they would stop visiting my site and go to another.

In the early 80s I was the guy with a van that drove my friend’s band and equipment all over. There is a lot of time and money invested in it with a slim chance of full pay back let alone profit. They wrote their own music and did recording also. Don’t get me wrong I am not trying to discourage you. You have good music. I just don’t think you should be looking at it from a money making point of view. When people hear you music and if it is worth it for them to buy it, only then will you find out how much you can charge. Until then, I would focus on name recognition, creating a market base (following), and getting exposure. If people are copying spreading your music for free, I would look at it as free advertising.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

And if you are an auto maker and enjoy making autos, you should just do it for fun. Or teaching, or being a lawyer or a doctor. If you get paid for it, great!

 

[drobbins]

I do enjoy making brake rotors and I get paid for it!!

Did you not read the rest of my post where I talked about making a living at it?

 

[Bryan X]

Dave, as for the cost of the CDs, what I have done is just re-use the same CD-RW to burn and rip. That way you aren't wasting any blank CDs.

 

[drobbins]

Great idea, I think I will get my son working on it this weekend.

 

[Jason Seaver]

The realities of supply and demand are somewhat different for those jobs/businesses, of course. I don't get upset about the website which publishes my movie reviews not paying me because I know that there are one whole heck of a lot of people able to articulate their opinions on movies about as well as I do that would do it for what I'm getting (the occasional festival past and ego boost of seeing my words on a DVD package). As much as I don't deny that making good music is difficult, there's a whole bunch of people willing to try.

 

[drobbins]

We could muddy the waters further with these questions:

• When watching TV and a commercial comes on, if you change channels, hit the mute button , or get up to do something, are you stealing?
• Are you visiting web pages while using ad-blocker software? Is that stealing?
• If you visit a local coffee shop and read a newspaper that someone else has left out on the table, are you stealing?
• Are you in the popcorn line when all the pre-movie ads are playing?
• When driving in your car listening to the radio at the end of the 40 minute nonstop music, do you change the station when the commercials come on?

 

[DaveF]

First, copyright infringement is not theft. In none of those cases is there any theft, copyright infringement, or even breach of contract. So no, there's nothing wrong, legally or morally, with your hypotheticals and the waters are still crystal clear.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

It is amazing the logical twists that people will use to try to legitimize illegal activity.

 

[MarkHastings]

For me, one of the biggest reasons for downloading songs is the old "I'm not paying ten (or more) f***in' dollars for 1 song!!!".

Ever since iTunes, I've had no need to look for 'free' music. If I like a song, I buy it for $1 and I'm not forced into buying 10+ other songs at $1 each.

That's the music industries biggest problem. Stop making us pay for crap we don't want!! It would be like wanting to buy Wall-E on DVD, but instead of paying $14, they package it up with 9 crappy titles and sell it for $140. If that's the only way to get Wall-E on DVD, then I guarantee you that people are going to find ways to get it for free.

Education isn't the answer. Getting with the times is! Pay-per-song has been the greatest upgrade to the CD since the CD!

In the 26 years that I've been purchasing CD's, I've purchased just over 500 CD's and in the past 5 years (ever since I've been purchasing iTunes songs) I've purchased over 480 songs...and just over 400 of them have been from different albums.

Why is that? Well, considering those 400 songs only cost me $400 whereas if I had to accuire them by purchasing the CD's, they would have cost me over $4,000.

I am at the point where I will NEVER buy a CD unless I want more than 4 or 5 songs and if you look at my iTunes purchases, I have not purchased more than 2 songs from any given album, which would mean that the $400 I spent (at iTunes) would have never have been spent if CD's were my only option.

 

[troy evans]

You're correct. CRI is not considered theft under the current copyright laws. The term of "theft" being equated to physical property not intellectual property. However, I personally feel it is a very, very fine line in the case of music or movies. Since the owner of said copyright can legitimately argue that a potential sale would have been gained if such options were not available. Napster didn't get it's ass spanked for nothin'.

 

[Brian Dobbs]

Thanks guys.

I think I've really gone as far as I can here on this forum. I wasn't looking for a solution, just some discussion.

I realize that there are different consumer markets out there, and I'm trying my best to appeal to all of them, except theives.

If anyone would like to contact me directly, I'm sure you can figure out how.

 

[Edwin-S]

1) No. Most people are paying for TV service. If they don't want to watch ads then why should they?

2)No. Those pages are made freely accessible. Most website owners know that people will stop coming to the site if they are charged for it. There are plenty of ads on HTF, but I don't block them because they are not thrown in my face in the form of pop-ups. Website owners should expect a backlash from visitors if the website owner uses obnoxious ad methods, such as pop-ups.

3) No. If the person who purchased the paper freely leaves it in a public space then I wouldn't consider it stealing if someone reads it.

4) No. I've paid for the ticket. If I don't want to watch pre-movie ads then I have paid for the privilege of not watching them.

5) No. The reception of freely broadcast radio does not carry with it any implicit contract requiring me to listen to a string of ads.

 

[DaveF]

Since when is changing channels an illegal activity? You didn't read what I was replying to.

And to your greater point, copyright infringement isn't theft in the conventional sense: nothing physical is taken from another person, depriving them of it. Stealing your CDs, you don't have them anymore.

It's like the old Steven Wright joke, "The another night someone stole everything I own and replaced them with exact duplicates."

 

[DaveF]

That's a shame, because I've been looking forward to what I think is the most important answer you can give: how would you convince your younger self not to pirate music 9 years ago?

Then you railed against "the man", those fuddy duddies trying to educate you and stop you from getting free music. Now you're "the man" trying to educate thieving youngsters. You're in the ideal position to address the problem: you were a big Napster user and you're an adult profession musician. Would you have bought your own half-price half-albums? Would you have cared about education? What would have reached you and your friends then (and now)?

 

[Jeff Gatie]

I was agreeing with you and commiserating on the post you were replying to. The "logical twists" referred to in my post were in the stupid examples used to justify downloading songs illegally, not in your reply.