Why DVDs are thriving while CDs tank (1 Viewer)

[Craig_T]

I agree that people don't factor in inflation and don't consider that paying $12 for a CD in 1988 comes to around $18 in today's dollars. Citing the manufacturing cost per disc is also ridiculous. The price is set by the perceived value and what people are willing to pay. The fact that CD sales are falling while DVD is flying shows that people no longer perceive a CD to be worth what labels are charging. If the labels think that copy protection is going to stop falling sales then they are fools. If anything, it's going to have just the opposite effect.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

Ted, your costing is off base, and this addresses another issue brought up earlier about bands recording stuff themselves on cheap studio equipment.

First, let's address the do-it-yourself issue. While it is theoretically possible for an artist to buy a piece of gear for a few thousand dollars and produce a technical marvel, the reality is that 99.9% of those people won't. Why? Becasue they lack the skill to do so. Even if they get lucky the first time out, what established producers and engineers have going for them is experience. They can consistently deliver quality product. Having been through the fluke stage myself, I can tell you that you can't buy a machine and get the knowledge years of experience that it takes to be able to produce world class product. Buying a golf club doesn't make you Tiger Woods.

Second, it still costs just as much, if not more, to buy quality equipment. Sure, I can buy a ProTools HD setup and computer for $20,000US (factoring in some plugins, and necessary peripherals which are never included in the base price). A high quality signal chain can easily run you the same amount. That still doesn't buy you a room. Sure, you can probably make do, but every place you cut corners sacrifices some quality. I can make a mix rock in my bedroom, but it doesn't translate properly to all other stereos due to acoustic limitations, weird room nodes, and other factors. If I spend long enough working at it, I can probably fix the problems, but that brings up another issue - time.

The music industry, especially big budget productions, have to be scheduled. There is an immense amount of coordination that goes into launching a product - the packaging has to be in place, the sell sheets need to be in place, the ad campaign needs to be in place, the mastering suite needs booking, press time has to be booked, merchandising, web sites, promotional tours and so forth all need to be in the pipeline during production. You can't afford to blow your release date due to production difficulties caused by using novices or inadequate facilities.

Also, when selling to radio or other promotional venues, the talent used in the production does count, especially on a new artist. With tens of thousands of new artists going through the system a year, having recognizable talent in the production chain is a way of seperating the wanna-bes from those a programming director will take seriously. You put Quincy Jones or Bob Rock on the credits and you have credibility. Your CD may be listened to over the thousand other candidates.

None of this means that there aren't those who can produce great product on a budget, but they are few and far between, and somewhere there is a compromise, either in sound quality, performance quality, or production time. Whether or not they can repeat their achievements is also an unknown. If you are betting hundreds of thousands on a product, it is not worth the risk.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

The other day I read something Sean Malone (bass player for Cynic, Gordian Knot) said that really hit me: a music lover will hear maybe 5% of music he would like in his life if he's lucky.

There is a TON of great new progressive and metal music out there. . .if you know where to look. Subscribe to a magazine like Progression or Sea of Tranquility, and look up the artists they review online at sites like mp3.com where you can listen to sample tracks. Heck, Progression comes out quarterly, includes a sampler CD, and reviews over 100 discs in every issue!

I don't buy as many CDs as I used to (which isn't saying much!), but those I do buy are used, direct from the artist, or from niche distributors at the North East Art Rock Festival.

The problem is simply that the CDs you find in record stores these days are, as others have already mentioned, EXPENSIVE CRAP! You have to look for the good stuff, but it's out there.

Jeff K.: They're selling L'Arc En Ciel in the US????

I bought a ton of J-Rock VCDs and CDs in Hong Kong and in NYC Chinatown dirt cheap. I got a DVD of 20 Glay videos in NY for $15. In HK, triple-VCD sets of X-Japan concerts for even less. (Incidentally, in record stores in HK, you can get the Japanese and HK releases of albums, containing the same material, for vastly different prices--in the same store!)

 

[Jeff Kleist]

I bought a ton of J-Rock VCDs and CDs in Hong Kong and in NYC Chinatown dirt cheap. I got a DVD of 20 Glay videos in NY for $15. In HK, triple-VCD sets of X-Japan concerts for even less.

Then you bought hordes of bootlegs. The few J concerts and video collections that are released in Hong Kong run at least $15 for a VCD, and to my knowlege there ARE no DVDs of JRock/Pop material released there. Chinatowns are not to be trusted for legit product
Sony has started a JRock domestic lable, they are going to be promoting a sampler collection big-time on MTV soon. I know the L'arc album is available at Tower Records, I have no idea about the others
Link Removed
Be warned: This website is extremely annoying

 

[Dave Hensley]

Not sure if I'm a typical consumer or not, but here goes...

I'd gladly pay $1-$3 per song downloaded as long as the song wasn't device-locked or restricted in another way. Why? Because if I (hypothetically) download a ripped song, I can't control the quality, bitrate or tag contents, and I'm not supporting the artists I like. I'd even pay a premium for lossless compression (like ape format). Most importantly, it would not worth my time to screw around with finding a bootleg song, dealing with quality issues, and having to tag and organize the song...if I had the choice to download a known-good version of the song for $3.

I don't want to buy physical CDs. I run everything I have off of hard drives, or burn collections into CD-Rs. My garage is full of boxes of the CD's I've bought and ripped. I rip CDs into lossless ape format and play them over my high-quality sound system. I can also convert them to high-compression formats for use with portable devices.

I saw a statistic recently that estimated the number of pirated songs per year in the billions. Multiply that number by $1-$3 per song and you can begin to see the magnitude of revenues lost by these companies by their refusal to address market changes and consumer preferences. Their regulatory attempts will fail--encryption and copy protection will be broken, de-centralized bootleg sharing systems will continue to appear, and offshore news servers will continue to carry bootleg songs.

So here's how well the majors are addressing my needs:

1) Require me to buy an entire album regardless of the number of songs I want
2) Require me to buy a physical product, even though I don't want it and will immediately rip it and put the CD into storage
3) Require me to wait hours, days or weeks to receive the song I want instead of being able to download it when I have time to do it
4) Grossly inflate the cost of the product to justify physical production, shipping, distribution and retailing costs associated with the physical product I didn't want in the first place

I can see a major succeeding (with me at least) but their primary values to me would be:
1) Convienience--I can get it now and I know where it is
2) Quality--It's well encoded and compressed; avaliable in multiple formats
3) Fairness--Equitable compensation for the artist, good return to shareholders and good price for me
4) Editorial--Select, develop and market new artists appealing to multiple demographics
5) Organization--Tags are correct, song easy to find in catalog
6) Extras--Album covers, supplemental material available with songs
7) Safety--Provide lifetime backup for my purchases

Unfortunately, I think the majors are just going to continue to accuse us of stealing their cheeze...

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

I realize that the industry has changed from a singles to album market, but the point remains, people have always eaten up these sorts of "preordained" hits.

I was discussing this on another forum this morning. The fact is, the most profitable music demographic, the 16-25 year olds mentioned earlier, are showing in every way that they are interested in individual songs. Record companies push individual songs to radio rather than albums. With these two facts in mind, the record companies are still primarily focused on producing and selling "albums". They seem unwilling or incapable of either promoting the whole album by pushing more than one song at once or making individual songs available via singles, downloads, kiosks or whatever. Their promotion model is straight out of the 60s (push the song) while their distribution model is straight out of the 70s (the album is king).

The other major problem is that they are now such bottom-line driven consolidated behemoths that their business model does not work unless an artist is selling millions upon millions of copies. They don't know what to do with mid-volume artists unless they already own their catalogs and can exploit their new and old titles at the same time as an established brand or at least write off their presence on the label as "brand enhancement". Its fairly analogous to the way that the largest car companies have trouble figuring out how to make money on niche product.

As Jeff Ulmer pointed out a couple of pages ago, DVDs, for the most part, are a secondary market for content which has already been exploited via cinemas or television, so the risk aversion phase was dealt with on their content and the DVD is there to either add to the profits or recoup some of the losses. That partially explains why the studios are not criticised for the content of their new DVD releases like with CDs. They were already criticised on the initial theatrical or televised release, and the inevitable DVD is just a question of the less mainstream concerns of mastering quality and extra content.

Regards,

 

[Aaron Silverman]

The few J concerts and video collections that are released in Hong Kong run at least $15 for a VCD, and to my knowlege there ARE no DVDs of JRock/Pop material released there.

Legitimate VCDs can be found cheaper than that in HK--you just need to shop around! (Granted, this is tough to do if you aren't IN HK. . .)

J-Rock DVDs are readily available in HK--they sell the region 3 Japanese releases, since all players sold there are multiregion and NTSC/PAL compatible. Most of the same stuff was also available on (legitimate) VCDs for significantly lower prices.

As for DVDs from Chinatown. . .bootleg they may be, but if they ever put this stuff out in region 1, I'd buy it anyway. They're NOT losing a sale of a $90 region 2 disc from me, 'cause that sale wouldn't happen anyway.

 

[Mickey Brown]

I am 31, with a 12 year old daughter. 5 years ago I bought a lot of CD's. HipHop, Jazz, R&B. Most CD's I bought were 16.99....
As I turned 29, I just didn't have the taste for hiphop anymore, and I was finding it harder to find any great new jazz acts that had that hard edge I was looking for. I quit buying CD's.
About 2.5 years ago my daughter got 9 CD's for XMas. Her friends exchanged CD's as XMas gifts. And then Napster. And the home broadband connection. That girl has not bought a CD since, neither have her friends. They download all the top 40 songs and burn them to a cd, or just listen to them on the PC. The thing I find most interesting with this is that I have NEVER heard a single song on any of those burned CD's that wasn't on the radio. This leads me to believe two things:
1. Most kids just want the hits. They aren't interested in 'a great musical experience.' They just want the songs on the radio, and they want to be able to play them whenever they want.
2. Because they can get these hits over the net for free, WHY BUY THE CD FOR THAT ONE SONG?
I guess this is stealing. But you can tape songs off the radio and burn them to CD, albeit a much lesser quality. But a lot of the songs on these burned CD's sound like crap anyway... But 12 year olds don't give a crap about 'fidelity.' They want to sing to Britney Spears with their friends.
I buy a couple of CD's a year, only to support the artists I really enjoy. I want them to keep making records. I buy them to hear them on my home theater system, so that I can talk about imaging, blah blah blah......
The days of a kid hearing the song on the radio and driving up to the mall to spend his allowance on that CD are NUMBERED. This is just a simple fact. 97 times out of 100, that one song on that CD is the only song you will hear from that cookie cutter band.

 

[Mickey Brown]

Also,
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to jump on this DVD wave.

Note to record companies:

Follow your big acts around and record their live shows. Record them making the records. Put them out on high quality DVD's!

NSync in Hawaii
NSync in Japan
NSync in NewYork
NSync meets Britney

you get the picture....

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

A big part of the download problem is that parents don't really give a crap if their kids are stealing music, presumably because there are no obvious ramifications to doing so. Perhaps if these kids were arrested for the theft they are undertaking, and the parents fined there would be a different attitude. Would you have the same attitude if they brought home a car they stole? Why should they buy one? This one was free!

There are numerous justifications for file sharing, but the fact of the matter is that this activity is having a detrimental effect of people's livelihoods. Perhaps you don't care. If so, don't go looking for sympathy when some situation you can't control puts you out of work. For the artists who rely on sales to support their careers and their lives, this is a serious issue.

A part of parenting is teaching ethics and morality to your kids. By simply ignoring an activity which causes harm to someone else, why should they respect another's rights for any other situation where they benefit by another's loss?

 

[Brian Bunn]

Jeff--Shame on you for standing up for ethics and morality! Shame on you! Don't you know that people do not care about such things anymore? The nerve!!

 

[Mickey Brown]

Ethics or not, I don't believe grabbing a song over the net to burn onto CD is stealing. If I can record it over the radio onto CD, I see absolutely ZERO difference. The difference is in the quality. I've heard many of the CD's my daughter has burned, and the radio sounds better.

And I am a software developer. And I lost my job 4 years ago when Microsoft started giving away many tools bundled with it's browser to put my company out of business. I didn't scream 'ethics.'

I knew I had to do something else to make money. The recording industry will have to do as I have. That is technology.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

There is a fundamental difference between you losing your job and condoning piracy. In your case, your services are no longer being utilised, therefore you aren't getting paid for them. In the case of piracy, it is the fact that the material IS being used that is why it should be paid for.

I have no issue with anyone deciding CDs are too expensive and not buying them. Stealing the content instead is where I have a problem. If you didn't pay for it, or someone didn't pay to broadcast or distribute it, then it is stealing. How else can you define it?

 

[Paul McElligott]

I'd like to point out that the record labels that the RIAA represents are not in the "music" industry, they're in the recording industry. They are in the business of making shiny little silver discs and trying to entice us to exchange little green pieces of paper for the shiny silver discs.
The music industry is all off the artists, promoters and managers involved in the creative side of the business. There is a lot of overlap, of course.
I think what the record industry needs to remember is that the music industry has been around a lot longer. Back in the old days, records were a great promotional tool for getting people out to hear a live performance. Somewhere along the line, the tail became the dog and vice-versa.
The ugly truth of the music industry is only the very top tier acts make any money from recording. Touring and performing is the primary money maker for the rest, who probably see most of their "income" from the label eaten up in recording expenses.
Thus the record labels are really not concerned with depriving the poor artists of any income. They are mostly concerned with preserving their own cashflow. That's why a lot of mid-level and lower music acts were all for Napster. It represented a great way of enticing people out to their live act, where they actually make their money.
So, in a sense, music sharing represented a return to an old paradigm for the music business. To the recording industry, it represented a return to the "bad old days" before the industry was the monolithic cash machine it is now. What they were (and are) most afraid of is the artists and fans connecting directly, without a middle man, thereby rendering the record labels obsolete.
Whether this is likely is not the point. It's still what they're afraid of.

 

[Travis D]

You know, it would be really sad if this turned into a really lame internet flame war. It really would.

I would advise against anyone posting illegal activities because not only will Jeff jump all over ya (for good reasons usually), but it also could jepordize this thread (which I really like).

Also Jeff, not everything can be solved with jailtime. Personal attacks, even really vague ones, are not wanted by anyone.

That being said, Ken's point of using marketing strategies from different era's is spot on. If one sells the song rather than the album why are they surprised when no one buys the album. Perfect example is Sugar Ray's first Cd, you know, the one with "Fly" on it. I was not an unfortunate purchaser of this album but my friend was. None of the other songs even came close to the sound of Fly. It just stuck out like a beautiful woman at a LAN party.

The whole system of "lucky purchase" is shady to me. Because you have to be REALLY lucky to get a CD with more than 5 songs that are enjoyable. In fact I bought the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album yesterday and I can only count 3 songs that I like. Out of all the songs on there, I only find 3 to be relistenable. I feel ripped. I feel really ripped because none of the other songs sound like the first single. Most are forgetable halfway through the song. I'm going to see if I can get my money back and purchase 2 things: the single, and another worthwhile album. But wait, I can't since it's opened. I'm stuck with this peice of shit. Somebody deserves to lose money for that and it shouldn't be me.

 

[Mickey Brown]

Jeff,

If I go down to my local library and check out a CD, then dub a tape from that CD to listen to it in my car, since my car doesn't have a CD player considered stealing?

Is it the same as shoplifting?

 

[Blu]

I really believe that the main reason for all of the controversy is the marketing strategies employeed by the Music industry AND the RIAA. They don't care if anyone enjoys anything other than the single.
Why DVDs sell more is simply the product. More effort, more quality production, and simply more caring go into making a movie/dvd in these days rather than a cookie cutter music cd that few people care about anymore.
Ok take the recent Jackson flap, Sony takes 25 MILLION dollars just to PROMOTE a cd that doesn't sell!!!!!!!
Why doesn't it sale? Probably because it SUCKS and NO ONE wants to hear it!!!
Then take a movie like Memento, Indie made and produced and it goes on to make tons of money because it is a quality product!!

 

[Brian Bunn]

Travis, sorry, but that is about the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard! Nobody forced you to buy the CD. I am not really sure what you are trying to get across. Huh!?
You don't like the CD so you think you should be fully reimbursed? Well, you can always sell it to a used CD store and get some of your money back.
Please...I strongly recommend those that just can't seem to find good music out there, albums with great tunes from beginning to end, to look beyond the mainstream stuff and there you will find the good stuff. Albums FULL of great tunes. Bands with members that are outstanding musicians first and foremost, that write and perform outstanding music. Go out on a limb and search for stuff that everyone else ISN'T listening to. I can't tell you how many CD's I buy that are a complete blind purchase, just by reading reviews in, say, Amplifier Magazine or online, and being totally satisfied with the experience. Sometimes completely blown away by what I hear. Albums chock full of great tunes...as examples recently...Brendan Benson's "Lapalco" and Candy Butchers' "Play With Your Head". Yeah, I know, stuff you've never heard of but I'm telling you that is where it's at man. I truly believe that the best stuff never gets much of an audience and is almost completely overlooked.
I am hate to ramble on about this, but I just feel so disheartened and perplexed when I hear people say that there isn't any good music out there and they buy an album only to find one or two good songs on it....when I am over here just surrounded by great album after great album...so much so that I don't have time to listen to it all. And the thing that gets me the most is that very few others have even heard of this stuff. Which at the same time makes it all the more special that I found it, something that very few others have.
As a matter of fact I just got a new CD in today and am listening to it now for the first time...The Waxwings "Shadow of the Waxwings". I didn't hear a single note from the album before today. I bought their first album a couple of years ago on a complete blind purchase and was totally blown away. So I knew I had to have their new album just released. Is it good? You betcha it is! To these ears anyway.
Point? Man, there is SO MUCH great stuff out there it is unbelievable. You just have to start searching for it. I am kind of on a mission to help those that are having a difficult time finding the good stuff! You could start searching here:
Link Removed
Subscribe for $15 (6 issues annually), get a free CD with the subscription, and get ready for one terrific pop/rock magazine with over 100 CD reviews in each issue, and even appealing Indie record label ads of tons more interesting albums, feature stories, monthly columns, etc. Read it from cover to cover, and the reviews of CD's that you think you may like...pick some of them up...you will usually end up loving what you hear. And then you can turn your friends onto them. (But don't just burn them a copy! Let them buy their own. These bands need our support).
I am telling you this is the way to go if you are in the group that says "I just can't find any good music out there" and desperately want to find some. Even if pop/rock isn't your thing I am sure there are similar avenues to venture down for all types of music. It is even fun searching for it...then getting that little gem of an album that nobody else seems to know about. THAT is the thing! Try it.
NP: Kevin Tihista's Red Terror - Don't Breathe A Word

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

If I go down to my local library and check out a CD, then dub a tape from that CD to listen to it in my car, since my car doesn't have a CD player considered stealing?

I believe that is allowed technically assuming you don't keep the tape copy when you check the CD back into the library. Only one person can possess the license to listen to the one legal audio source at one time.

 

[Damin J Toell]

Ethics or not, I don't believe grabbing a song over the net to burn onto CD is stealing. If I can record it over the radio onto CD, I see absolutely ZERO difference.

While you might see zero difference, music publishers and record labels (and, as a result, artists) make money from radio broadcasts. No legitimate entity makes money from illegal file sharing.

DJ