April 17, 2006

April 12, 2006

steve jobs and co. have fought to keep the prices low. warner bros are to blame for this crazy price. ANYWAY, why would you pay FULL PRICE for a 128 kbps ACC that has limited copy restraints? buy the CD, get the art, get the full quality music, get no copy restraints...it's a no brainer. sorry iTunes Music Store, this doesn't appeal anymore...

$13 is nuts. You can buy the disc for $13, rip it to your iPod, and still have the CD.

...I thought that was the whole selling point of iTunes - to charge less for the actual songs but not get the CD casing & art work...

...it is stupid to raise the standard 9.99 price to $13...oh well I'll just go download it off limewire now.

I hope the large record companies are happy now that they are beginning to kill the golden goose (iTunes) by insisting that Apple charge more than $9.99 per album. No one in their right mind should download this intangible album for $12.99 (with restrictions on how they can use it) when they can purchase the tangible album for the same price or less...

Sorry but for $13 I want to own my music. Last I checked I wasn't getting album art, an actual CD or music that I can play anywhere. I'm getting digital tracks in a proprietary format. Screw you iTunes, I'm not buying this.

I've been a big fan of the 99 cent song and the 9.99 album but I'll be damned if I pay any more than that. Good things never last, greed conquers all...again. There is a reason peer to peer sharing became so popular...

Mr. Rocker and I are doing a little CD Spring Cleaning in the Music Pantry and I thought we'd sell all the stuff we don't want (or have doubles on) at Half.com. The stuff we're selling still has the plastic wrap on it and I'm hoping to get some good dough from the sales.

I was kind of surprised to see that over 60% of what I have to sell is not worth much at all. If a (currently popular) CDs is not sold within a year of their release, three years later, they aren't even worth the cost to ship! Kind of makes me feel bad for bands that were the "IT" band three years ago to come across a site like Half.com to find that their music is practically worthless to the consumer.

April 07, 2006

April 03, 2006

Pitchfork: Are the artists making money from iTunes and other sources of digital revenue?

Gordon: The artists with the big labels are not seeing much revenue. Although sales of digital music have multiplied in the last year, they still only represent a fraction of the income from CD sales. And the artists are paid on digital sales basically the same way as they are paid for ordinary record sales. Artists usually only receive any recording royalties after "recoupment" of their "unearned balances," that is, production and marketing costs. But only the most successful artists recoup production and marketing costs. Under the standard recording agreements artists only "recoup" at their royalty rate. After deductions, the artists' royalty usually is well less than a dollar per album. So if production and marketing costs (including music videos) are $250,000 (modest in terms of big labels) then they most sell more than 250,000 records to earn any recording royalties. In addition many agreements reduce the artists normal royalty rate for digital sales.

Now compare this to an artist who records and sells an album without a record company. Say an artist records an album for $10,000 and sells the CD for $14 on CD Baby. CD Baby takes only $4. If the artist sold 10,000 units, he or she would make 10,000 x $10 = $100,000 minus $10,000 and gets to keep $90,000. If the artist recorded the same album for a record company and sold the same number of units they would probably receive no recording royalties at all. If the record company produced the album for $10,000 and spent $10,000 on recoupable marketing costs, and the artist's royalty was a dollar, the artist would in fact still owe the record company $10,000.

March 30, 2006

Per Song Payments for Streaming
AOL MusicNow: 2 cents
Music Match: 1 cent
MusicNet: 2 cents (up from .2 cents!)
Napster: .8 cents AND 2.1 cents
Rhapsody: 1 cent

March 23, 2006

The courts have a proven track record of fashioning balanced remedies for the copyright challenges created by new technologies. But when Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, it cut the courts out of this role and instead banned any devices that "circumvent" digital rights management (DRM) technologies, which control access to copyrighted content.

The result has been a legal regime that reduces options and competition in how consumers enjoy media and entertainment. Today, the copyright industry is exerting increasing control over playback devices, cable media offerings, and even Internet streaming. Some firms have used the DMCA to thwart competition by preventing research and reverse engineering. Others have brought the weight of criminal sanctions to bear against critics, competitors, and researchers.

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders -- and the technology companies that distribute their content -- the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

March 20, 2006

March 10, 2006