"Music will become regarded as a throwaway item"

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
I agree that musicians should get paid for their work.

Question is what do you define as work.

Try producing an album that is enjoyed by thousands of people?

Consider that the benefit to society is roughly proportional to the number of people who listen to the album, why shouldn't the artist be compensated likewise?

But I think that many people today expect recorded music alone to make enough money. That, together with bloated production costs, leads to insane pricing.

If the pricing is really wrong, then eventually someone will figure that out and drop the price. Right now, piracy really does drive up prices, because it reduces the number of people who would actually buy the album at a lower price (IOW, the optimum sale price increases because those who are still willing to pay, are willing to pay more).

[Shrapnel12]

Sorry for the threadjack, but this could tie in to the subject:

Why if singing, acting, and other entertainment type careers are such work, do we have so many child stars? What happened to labor laws?

[Dis]

now if they could make music good enough to pay for, I'd pay for it.

Fact is what music that came out this year is any good? (yes I'm looking for recommendations ).

all the old bands have faded away (or a member died), new bands have started to suck lately. even newer bands have a bland undistinguishable sound.

fact is I refuse to pay money for music I already paid for (cd's, cassettes). I want them in a more permanent form since some of my cd's have been failing, and cassettes definately have a limited life.

I think after 10 years, music should be free and basically like shareware. Why do I have to pay for some obscure metal song from 1982? it's not like I still get paid for the work I did in the navy. That was ancient history.

[Sirotnikov]

Try producing an album that is enjoyed by thousands of people?

Consider that the benefit to society is roughly proportional to the number of people who listen to the album, why shouldn't the artist be compensated likewise?

He should be compensated proportionately to that.

But I think that I should cover less of his costs, than say, a radio or a public venue.

As it is, I have to pay up to 18$ for an album, while most radio stations get it for free, and later have to pay only a really small amount for playing the music to tens of thousands of people.

example:
The license for playing hundreds of Israeli songs on radio or whatever public venue costs several hundreds of dollars per year. A measly cost for a business.

If I had wanted unferetted access to the same number of artists in my home, I'd have to buy thousands of discs, for 15-20$ each.

Why should i pay that much more?

If the pricing is really wrong, then eventually someone will figure that out and drop the price. Right now, piracy really does drive up prices, because it reduces the number of people who would actually buy the album at a lower price (IOW, the optimum sale price increases because those who are still willing to pay, are willing to pay more).

This is not piracy driving the price up, but it is the wish of salespeople to increase profit. They're just abusing those who are willing to pay a high price to their maximum.

If the price drops, say, by a factor of 5, then the market will increase by a huge factor.

[Kuciwalker]

He should be compensated proportionately to that.

But I think that I should cover less of his costs, than say, a radio or a public venue.

The anomaly of radio stations is created by statute, IIRC, through mandatory licensing schemes.

This is not piracy driving the price up, but it is the wish of salespeople to increase profit. They're just abusing those who are willing to pay a high price to their maximum.

It's the same thing. They price albums to bring in maximum revenue, which is what they're supposed to do. If the bottom half of the market drops out, that optimal price increases.

[Sirotnikov]

It's the same thing. They price albums to bring in maximum revenue, which is what they're supposed to do. If the bottom half of the market drops out, that optimal price increases.

Yes but they wrongly attribute the dropping out of half of the market to unwillingness to pay for music at all, instead of rethinking pricing strategies.

They are decreasing their market by over-pricing, and then blame the consumers and let OTHER consumers cover the cost.

This is quite silly.

Were it not an oligioply that set improbable prices, we'd have seen the major labels destroyed in favor of smaller cheaper ones.

[Kuciwalker]

Yes but they wrongly attribute the dropping out of half of the market to unwillingness to pay for music at all, instead of rethinking pricing strategies.

I believe they are correct that most of the pirates wouldn't pay for cheaper music while there's still free music available.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
It is not true that small unknown bands don't attract audiences. I went to a dozen of small unknown bands based on the fact that they had a concert near me and were not very expensive.

I've been to countless gigs with excellent bands and very few people there, and countless gigs with shyte bands and the place is packed.

In over 20 years of playing in bands and watching bands, I am convinced that there is not a great deal of correlation between quality and success. Some good bands make it, but most don't. Most of the bands that do make it are not much good.

If my band had the financial backing, we might have got somewhere a couple of years ago when we spent a month in the top 10 of a major US internet radio sideload chart. We were No 2 one week behind only Avril Lavigne. To maintain the impact though, we would have needed to continue to spend thousands on promotion, which we didn't have.

People happily spend $X on a meal out that lasts 2 hours, but are very unhappy at paying the same $X for an album that can provide 00s of hours of entertainment. A good album, like a good computer game, is one of the best value forms of entertainment on the planet.

Whatever the value of X, and whatever the injustices of the small amount that reaches the artist under many record deals, $0 is not the right amount.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Yes but they wrongly attribute the dropping out of half of the market to unwillingness to pay for music at all, instead of rethinking pricing strategies.

I believe they are correct that most of the pirates wouldn't pay for cheaper music while there's still free music available.

But (at least for germany I can say this) it is a fact that the music industry has agressively pushed the prices upwards during the last 1.5 decades.

In the beginning of the 90s theys increased the prices of LPs by around 30% with the argument that they would have to pay higher prices for switching their production from Vinyl LPs to CDs and that this increase would only be temporary and would be taken back as soon as things normalised.
Of couerse it was never taken back, but instead the prices rose steadily.
In the beginning of the 90s normal prices for a LP (Vinyl or CD) were between 12-20 DM (around 6-10 Euro).
Nowadays prices are located betwen 10 and 20 Euro wirth 10 Euro being considered rather cheap and around 15 Euro being the norm.

I don´t think one can attribute this rise in prices to normal inflation or to music piracy, especially considering the fact that eMule and Co only became a topic since maybe 5 years and the highest rises of music prices hapened during the 90s.
In contrast, with legal offers like from iTunes it is nowadays even cheaper to get music than it was before when there were only CDs.

I for my part would be very reluctant to pay 20 Euro or more for a CD, even if I really like the singer/band. Therefore you will rarely see me buying CDs as soon as they hit the market, but rather then, when there are actions with reduced prices and they can be bought for 5-15 Euros. Aside from this I would occasionally download music from iTunes (Coca Cola has a nice action with giving you 1 iTunes song for every 4 codes from Coke bottles you enter into their Cokefridge homepage, may not be much, but over the times it gave me 80 additional songs I wouldn´t have acquired else).
hta´s everything I would spend on music, aside from the free use of internet radio.
Were music cheaper I would definitely more often buy me new CDs as soon as they get released.

[Kuciwalker]

But (at least for germany I can say this) it is a fact that the music industry has agressively pushed the prices upwards during the last 1.5 decades.

The thing is, suboptimally high pricing hurts them as much as it hurts the consumer. I'm open to the idea that they are pricing things incorrectly, but some of that is due to piracy (and the other part is just a poor business decision, not a good reason to overhaul or ignore copyright).

[Kuciwalker]

I for my part would be very reluctant to pay 20 Euro or more for a CD, even if I really like the singer/band. Therefore you will rarely see me buying CDs as soon as they hit the market, but rather then, when there are actions with reduced prices and they can be bought for 5-15 Euros.

This is a good thing. It allows them to charge higher prices to the people willing to pay more, while also selling the music to people who aren't. It's economically efficient.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

I for my part would be very reluctant to pay 20 Euro or more for a CD, even if I really like the singer/band. Therefore you will rarely see me buying CDs as soon as they hit the market, but rather then, when there are actions with reduced prices and they can be bought for 5-15 Euros.

This is a good thing. It allows them to charge higher prices to the people willing to pay more, while also selling the music to people who aren't. It's economically efficient.

But on the other hand it can result in the trend that, as Siro mentioned, gets falsely interpreted by the music industry as the work of music piracy, i.e.
more and more people begin to think twice of buying new full priced CDs (without necessarily piracing music instead) and either buy reduced CDs, switching to cheap internet alternatives (iTunes and Co) or buying less CDs altogether,
which on the other hand leads to sinking sales of CDs (like it is observed nowadays).

[MikeH]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
I've been to countless gigs with excellent bands and very few people there, and countless gigs with shyte bands and the place is packed.

In over 20 years of playing in bands and watching bands, I am convinced that there is not a great deal of correlation between quality and success. Some good bands make it, but most don't. Most of the bands that do make it are not much good.

I think you need four things to succeed.

1. You have to be good (at least within your chosen genre, eg James Blunt = good at being a dull crooner for bored housewives), any band that makes it will be much better than 99 other similar bands who fail, even if they are still pretty ****. Some bands have a lot of friends who go and see them at first, but who become unpopular very quickly.

2. You have to work your arses off. In reality this means not having a day job, or at most a part time job, being totally broke and spending all your time on the band.

3. You have to be young, because otherwise #2 is too hard, and touring when you have no money behind you is incredibly hard work.

4. You have to be lucky and have your music be what people want to hear at the time you are doing it.

5. You have to understand that even if you 'succeed' you'll be broke. I remember meeting a the bass player from Shed 7 at a party back when they were big, after Going for Gold was a big hit. We were all students and he was the poorest person there.

I think most people fall down on point 2. A few years ago the band I was in was approached by the guy who used to be Soft Cell's manager, he told us we were one of the most exciting things he'd seen for years, thought we could be big in Germany and Japan... so we got in touch with him and it turned out his development people didn't know how to handle us... he left us for a year to develop and then called us to see how we were getting on the day of our last ever gig. D'oh! Even then when I was in my mid 20s I'm not sure I could have made the lifestyle change. Even with my brother's current success I can see that it's bloody hard work for him and he's only 25.

I think it's fair enough, if you want one of the most fun career's out there, and in entertainment, it's going to be a very difficult road.

On the other end of the spectrum, look at those kids in the Arctic Monkeys, they just write loads of great songs, get picked up immediately, write 2 brilliant albums and sell millions.

[Cort Haus]

Reasonable points there, Mike.

There was a time for me, long ago, when boxes 1,2,3, and 5 were all ticked. I spent over 3 years out of work and going at the band full time. I used to traipse around the record labels on foot, preparing and delivering marketing gimmicks. I wrote a contact-management database application to log all the phone calls and chasing. Some of the band even got arrested for flyposting and we were all threatened by a bloke from a 'flyposting firm' for posting on 'his patch'. He came to a gig ready to adminster a beating but liked what he saw and offered to manage us.

During times in work I used to spend every night either rehearsing, gigging or working on promo stuff and spending every spare penny on the band. This went on for years until eventually I said 'enough is enough' and having finally managed to get a job again after a long spell out, I was relieved to finally enjoy the luxury of not sacrificing everything and being able to buy clothes, go on holiday, and afford beer in pubs.

After several years of concentrating on having a normal life the old band reformed, but I wasn't prepared to destroy my life again for it. I wanted to actually enjoy it, which was never possible before. Theoretically, the problem of point (5) - no money even if successful, should be overcome with the potential of the Internet to bypass the middle-men and allow bands to actually see some money from what they sold. Unfortunately, it hasn't turned out this way, and although we were able to recoup via sales some of the thousands we spent ourselves on producing and promoting the album (only possible because I had a decent-paying job to finance it), the emerging pattern of near zero-income from recorded sales makes the business model unworkable in my view - especially for bands that like to rehearse a lot to play tight and sophisticated arrangements.

What we never had, was point (4) - luck.

Even though I wasn't prepared to sacrifice everything in the last line-up, I still sacrificed career development in the job I had - turning down the secure option of a permanent job to allow the flexibility to be doing gigs etc, and eventually got laid off, and am still suffering from this.

So, having compromised my life one-way-and-another for nearly 20 years, I get a bit sick of people saying "you should expect to live and die poor" just to excuse their own desire to not pay musicians for their music.

[MikeH]

I think often people think that everyone making music that appears on the radio is making a fortune, when often they are pretty broke and scraping by. If a 4 person band sells 250k albums they'll only earn a few grand per band member for what is effectively a full years work.

On the plus side, in between all the boring crap you get the odd moments when you can actually write music, or play to people which is awesome.