Letters to the Editor
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new way of doing things
this article challenges us to do something a little risky; try out a whole new way of purchasing music. amazon's setup sounds competitive and i will try it out. something even crazier that i do sometimes is to actually leave my computer, walk out of the house, get on my bicycle, and go to a real physical (and locally-owned) music store to buy something called a "CD".
weird!
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But it is all still MP3
I know I'm just an old fart. But I rarely use iTunes and I will rarely use Amazon in this way. Why? Because I actually enjoy music and what the musicians put in to crafting it so I don't want to lose fidelity with MP3 compression.
I do order CDs from Amazon and rip them myself to a lossless format. Yes if I'm in the gym and listening to an iPod on OK headphones I'm not going to notice the difference, but listening at home over a good amp and speakers I will notice and someday you might also but you'll mostly have some crappy MP3 that you swore sounded the same until you sprang for some good equipment. Also with the CD you have a hardcopy backup (granted that may degrade in 15 years).
I understand the ease of MP3 but it just seems a shame how willing people are to sacrifice quality for that 'immediate' gratification.
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Re: Encoding
Worried about sound quality? MP3 encoding is only part of the story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Studio techs increase loudness in the mastering process and thus gum up the original recording. So, you take a track that has been remastered to sound louder so it will seem better on battery powered players, then chop out even more of the information...yeah, it's a bad cycle.
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If only it was music heaven!
Unfortunately, I have a strong addiction to imports that aren't terribly popular in the US. Sometimes they're available via iTunes and then I'm in heaven because I can pay reasonable prices for something I enjoy.
Many times, alas, I have to buy CDs for twice their normal cost plus shipping, and then I wonder what ties these songs up. Contracts with record companies or distributors? Or are some just ignorant of how the internet has expanded their potential markets? Because languages are no longer limited to their former geographical boundaries, and for a person who speaks something not native to their own country, good music is a real delight.
I'm not picky about the difference between MP3 and a CD. I would just like to not have to budget quite so strictly for new music when it can normally be had for a dollar a song, and a quick scan of Amazon's service shows that this is still a pipe dream for me in most cases.
Maybe over time things will get better, and maybe Amazon's service will hasten that time. I can hope so, anyway! But my music heaven isn't perfect sound quality, it's affordable, genuinely global access to everything, and we still haven't reached that yet.
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I...
I feel the same way about iTunes.
I try not to buy much of anything there except maybe a single song from an album that I'm interested in. If I like that song, I usually go out and buy the CD and then over write the iTunes version.
Yes, it is a waste of money in that I already bought a song from the CD but I view it as 'damaged' in some psychic/cosmic way.
I somehow accumulated several iTunes accounts and found out that some of the earlier purchases from iTunes couldn't be played anymore on my iMac or ipod. I feel foolish but not for forgetting the account (which I really can't remember) but for paying for music from a site that would deny me the right to listen to the tracks on my own computer. Is it more stupid to buy heavily restricted music or to forget a username/password. I think the former.
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Apple's cut
@1969L46 re Apple gets 2x as much as the artist--you asked "Do you have any sources for that breakdown in price? If that breakdown is correct, should Apple really be getting twice the cut that the artists do?"
Check out this article: http://www.reuters.com/article/musicNews/idUSL2488079220070924
and this one: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/09/24/vivendi-airs-grievances-over-apples-indecent-proposal
It's funny that you wonder why Apple should get 2x as much as the artist but have no problem with the label geting 7x as much.
You also say: "Also, Rhapsody was able to charge $0.89/track for the last 5 years or so"
If you want to own any of the music (and wouldn't you want to own music you like) it's not really .89 because you have to pay for your subscription on top of it. That subsidizes the price doesn't it. And I'd really like to know what the breakdown is for the artist in this business model. That's a constant revenue stream for the company but does the artist get compensated?...something tells me no...but I'm not sure. If you know please educate me.
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God dammit, anyone who pays to download music is a chump
Just keep telling yourself that you're doing the 'morally right thing' by supporting megalomaniacal proprietary corporations like Apple or Amazon. Your taskmasters at the RIAA will be pleased.
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of course there are royalties on subscription tracks
Of course Rhapsody has to pay a fee for their subscription services. Any commercial outfit has to pay royalties when it uses copyrighted material. In fact, the increase in royalty rates caused a big stink: (from USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2002-07-21-radio_x.htm)
On June 20, a copyright appeals board set a rate of seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener. For many stations, run by music fans for music fans, that works out to thousands of dollars more than they make.
That's in addition to royalties paid to publishing houses - i.e. the artists. But there is also the overhead of running a subscription that is more than that for a store front. I expect that bandwidth costs are higher for a subscription service and the DRM management is tougher particularly when transfering subscription tracks to a player (the mechanism for making tracks expire with membership without accidentally causing legit tracks to expire is more tricky than a sale). Even if the subscriptions completely subsidized the track purchase prices, that says less about the record companies trying to screw Apple than it does about Apple's business model for iTunes vs. a subscription-subsidized service.
My dig about Apple's cut vs. the artists' cut was to point out that someone provided figures showing that Apple wasn't getting as much per sale as the record companies, but the data showed that Apple is making more per sale than the artists, a common complaint about the recording industry. If the record companies are screwing the artists because they take a bigger cut than the artists on sales, Apple is screwing them too. It's just a fight between who gets to do the lion's share of screwing the artist. On who gets the lions share, Apple is a distributor while the record company is the producer who incurs costs for scouting, signing, recording, touring, and legally representing artists - costs Apple does not incur directly.