The RIAA Armageddon has begun

i mean clearly you're going to do your best to misinterpret a pretty simple concept in order to get more lame digs on me, what's the point of arguing if you don't understand why you can't stream a pancake

Oh, I get it, he's assuming away input costs. OK. But then he's also assuming away opportunity costs, e.g., an artist saying, "Well, I could record this new song or album, but given that a bunch of knobs on the internet are just going to download it without paying, I could also just take an extra shift at the print shop and actually make money."

xp i'm not talking about transferring data, i'm just talking about copying it.

what is this i don't even

I can stream a pancake but I have to eat it first

Transferring is copying. Copying is transferring. Opportunity costs are real costs. Every MB of a hard drive taken up by music you copied from CDs at the library is an MB that can't be allotted to something else. This is simple shit, here.

this thread is a lot more fun after i gave up caring and just decided to watch shakey and frogbs and iatee circle around each in a festive dance of faulty logic and useless generalizations

― Planned Perrintweet (some dude), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 6:47 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not talking about transferring data, i'm just talking about copying it.

god this is so fucking stupid. it's like you think the only point at which money was required in the music industry is at the point of sale of a physical product. But when you bought an album you weren't just paying for the physical costs of pressing and distributing an album, you were paying for the engineers, for the studio time, for the gear used, for the time the artist spent writing and creating the material, for the promotional costs, etc etc. This is because the purchase of the physical product was the most reliable point in the chain of music created -> you listening to it from which to extract financial compensation. Now that that's gone, there is NO point in the chain through which the musician can financially recoup their expenses for creating a piece of recorded work.

xp

I might use the time to finally get Spotify.

I can't really roll with Spotify except as a previewing service for what I might wanna buy/which tracks I wanna cherry-pick. Spotify just sounds really bad a lot of the time. Like markedly worse than a 192 bit MP3. I think it might be a label by label thing in how they supply their digital files or something. Listen to for ex 'My Old School' on Spotify. The backing singers sound really really weird. Same for lots of classical music and film scores on there.

(disregard the above if the paid service gives you a higher stream quality or w/e)

Transferring is copying. Copying is transferring. Opportunity costs are real costs. Every MB of a hard drive taken up by music you copied from CDs at the library is an MB that can't be allotted to something else. This is simple shit, here.

yeah I already got it. it doesn't *literally* cost nothing but it's not exactly related to the initial cost of production. with a physical good, the cost to buy is very related to the cost of production. whether you spend $200 or $2000000 on producing an album it's going to cost the same amount to distribute a copy to someone else. got it?

But then he's also assuming away opportunity costs, e.g., an artist saying, "Well, I could record this new song or album, but given that a bunch of knobs on the internet are just going to download it without paying, I could also just take an extra shift at the print shop and actually make money."

exactly. I'm not saying this is going away. I never said that artists don't have to spend money to make recordings. Just that the analogy doesn't make sense and we've all bagged on the RIAA for years and years for assuming it does.

I don't bother with spotify because - like EVERY other streaming service before it - it's catalog is woefully incomplete. and yeah then there is the payment thing.

xp

about half of my pre-iPod listening time was on cassettes and car radios so i'd be totally fronting if i said i ever think about or mind the fidelity or mp3s or streams, even if i notice the difference.

with a physical good, the cost to buy is very related to the cost of production.

lol in what universe

some dude OTM

like I get that's how it's supposed to work in Econ Theory 101 but in the real world that is just not the case

xp

god this is so fucking stupid. it's like you think the only point at which money was required in the music industry is at the point of sale of a physical product.

yeah I stopped reading here because you're putting a lot of words in my mouth. you really think I don't know it takes money to create the music? what I'm saying is there's a difference between a product that costs you $5 to make and distribute vs. a product that costs $10000 to make but $0 (okay, a few cents) to distribute. say you sell each for $10. if Product A sells 50,000 but you get 50,000 stolen, you broke even and that sucks. if you sell 50,000 of Product B then you made $40,000 regardless of how many are stolen. get it?

*sigh*

backing away slowly

IMO bitching about a streaming service having an incomplete catalog makes absolutely no sense; would you expect a single record label to release every album you've ever wanted to hear, from the past to the present? If not, why would you expect that of a streaming service? Even paid television subdivides into packages and different carriers may offer different channels. Neither Hulu nor Netflix has every television show or movie ever made available for physical rental, let alone download. It's a wholly unrealistic expectation; the question shouldn't be "do they have EVERYTHING?", it should be "do I like enough of what they have?"

*sigh*

backing away slowly

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 2:06 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is my favorite part of the festive dance!

yeah well that answer (in my case) is no

xp

lol some dude

*sigh*

backing away slowly

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 1:06 PM

lol, this was me yesterday on the Zappa thread when he showed up

xp hahaha

dude WmC you were bitching about something I *didn't even write*! cmon man

I don't get it why do people constantly mock the RIAA for using this type of bad logic yet champion our posters around here that do the same? This place is weird

You instantly misread my criticism of the quote you pulled by that critic, and in general your posts have the logical and rhetorical rigor of a pile of wet spaghetti, so there was no need for me to carry on with you in that thread, and the same thing is happening here. xp

http://www.v-r-a.org/ppp/MJFrog/MJF1.gif

when I want to listen to obscurities I don't own I sequence a bunch of YouTube clips together. Is it any worse than paying for Spotify?

yeah WmC I admit that part you pointed out might imply something you didn't like but I don't see how A) asking you to read the whole fucking thing or B) asking why you're obsessing over such a minor point represents "the logical and rhetorical rigor of a pile of wet spaghetti"

but seriously if you have anything to say w/r/t the similarity of the economics of physical and digital goods, I'm all ears, otherwise I'm glad you felt the need to come on this thread just to be a prick about an unrelated topic

when I want to listen to obscurities I don't own

Acts that are not on Spotify obscurities like Royal Trux and De La Soul and Can ...?

when I want to listen to obscurities I don't own I sequence a bunch of YouTube clips together. Is it any worse than paying for Spotify?

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 11:20 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the difference is you can pretend you own it a little better w/ spotify.

also you can play a whole album without clicking in between each song to find the best version.

genuine q: do artists get royalty from Youtube plays? At least Spotify pays a royalty, however pitiful that might be.

"royalties" in first sentence above obv

genuine q: do artists get royalty from Youtube plays?

If the uploader "claims" the video, they get paid when it plays.

okay, thanks.

well how much do they really make? I mean I read that Rebecca Black apparently made a ton of $$$ but how much does your average say Field Music-level band made?

ultimately this seems like the best way to pay artists (in addition to album sales, which I don't think will go away completely) but I'm guessing Spotify ad revenue is just a drop in the bucket (not that iTunes pays them much more!)

this is out of left field but i keep thinking about the power of the idea that carrier is different from content. i think it's basically what made the record industry possible and now it's what is killing the record industry. and it's like, a lie. carrier just gets endlessly outsourced and fractured into new industries and you pay for it w/ your phone bill or whatever. more fingers in the pie, less for everyone? idk.

anyway i'm with the fidelity/physical object geeks for the most part. there still isn't a way to get cassette-quality music for free. if there was, i'd be all over that.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

well how much do they really make? I mean I read that Rebecca Black apparently made a ton of $$$ but how much does your average say Field Music-level band made?

― frogbs, Tuesday, June 19, 2012 2:41 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

note these numbers:

By March 21, 2011, the "Friday" music video had been viewed more than 30 million times on YouTube.[50] Forbes estimated that as of that date, Black and ARK Music had earned $20,000 from YouTube's revenue-sharing program,[51] and Billboard estimated iTunes sales of approximately 43,000 copies, roughly equivalent to $26,700 in royalties.[52]

40k in iTunes sales yielded roughly the same amount of money as 30 million YouTube views, so the ratio is roughly 1000 to 1 in terms of iTunes vs. YouTube

i think it's funny that everyone became such an expert about major label contracts, royalty rates, merch sales, touring income, and like ~the nature of what ownership of information even is, man~ right about the time they could download a music for free

well how much do they really make?

I don't have hard numbers in front of me (and wouldn't share them if I did), but where I work, YouTube streams generate a significant revenue stream. To give you an example, Nickelback's video for "When We Stand Together" has been viewed over 56 million times. Even if we get paid a tenth of a penny a play, that's a lot of money.

not really. you think that's a fair price? a tenth of a penny? for one play?

$56,000 isn't a lot of money?

it is nickelback though

woah i didn't know the nickelback dude posted here

yeah i mean, a dollar for every thousand views, or a thousand dollars for every million views, that seems pretty decent.

we are talking, after all, about a site where you can click it over and over to up your views, and nobody pays to watch anything. advertising can only generate so much revenue.

woah i didn't know the nickelback dude posted here

I run Roadrunner Records' website.

the fact that the artist gets only 9 cents per iTunes download is ridiculous

...if you don't mind my asking, how many employees are left at Roadrunner now anyway?

where did that statistic come from? (xpost)