Digital Music Downloads Too Expensive? 274
threeofnine writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article written by a copyright and technology lawyer asking if we are paying too much for digital downloads. From the article: 'Parallel imports are unavailable in the Australian digital market, however. Australian consumers cannot purchase downloads from iTunes or Wal-Mart in the US, which are often cheaper than downloads available here, without a US-issued credit card. And restrictive licensing conditions imposed by copyright owners also limit the sale of digital downloads across international borders. For both reasons Australian consumers miss out. And retailers cannot buy downloads from overseas and resell them here, even if it is worthwhile for them to do so. In a recent analysis, the prices of Australian-made CDs of artists such as Bon Jovi, REM and Robbie Williams were compared to those of legal parallel imports. It was found that the local product was as much as 300 per cent more expensive.'"
selling music by the meg? (Score:4, Interesting)
iTunes is too expensive
Torrents have no Borders (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it any surprise that the Australians are abandoning the commercial ship and are now sailing from the Pirate Bay? [thepiratebay.org]
You aussies ain't missing a thing (Score:1, Interesting)
My Unpopular Opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
Are record companies greedy and evil? You betcha.
Are they gouging customers and musicians both? Right-o.
Has everyone's perception of value been altered by p2p downloads, cracked software and other Internet-rendered amenities?
Without a doubt.
-1 Flamebait.
Re:I find Bittorrent and Sharaza....... (Score:5, Interesting)
By paying for music I am propping up an anachronistic distributing chain whose business practices I take issue with. Which, for me, is more of an issue than violating a business friendly law, or depriving the artist of the miniscule cut of the sale he'd be receiving.
For me something that is mutually beneficial would support both the artists and the consumer; paying for music ain't. I'd rather see no one pay for music and watch the record labels go down in flames (artists can still make money touring), so that when I do want to buy an album I can know that the artist is getting a reasonable cut of the sale.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Too expensive? I don't think so... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Music has no absolute value (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cross Border downloading (Score:3, Interesting)
Not at all. Price is determined by how much people are willing to pay.
In a truly competitive commodity market, price will approach the cost of goods sold, but that is not a result of determining price by tacking on some profit to the COGS -- it is a result of needing to underprice your competition while maintaining profitability.
Note, however, that music is not a commodity good -- and therefore price will not necessarily approach the COGS even if the market were competitive. The determinant of price for music is not-so-simply a maximization of (copies sold)*(price), especially since the COGS of digital music is near zero. In other words, whatever the market will bear.
If five suckers pay $30 for an album, the label profits more than if twenty reasonable people pay $5 for that same album. The real problem, then, is the stupidity of people who willingly pay too much and screw it up for the rest of us.
Re:Too expensive? I don't think so... (Score:5, Interesting)
This point should be stressed: "There is no private right of action for violations of customs law." Thus, the RIAA still could not come after an Allofmp3 user directly.
The RIAA is going ballistic over allofmp3. But they are trying to handle it via the governments involved, not directly with the users. Considering that the RIAA has no problem suing customers, I find that very informative.
My guess is that the RIAA does not want to risk an unfavorable ruling regarding 17 U.S.C. 602(a)(2). Can you imagine if that occurred? Suddenly downloaded music from foreign servers, even on P2P, would not be infringement. The shit would really hit the fan.
Thus, the RIAA's first step is to get Russia to shut the site down but pressuring the US government. When and if that fails I'd guess that they'll have Congress amend 17 U.S.C. 602(a)(2) to specify that it does not apply to downloaded music. Heck, their probably already working on that! Once that is amended, then they'll start suing Allofmp3 users.
YRO? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Aussies are being stuffed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Music has no absolute value (Score:3, Interesting)
Now you bring up a second market that sells at a lower price but carries additional risk. Which some users percieve as having less cost than $1. This is the same as saying that because I can buy a DVD player from a crackhead for $20 there is not a market in legitimately traded DVD players. It's still the same market there's just a discount associated with the risk bundled in the grey (or black) market transactions. People can evaluate the risk and potential cost and choose to pay more with no risk or less with an element of risk bundled in. The risk isn't entirely being sued, its also the risk of poor data quality (think if the whole file was just goatse images), which is non-zero.
I think what you meant was that a large portion of music customers price those risks at well below a dollar, but no one really knows what the volume is on pirated sites (I'd be nothing more than guessing that P2P distributes far more songs than iTunes).
Even if the grey market were larger, it seems likely that a very large portion of sub $1 demand is less elastic than you appear to be projecting. The credit card companies probably take at least a dime, and if 90% of the grey market values their downloads at less than a dime (in percieved risk reduction), lowering prices to 11 cents would greatly reduce total revenues due to the price reductions more than offseting the increasing volume.
Re:Too expensive? I don't think so... (Score:1, Interesting)
I normally don't buy music in CD form, it's just not worth the price to me (student) since I don't have a lot of spare cash to throw around. So my alternatives are:
1. Don't buy music. Artists get nothing, I get nothing, and don't acquire a taste for a lot of music.
2. Download music from AllofMp3. Artists get an insignificant amount or nothing, I get music. I also grow to like a lot of bands, and when I'm out of school and making money, I will financially support these bands.
Option 2 is far better from my point of view.
Re:I find Bittorrent and Sharaza....... (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought The Arrogant Worms latest album Beige online for less than the CD online price, it was $1CAN a song.
Check out http://www.huntershack.org/nucleus/index.php?item
Re:both sides of their mouths. (Score:4, Interesting)
I can confirm for a solid fact that this is extremely true. I can have on-demand CD's printed off Lulu for $5.75 a pop. On-demand printing is proportionally 150% or more expensive than mass-produced printing, which I also know by comparing what it costs to print off my book versus what a trade paperback goes for in the store. So imagine what the real per-unit cost of a CD is, factoring in just about everything else (and the fact that the record companies' "advance" to the band usually deducts all of the costs of recording the actual music), it is probably below $3.00, and very likely below $2.00. We're talking a ballpark markup of about 1,000%
Re:OT: Your sig... (Score:3, Interesting)
How many years has it been since you last used Linux?
I've done several kernel updates, and there was no recompiling anything. Just a simple apt-get install linux-image-2.6.whatever does the job, and even updates GRUB by adding the appropriate entries for the new kernel.
Granted, a kernel update does indeed require a reboot to take effect. But that's a good idea anyway, just to make sure nothing went wrong. And if it does break something, then I can always select the previous kernel to boot when the GRUB screen comes up.
Re:YES! (Score:2, Interesting)
Where you got yourself in trouble was mentioning Napster and Metalica. Metalica didn't bring about the downfall of easy P2P (and with the current protocols and clients: uTorrent, eMule, etc), its still not that hard to steal music, if you want too.
Metalica sued because there was unfinished studio recordings being swapped around, and to be honest, its not difficult to see where they're coming from in wanting that material yanked.
Think of it like a sex tape or something else similarly embarassing -- you sure as hell wouldn't want something like that viewable to the world.
Re:both sides of their mouths. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's difficult to find actual data about what the real breakdown of the cost of a CD is, since anything on the internet is either written by rabidly pro- or anti-RIAA people, but one list I found says:
- Profit to label - $0.59
- Pressing album and printing booklet - $0.75
- Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers - $0.85
- Signing act and producing record - $1.08
- Royalties to artist and songwriter - $1.99
- Marketing and promotion - $2.15
- Company overhead, distribution, and shipping - $3.34
- Retail markup - $6.23
Other sources say that the label gets more -- depending on the source, somewhere up to about 25% of the total price. But it certainly is not the 90% that you seem to think it is.