aka, you can become an insider to view techdirt content early.
no matter what you do -- other than pirate it -- and no matter how much you want to pay, you cannot view a dvd of a movie the same day it was released in the theater.
it's certainly one of the reasons i refuse -- absolutely refuse -- to buy riaa-backed music.
i say this vehemently: to hell the riaa.
sure, i pay more for a cd because of it. but i would rather hand a $20 bill to the guy (for his burned cd no less) who just played a small concert of his own inspired-by-gershwin music. of which, i promptly took home and ripped all the tracks to mp3.
i'd rather give money to musicians than a useless suit.
"It is the reason Techdirt is so funny to read, so many people flailing about yelling "free this" and "free that" and nobody thinking past the ends of their noses as to how it would really work in the long run."
heh. funny. i'm pretty sure that music and musicians have existed for millennia without the riaa. that strikes me as a substantially longer "long run" than the ~55 years the riaa has been 'round.
the best part? the riaa will eventually go away whether you think techdirt is funny or not.
not to mention that google isn't in the content business -- they're in the indexing business.
i repeat: google does not make and sell content.
they don't even sell other people's content. they sell algorithmically indexed associations linking disparate 3rd party producers' content. (search, gmail, maps, adsense, book search, etc.)
meaning, they're the middle-man. they point them over there to them over yonder and take a cut for the referral. the more hook-ups they can make, the more money they bring in.
"better lucky than good" is really a fact of life. and that's basically how i sum up cuban's success. i'm sure he's a just-fine business man because it does indeed take skill to capitalize on right-place-right-time opportunities, but just because he's rich, doesn't make him a "thought leader."
he's not really the type of person i'd take advice from.
however, take marc andreessen as the counter example. compare his wikipedia page with mark cuban's. who do you think is good and who do you think is just lucky?
alright, alright. i think i'm about done beating up on defenseless folks and their silly comments. i'll stop bullying and making fun of them now, mike.
"m3mnoch, in your carpenter example, did you take into account the time it takes to record an album. You, time when there is no revenue generated. So it's okay to spend a year recording music while not getting paid, but the minute music is being sold so the musicians make money while their not working, it's a problem?"
wait. you think they spend a year in the studio? do you have any idea how much a year of studio time would cost?
song writing can take days to years, for sure. recording tho? it's in and out in a week or less.
"m3mnoch, the problem with your carpenter argument is a carpenter works for a specific person or company, and provides them with a service."
i forgot. can you remind me? when bands sign a contract with a label, who does the artist work for?
if you don't think it's the label, you should explain that to prince... er... i mean the artist formerly known as prince. or. now known, but was formerly known. or something.
"m3mnoch, how is music not a product? It's a form of entertainment. You listen to it to be entertained. There, the artist provided a service, entertaining you, yet you don't think the artist should e compensated for that?"
so, aside from you actually calling it a "service" yourself, here:
anonymous coward, how is the opera not a product. it's a form of entertainment. you listen to it to be entertained. there, the artist provided a service, entertaining you, yet you don't think the artist should e compensated for that?
nah. it's not me who's clueless. you "think" you have a handle on it. but, i mean, look at your own example.
if you 100,000 people pay a performer $1 each, who pays the song writer? who pays the song recorder?
not "the people."
the performer does. and none of that changes whether the performer is selling cds or tickets. the difference is the performer actually has to "work" for a living instead of work for a week.
maybe you think a week's work is worth $100,000, but the market doesn't.
prior to the 20th century, when did a musical performer only have to work one week a year and still eat? (you said yourself they're not writing songs... all they have to do is sing) it's not pirating music that's the anomaly here. it's trying to sell something as a product that's not a product that's broken.
you tell that carpenter that he's already built a house. why does he need to keep building houses to get paid? you tell the waitress that she's already served coffee for the day. why does she need to come back and do it tomorrow to get paid?
that's crazy talk!
performers are just that -- performers. they are, by nature, work by the hour. performance is not a product, it's a service.
welcome to the service industry, musicians. you don't work, you don't get paid.
"You don't get a bulk discount, and if you do, it's up to the seller, NOT you."
nope. it has nothing to do with the seller. i can try all day long to sell a granny smith apple for something silly like $10 million. there's not a person in the world who'll buy it.
storage size absolutely has to do with the price of music.
lemme explain.
why do you even need that much storage for your music? the answer? glut. if there wasn't so much glut -- so many choices -- on what to listen to, we'd only need a couple hundred megs of space for our music.
here's the real problem the riaa is grappling with: they no longer matter.
yeah, that's pretty non-profound on a bunch of levels, but it really boils down to the fact that they are not the gatekeepers anymore. they are not the taste-makers anymore. in this day and age, anyone -- and i mean absolutely anyone -- can become a "musician." there are so many socially relevant sharing mechanisms out there that having a bottleneck to "good music" just doesn't make any sense at all.
what's even worse for the riaa is, using the standard ugc upside-down pyramid, 1 out of about 100 of these new musicians is actually going to be good. look at it from their point of view. if suddenly, the music industry went from a metered "couple hundred" acts a year coming out to %1 of 85,000,000 people who play musical instruments in the united states (according to the international music products association) can self-promote and self-publish? that goes from something in the neighborhood of 285 acts to 850,000 acts -- in the u.s. alone. pure cacophony.
the only economy that musically makes any sense is the attention economy. there are soooooo many bands out there -- good bands -- that if you have any barrier to your music? well. people just throw you away and move on to the next song in their thousands-more-bands-because-their-player-holds-that-many queue. and you, as a musician, will never be heard. there is no more "captive audience" nonsense for the music industry to push music at.
so, to recap, why does huge storage mean $1 a song isn't relevant anymore?
1) digitizing makes music easier to make and distribute now than ever before.
2) which means more musicians are able to publish than ever before.
3) which means the riaa isn't the bottleneck anymore.
4) which means the riaa isn't the gatekeeper and taste-maker anymore.
5) which means there's a huge glut of new music to discover.
6) which means you need huge storage to store and sort this glut.
7) which means you will have thousands of hours of music but still only 24 hours in a day.
8) which means any barrier at all between you and the music is too much barrier.
9) which means if someone has to pay $1 before they hear your song, they won't hear it.
ergo, because of the huge storage, if you're charging a dollar for a song, nobody will listen to your music.
RSS
Twitter
Re: Wrong approach (as m3mnoch)
"MG Siegler's TechCrunch"
now that's funny.
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: RTB (as m3mnoch)
aka, you can become an insider to view techdirt content early.
no matter what you do -- other than pirate it -- and no matter how much you want to pay, you cannot view a dvd of a movie the same day it was released in the theater.
this is the much-vaunted "reason to buy."
m3mnoch.
just don't buy their music (as m3mnoch)
it's certainly one of the reasons i refuse -- absolutely refuse -- to buy riaa-backed music.
i say this vehemently: to hell the riaa.
sure, i pay more for a cd because of it. but i would rather hand a $20 bill to the guy (for his burned cd no less) who just played a small concert of his own inspired-by-gershwin music. of which, i promptly took home and ripped all the tracks to mp3.
i'd rather give money to musicians than a useless suit.
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: Techdirt's Very Existance (as m3mnoch)
say what?
so, by this rationale, the declaration of independence is damn near worthless?
bzzzzzt -- wrong.
idea != property. music != property. the point was not missed.
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: Yeah, that's about right. (as m3mnoch)
"It is the reason Techdirt is so funny to read, so many people flailing about yelling "free this" and "free that" and nobody thinking past the ends of their noses as to how it would really work in the long run."
heh. funny. i'm pretty sure that music and musicians have existed for millennia without the riaa. that strikes me as a substantially longer "long run" than the ~55 years the riaa has been 'round.
the best part? the riaa will eventually go away whether you think techdirt is funny or not.
m3mnoch.
The Crystal Ball (as m3mnoch)
btw, mike. i just wanted you to know -- i LOVE the crystal ball.
http://www.techdirt.com/rtb.php?tid=200
... makes me feel all special and stuff.
m3mnoch.
no links (as m3mnoch)
hrm. i just noticed -- osnos's article doesn't have a single link throughout.
m3mnoch.
content? no. (as m3mnoch)
not to mention that google isn't in the content business -- they're in the indexing business.
i repeat: google does not make and sell content.
they don't even sell other people's content. they sell algorithmically indexed associations linking disparate 3rd party producers' content. (search, gmail, maps, adsense, book search, etc.)
meaning, they're the middle-man. they point them over there to them over yonder and take a cut for the referral. the more hook-ups they can make, the more money they bring in.
you know -- kinda like a digital pimp.
m3mnoch.
better lucky than good (as m3mnoch)
"better lucky than good" is really a fact of life. and that's basically how i sum up cuban's success. i'm sure he's a just-fine business man because it does indeed take skill to capitalize on right-place-right-time opportunities, but just because he's rich, doesn't make him a "thought leader."
he's not really the type of person i'd take advice from.
however, take marc andreessen as the counter example. compare his wikipedia page with mark cuban's. who do you think is good and who do you think is just lucky?
m3mnoch.
Re: Wow (as m3mnoch)
omg. that was the funniest thing i have seen all day.
dark helmet win.
m3mnoch.
beating up on the defenseless (as m3mnoch)
alright, alright. i think i'm about done beating up on defenseless folks and their silly comments. i'll stop bullying and making fun of them now, mike.
m3mnoch.
Re: (as m3mnoch)
"m3mnoch, in your carpenter example, did you take into account the time it takes to record an album. You, time when there is no revenue generated. So it's okay to spend a year recording music while not getting paid, but the minute music is being sold so the musicians make money while their not working, it's a problem?"
wait. you think they spend a year in the studio? do you have any idea how much a year of studio time would cost?
song writing can take days to years, for sure. recording tho? it's in and out in a week or less.
m3mnoch.
Re: (as m3mnoch)
"m3mnoch, the problem with your carpenter argument is a carpenter works for a specific person or company, and provides them with a service."
i forgot. can you remind me? when bands sign a contract with a label, who does the artist work for?
if you don't think it's the label, you should explain that to prince... er... i mean the artist formerly known as prince. or. now known, but was formerly known. or something.
m3mnoch.
Re: (as m3mnoch)
heh.
"m3mnoch, how is music not a product? It's a form of entertainment. You listen to it to be entertained. There, the artist provided a service, entertaining you, yet you don't think the artist should e compensated for that?"
so, aside from you actually calling it a "service" yourself, here:
anonymous coward, how is the opera not a product. it's a form of entertainment. you listen to it to be entertained. there, the artist provided a service, entertaining you, yet you don't think the artist should e compensated for that?
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Something Missing... (as m3mnoch)
nah. it's not me who's clueless. you "think" you have a handle on it. but, i mean, look at your own example.
if you 100,000 people pay a performer $1 each, who pays the song writer? who pays the song recorder?
not "the people."
the performer does. and none of that changes whether the performer is selling cds or tickets. the difference is the performer actually has to "work" for a living instead of work for a week.
maybe you think a week's work is worth $100,000, but the market doesn't.
prior to the 20th century, when did a musical performer only have to work one week a year and still eat? (you said yourself they're not writing songs... all they have to do is sing) it's not pirating music that's the anomaly here. it's trying to sell something as a product that's not a product that's broken.
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Something Missing... (as m3mnoch)
totally.
you tell that carpenter that he's already built a house. why does he need to keep building houses to get paid? you tell the waitress that she's already served coffee for the day. why does she need to come back and do it tomorrow to get paid?
that's crazy talk!
performers are just that -- performers. they are, by nature, work by the hour. performance is not a product, it's a service.
welcome to the service industry, musicians. you don't work, you don't get paid.
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: Re: RE: Something Missing... (as m3mnoch)
"You are requiring them to do extra work to make a living."
hahhahahahhahah...
holy crap! work to get paid!?!?! perish the thought!
...lord, that's funny.
m3mnoch.
Re: Re: Re: (as m3mnoch)
"You don't get a bulk discount, and if you do, it's up to the seller, NOT you."
nope. it has nothing to do with the seller. i can try all day long to sell a granny smith apple for something silly like $10 million. there's not a person in the world who'll buy it.
sellers don't control pricing. the market does.
m3mnoch.
Re: (as m3mnoch)
"Again, you bring up outside factors. These factors may have a significant impact on price, but the storage capacity issue one is weak."
hrm.
well. maybe you can do me a favor. can you explain to me why anyone buys mp3 players with 80 gigs of space?
if your answer has anything to do with "that's how much music they have" -- regardless of how they acquired it, then you just proved my point.
m3mnoch.
it makes perfect sense (as m3mnoch)
storage size absolutely has to do with the price of music.
lemme explain.
why do you even need that much storage for your music? the answer? glut. if there wasn't so much glut -- so many choices -- on what to listen to, we'd only need a couple hundred megs of space for our music.
here's the real problem the riaa is grappling with: they no longer matter.
yeah, that's pretty non-profound on a bunch of levels, but it really boils down to the fact that they are not the gatekeepers anymore. they are not the taste-makers anymore. in this day and age, anyone -- and i mean absolutely anyone -- can become a "musician." there are so many socially relevant sharing mechanisms out there that having a bottleneck to "good music" just doesn't make any sense at all.
what's even worse for the riaa is, using the standard ugc upside-down pyramid, 1 out of about 100 of these new musicians is actually going to be good. look at it from their point of view. if suddenly, the music industry went from a metered "couple hundred" acts a year coming out to %1 of 85,000,000 people who play musical instruments in the united states (according to the international music products association) can self-promote and self-publish? that goes from something in the neighborhood of 285 acts to 850,000 acts -- in the u.s. alone. pure cacophony.
the only economy that musically makes any sense is the attention economy. there are soooooo many bands out there -- good bands -- that if you have any barrier to your music? well. people just throw you away and move on to the next song in their thousands-more-bands-because-their-player-holds-that-many queue. and you, as a musician, will never be heard. there is no more "captive audience" nonsense for the music industry to push music at.
so, to recap, why does huge storage mean $1 a song isn't relevant anymore?
1) digitizing makes music easier to make and distribute now than ever before.
2) which means more musicians are able to publish than ever before.
3) which means the riaa isn't the bottleneck anymore.
4) which means the riaa isn't the gatekeeper and taste-maker anymore.
5) which means there's a huge glut of new music to discover.
6) which means you need huge storage to store and sort this glut.
7) which means you will have thousands of hours of music but still only 24 hours in a day.
8) which means any barrier at all between you and the music is too much barrier.
9) which means if someone has to pay $1 before they hear your song, they won't hear it.
ergo, because of the huge storage, if you're charging a dollar for a song, nobody will listen to your music.
m3mnoch.