Posts by jon_knox
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as much maligned as the label part of it is its bloody hard work, apparently quite thankless sometimes
I don't doubt this. But there are actually plenty of jobs which are pretty or entirely thankless....you'll clean my toilet/remove my rubbish and be grateful you have a job.
Plenty of other industries where they have a physical product and the retailer and intermediaries take the lion's share of profits for merely facilitating the marketplace. Horticulture and farming for example. Talk to farmers about how much they get for a lamb and compare that to the price that lamb retails for. Out of uni I did a stint working an engineering supplies distributor. Our cost to suggested retail price was roughly a factor of 10.
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Meh... This out: "I don't mean to be rude, but I was in the middle of having sexual intercourse. If I'm away for too long, he's going to finish himself off and go to sleep. Bye."
shit you're really don't want to take some of this stuff out of context....even if you do know what the context is, some of this stuff is probably graphic enough to jolt the context right out of you. (where's Sacha?...she seems to be good on overly graphic threads).
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Online store takes a smaller cut
Sorry this should read "the risk-reward model suggestes that online stores should be taking a smaller cut".
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A lot of this stuff, says to me that the market part of the chain is the part that has been broken, as much as anything by the internet.
It's about building a preference for your product in the market and the willingness to pay. It seems that for the moment it is so much easier to go down the illegitimate route rather than the legitimate route. I spent an hour unsuccessfully trying to buy a track last week, that I could get via bittorent in 5 minutes. The economics of that transaction do not add up at all. Trying to spend an hour of my time to spend $2 for a track. If the legitimate route can be made to appeal, then that's the better mechanism for me.
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ere's some figures for you. (approx for ease)
Cool...I've been waiting for this info.
if you sell a cd in a store for $29. (store keeps $12)
$17 of that goes to the distributor, (distributor keeps $4)
$13 of that goes to the label (label pays for pressing, recording costs promotion administration fronts the cash etc)
after all that there's not much left over. but artists get a few dollars if there's anything left over.Physical stores are increasingly redundant. If you want liner notes or vinyl where do you order them? Online store takes a smaller cut as it has less physical stock to buy, less risk that the stock won't sell, less storage costs for the reduced volume, less need to have real estate on prime strips of retail property. Less risk, less reward. Radiohead have deomstrated that this can be made to work for the artist, but yeah they've got deep pockets and could afford to be stung on the outlay for infrastructure. Costs are coming down all the time and setting up an online shop doesn't seem that hard, plenty of people are doing that for themselves, or shopping around for service providers who will look after that part of the process. To me, that $12 says the retailer was bearing most of the risk of not being able to sell the product.
(distributor keeps $4)
Without the need to shift so much physical product, what are the distributors doing? Settting up the infrastructure to shift a digital product. This activity probably doesn't need to occur that often. Set it up once and just add new files/bands as required, maybe organise a revamp of content for a band when there is a new album to make some noise about. Provide an end-to-end service for artists who aren't into tech/DIY. Make sure the reviewers get told where they can listen and get any associated collateral in a timely manner, negotiate that people can provide some column inches/airtime to it. Much more of a promotions role. Again less risk associated with physical product, but increased risk relative to the cost of promotion due to (presumably) a lower per unit price/revenue. I'm not sure how much of the risk distributors were actually bearing back in the bad old days, but I suspect they were probably pretty efficent at passing it on to the musicians, or the retailers...or anyone else sufficently naive enough to let them do so.
$13 of that goes to the label (label pays for pressing, recording costs promotion administration fronts the cash etc)
Label for pressing. How much effort needs to be retained here? Most people are satisfied with a digital product (I'm not talking the shitty low bitrate illegal copies), if people want a physical copy, order online, perhaps have infrastructure set up to deal with orders like public address books. I know minimum order quantity and all that shizzle for the manufacturers, but that's niche rather than catering to the masses.
Recording costs...yeah probably as valid as the musician and as I've said before, unfortunately impacted by the general perception of a drop in value for music sales.
I didn't get an answer to the questions yesterday about how the recording guys already work.... Fixed price, it you want to try for volume and push stuff out at the minimum acceptable quality. Time & materials where people actually are happy to go on that journey. Recording people take on a bit of the risk if you want to, or need to. Is any of that tranferable to/from the software industry/accurate??? Costs of recording seem pretty well understood in recording and don't vary if the product sells 1 unit or a million units. Risks seem to exist about managing the performance of the musicians and keeping costs at a level that is acceptable.
There is the ever present risk of any of the players in this game getting sucked into over-capitalising/spending money you don't need to....if you're simply doing it for the moo-lah.
I think there is plenty of incentive for the industry to come up with a winning formula that doesn't require masses of red tape elsewhere.
I'd love to know what the figures for the digitial music sales industry are. I'd suspect iTunes being the apparently hip market leader are probably doing really quite well out things and using their position to push their costs down quite aggressively. I'd also love to know what their costs/profits ranges are. Will the fixed price subscription model that is rumoured to in the pipeline come about and what sort of impact does it have on revenue to artists?
How many muscians in the past have gone down the path of starting their own label, just to get their music out there. The means of travelling down the path may have changed a bit, but I think the path is still there.
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are there better ways of delivering media. hell yeah.
I'd happily pay a couple of bucks for an episode sans ads of my favourite program. If I like 5 programs a week that's $50 a month more or less. that's good income for a media content provider.Yeah the whole idea of bundling content or vertically integrating and the like are perhaps the way things are heading. There was a bit of a scramble a couple of years back in the telecommunications under the banner of 'convergence' (NZ example is Voda grabbed Ihug...but it was a big trend globally), which to some degree was that industry having a bit of a stab in the dark regarding where the future was.
Walled gardens of content, don't seem to have worked either.
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They know if you're using software typically associated with media infringement ie peer to peer (known cos ISPs can see what program you're using, IE, Firefox etc).
They know what sites you visit.
They will be able to know the content of what your traffic is., if they don't already.Yeah the ISP's can tell what application you're likely to have been using. This information is added onto the packet of data and is how your computer knows what this packet relates to...that's not to challenging, but it's a whole different world of pain to consider the data itself...they might be able to guess...this looks like music, or video, but they would have to go to a good deal of trouble to actually work out what it unequivocally is and then determining if it is legitmate or illegitmate data is a second parallel universe of pain. Costs suddenly skyrocket in a heart stopping manner for the parties charged with responsbility for identifying infringement. Who does the music industry seem to be looking to lumber/shaft/burden with that obligation? Chuck in the use of some foriegn proxy servers and bit of encryption and you're moving into the realm of stuff that only those brainy chaps at the FB-I crimelab with their supercomputers are stupid enough to do....Better off just hiding a bit of spyware on everyone's computers to see what they're upto....oh wait a minute they've already tried that. Sounds way too Orwellian already.
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they know if you're downloading a lot cos of your data totals at the end of the month.
I could be downloading stuff that is legitimate. Shayden's kids (Blayden and LeDamian) might have been in the school play (Merchant of Venice) that one of the other parents taped & uploaded with permission. I could be downloading stuff from the BBC or any other enlightened content provider....Not downloading petrol from Royal Dutch Shell or Exxon Mobil.
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'scuse the Friday morning flippancy
Thursday night grumpiness here at the mo'...so 'scuse that too.
Suspect all traces of my serious tone will be well and truly gone by the morning.
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The theyworkforyou site is a useful. Well done to the peeps behind it.
In before "don't look at me, it's the tech wonks' job to work that out"
Perhaps that might have worked yesterday, but today I'm here for the detail. I think it's only fair that we get the detail from Rob on his view, else we're left making assumptions on his behalf.