I am sick and tired of the greedy label companies and their bull crap. These people just do not have any common sense whatsoever! What gives!?
Think about this: Label companies are suffering. Why? Because people are pirating (illegaly distributing) the music they’ve published. Now, more people are actually paying for their music at the very decent price of $0.99 per song, rather than pirating it. But now that they know they can make money off of it, the labeling companies want to make more money from it? Shouldn’t they be satisfied with the fact that they are getting any money at all?
Personally, I completely disagree with pirating music. It is outright stealing. However, if the iTunes store were actually closed because the labels are greedy, I would highly recommend that EVERYONE AND THEIR PARENTS DISTRIBUTE ALL OF THEIR MUSIC! Never buy an album again, until they realize how freaking stupid they are. It’s one thing to be against the illegal downloading of music; it’s another thing to be against another company’s store paying you!.
Do what I do, I buy a CD, I let all my friends borrow it, then they let me do the same. Quickly you end up having a few gigs of music for like 1/8 the price. I personally don’t use iTunes music store, but if I had to use a service that would be it due to its flat fee (basically). I hate variable pricing, it overcomplicates something that shouldn’t be.
September 30th, 2005 at 11:50 pm
I somewhat like the idea of Napster. Unlike iTunes, if I am correct, you pay a monthly fee to download unlimited tracks. This seems great for me. I have a very high speed Internet connection so I could easily make my iTunes equivalent moneys worth.
The question is the size and/or range of music available…
October 1st, 2005 at 7:14 am
Hah… UNLIMITED!? That’s wild, like an all-you-can-eat buffet. How much is the fee?
October 1st, 2005 at 10:16 am
It is unlimited, per se, but once you stop paying all your music dies. With iTunes atleast what you buy is yours. That’s why I don’t like napster, because if I download…say… 1,000 songs and then stop paying all those songs are gone, and its a waste of my internet :P.
October 1st, 2005 at 11:35 am
The record companies are just pure greedy with this. Think about it, every sale they make is 100% profit. Who wouldn’t love a product like that? There are zero production costs (Well, after the music is recorded. Think about it, they don’t have any percentage of the price of an album or song being put off to pay for production. No worries at all of having to pay for more CD’s than will be bought). Each time someone buys a song, it all (Which I think is around 95 cents or something, apple takes only 4 or 5 if I remember correctly) enters their bank accounts. Oh wait, I’m sorry, don’t they have to pay those pesky recording artists 9 cents of that?
Recording companies are bogus. They’re like freaking parasites, leaching wealth off of artists that actually do all the work. There’s only a handful of major companies that form an oligarchy, they government has taken legal action against them multiple times for price fixing. Now they’re really pissed that they didn’t get to the online market first, and have to pay the 5 cents to apple!. OMFG, they have to pay 5% to a company that’s set up an entire distribution system, paid all the programmers to create the programs, pays for bandwith and maintains their servers, who’s marketing and design people have created an enormously popular product. So let’s review.
Record company pays artists 10% for making a song. Then 5% goes to a company which has invested millions at this point into taking care of the whole distribution system. They don’t have to maintain a certain number of sales or anything to keep it profitable, pay for maintenance or anything, just a flat fee. Recording company has a product production cost of 0 after only having to fund the artists studio time. On top of it, online sales have greatly boosted sales in the recording industry, so more people are buying, and buying more. The record companies view? We need to charge more! More! MOOOORRRREEE!!!!
And in the end, everybody else gets screwed, artists, distributors, buyers, everyone. And people will still buy, effectively allowing the industry to do what they want.
Methinks the open source scene should get together and design some software that allows artists to take care of the software end of recording, and allows them to be able to distribute their stuff on their own. (Only problem is hardware cost). Damnit, this comment is too long, sorry for hijacking your website, Jona.
October 1st, 2005 at 11:49 am
My opinion stands as follows:
Any media that can be seen/heard in any form for free, be it on the radio or television, should not be illegal to obtain for free. Also, it should only be illegal to distribute it if you are doing so for a profit.
October 1st, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Stop whining. If you purchase an album online, you ‘re still paying less than if you went out and bought the CD in a store. Plus, online, you don’t have to pay for songs you don’t want. I doubt the raise in price will be that significant anyway.
October 2nd, 2005 at 7:34 pm
i totally agree with you dan, i mean my parents generation used to record lot’s of things on the radio and tv on tape, it’s very similar, isn’t it?
October 6th, 2005 at 10:29 am