@Woony

The point is, You cant simply determine the value of a piece of music based on materials, scarcity and distribution costs.
The price of a track in a store like beatport is an arbitrary amount based on a combination of the average costs the labels make and the average amount people are willing to pay for a piece of music.
This says nothing about the profit margins the labels make. Not every piece of music is of equal value, it might have taken a few hours to make or it might have taken months. It could have had thousands spent on promotion for it or it could have had none. You don't know.

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The problem I have with it is simply that I can't judge how valuable I find an album until I've listened to it, so when given the option I will nearly always download for free. It seems an absurd concept now that you once had to pay for a record to hear how good it was. It seems totally backwards. The trouble is, there's just so much music to be heard all the time that I rarely dwell on an album, and the only time I will pay for it immediately after hearing it, whether I heard it on Spotify, through a friend or from a Name Your Own Price scheme, is if I absolutely stone-cold love it.

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quote:

Originally posted by Bierheld @Woony The point is, You cant simply determine the value of a piece of music based on materials, scarcity and distribution costs. The price of a track in a store like beatport is an arbitrary amount based on a combination of the average costs the labels make and the average amount people are willing to pay for a piece of music. This says nothing about the profit margins the labels make. Not every piece of music is of equal value, it might have taken a few hours to make or it might have taken months. It could have had thousands spent on promotion for it or it could have had none. You don't know.

I'm not talking about the value of the music. I'm talking about the product I get as a customer. When I buy a record I have something with a real world worth, something I can touch, something I can resell. With a file I have none of these things. Paying the same for both just seems absurd to me.

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June 2018 mix

quote:

Originally posted by Woony I'm not talking about the value of the music. I'm talking about the product I get as a customer. When I buy a record I have something with a real world worth, something I can touch, something I can resell. With a file I have none of these things. Paying the same for both just seems absurd to me.

i agree on this, they can't pretend that we pay the same for a digital track than for a physical cd.

Physical CD 10-15$, if it has 10 tracks inside is 1'5$ each. 2$ for each digital track in a 320kbps encoded mp3? I've wavs for 1'5$ and with a booklet, cd to play in the car... the difference is clear.

Last edited by Rodri Santos on Jan-13-2012 at 16:16

Well buy the fucking record then.

All you're doing is making up you're own idea of what labels and artists earn justifying it with the alleged astronomical costs of getting a piece of plastic in a cardboard sleeve to appear in a music store. Whatever man. They're not the same product, and the one thing both have in common is that their price in most cases in no way reflects the actual value of the music itself. Which in the end is what it's all about.

All this newfangled digital music business in the end is no more then a glorified promotion tool anyway. It's not a coincidence that beatport targets DJ's as heir main costumers and offers their own promotion services with their fabled 'exclusive records'. Or spotify, which is praised as a new alternative to buying music, were every thousand streams add up to a full 4,70 euros in artist revenue. Fantastic profit margins!

Not uncommonly the most honest music suppliers are the labels themselves. Just buy them there if you're so concerned.

___________________
Mixes: Alaé (Conceptional ambient dub)
AOTSE (Experimental)

Listens:
http://www.last.fm/user/bierheld

quote:

Originally posted by ziptnf I feel like many artists out there are trying to implement this form of pricing with their albums or songs. And I think it's a great idea. In general, anyone who wants to hear almost any song can go to Youtube or google the name of the track and be able to hear it instantly in relatively high quality. Artists who offer their songs or albums for any price are putting enough faith in their own work to know that a majority of listeners will be getting it for free, one way or another, whether it be through file-sharing or a streaming site like Youtube. However, I feel like they can still make good profits using this method.

Radiohead - pioneers of that approach, have decided not to repeat it last year with The King Of Limbs. That should say something. When a pretty big and well-selling band doesn't benefit much from this method (In Rainbows did actually sell slightly more than their previous album, but that doesn't say much), then I can't see it working for smaller, less-known bands.

Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb did something similar year later, he even offered his album on various private torrent trackers with a html file which encouraged sharing, but also included paypal link to donate how much you can and an option to buy a physical product directly from label, but again the whole thing collapsed and sales for that particular album didn't surpass sales of his other albums by much.

In theory, the whole thing could just further fragment the sales. More people could end up getting less money each, and only really good and already popular artists will be able to live from their work.

Internet / music as computer file era is pretty much a bust, as far as artists making a living from music. Sales volume (supposedly higher now) does not really matter if it is more than compensated by the drop in price per unit.

http://www.azoz.com/newsarchive/2010/01/Nielsen.html

Then again, there are lots of other advantages to the web that I would not want to give up.

At this point it seems silly to expect to make any money from selling audio files. You might as well just give it away and focus on your live show as your source of income.

I did do a pay what you want thing for my album and I did have some people grab it for $5 and $10, but paypal fees took a lot of the money. In fact I remember one guy buying it for twenty cents and paypal just ate it all with their fee (this was through bandcamp)

After that whole experience I think if you're going to release, just do it digitally for free, or press something to vinyl out of your own pocket (or do both). You can usually make your money back and break even if you have a stack of records at your show for people to take home with them

you loose a chunk of people when you do this tho, all the kids who buy music with itunes gift cards and stuff because they dont have a credit card, thats the only problem with this kind of pay what you want thing. and if you hope to make a bit of money you have to have exposure, its fucking easy for trent reznor or radiohead to say ''oh artist should all go independent'' when you headline festivals rofl