RIAA site hacked

[KhanadaRhodes]

You can buy CDs for $10. Go to Disc-o-rama, the best record store in NYC where new CDs are only $10. And they are legit, liner notes and all. Its possible.

agreed. i get my cds now from amazon.com - completely legit. especially since they're doing free shipping on orders of $25+, i just buy two cds at a time! i save on the price of the cd AND i don't have to pay my state's almost 10% sales tax. even if i did pay shipping, i'd save money.

amazon.com:
$13 cd
+ $ 2 shipping
$15

local cd store, even best buy:
$ 17 cd
$1.50 sales tax
$18.50!!!

so i save $3.50 a cd, $5.50 if i get free shipping. i'm sure while record stores in general have seen a decline in sales, i'd be willing to bet that amazon.com and anyone else who offers free shipping on orders of a certain amount have seen an increase in sales.

i look at it this way. i go to amazon.com to, say, buy the latest U2 album. it's $13. ooh, i see i can get free shipping if i spend 25! so i buy ANOTHER $13 cd to save myself $2 in shipping costs! it works out better for me in the long run, i always have a huge list of cds i want, so it's not like i get the other cd and hate it.

it's got nothing to do with supply and demand. demand's down NOW, justifying higher prices, but how can they justify said prices in 1999 when they were selling more than the year before? (i believe, don't quote me on that. but i do know the record industry wasn't in as much of a slump in 99 that it is now.) it's the same reason a U2 concert ticket was $20 in 1987 and is now $120. they charge that much because they can.

teenieboppers wanting the new avril cd don't care about the price; chances are it's not even their money! even if it is, they want it OMG NOW so they won't be smart like me. instead of saving their money and buying online like i do, buying them cheaper, OR finding a local store that sells them cheap (even if it's a bit of a drive, going once a month and splurging on those 10 cds you've wanted, the money you saved makes up for it), they spend an extra $5 EVERY TIME. it's not even every visit, it's every cd. $18 cds don't get cheaper as you buy more, and tax is a percentage so it'll still come to about $20 a cd, whether you buy one or fifty.

i don't not buy less cds because i want the riaa to suffer, since i'm buying legitimate copies, everyone still gets a piece of the pie. i buy with hope that it shows the record industry that i don't like having to pay $20 for every cd i want, and if i can get it legally cheap elsewhere, i will. i hope maybe if they see there's many more people like me out there who buy online because it's cheap or even just because it's convienient, maybe they'll realize these outlandish prices are ridiculous.

 

[KhanadaRhodes]

But who are you or anyone to decide how much someone sells their product for? Who are we to decide how much an artist charges for their product?

but that's the thing. usually, artists get a small percentage of a cd sale. when i watched the btm on tlc, left eye [] broke everything down when she was explaining how they went bankrupt. artists make maybe a dollar on a cd. if it's a band, each person sees even less. bono gets $1 for every U2 cd sold, since they have such a great deal. the singer from nickelback may see like 30 cents or something.

i don't think the artists have a say or even want their cd prices to be so high. it's the record companies and the executives who get the biggest piece of the pie. many executives live more lavishly than many of their big name stars, because they get such a bigger percentage, and from EVERY artist they have signed. wouldn't it be awesome to get, say, 10% on every artist you have signed? for someone like the ceo of jive records (who's signed big name people like bsb, n sync, britney spears, etc.) you KNOW they make millions a year, even more than britney does on her music alone.

for the artists, the money is made on the road. that's why most of the smart artists make an album every few years, but have a three year tour. their album sold 50 million, so what? they make more money if a total of 2 million people total see them in concert on that tour.

 

[bonoman]

Ya we do set prices. Thats what a free economy does. What people are willing to pay for the product is what a smart (not the MI) will charge. They will stop blaming every thing on burning and see that not only that adds to less sales but the weakness of the music and the prices they charge.

I put this to you. On KAZZA you can d/l music, but you can also d/l movies and burn then to VCD and watch them in your own home. Why has the movie industry seen an increase every year for the last few years? AHHH i know why...because they combat this with cheap theatres (dollar movies) for the ppl not willing to pay 10-15$ a show.

How can you explain the decline in the music industry and not in the movie industry. Is it because the movieI is still pumping out movies that ppl want to see? Is it because they offer alternatives to the higher priced better equiped theatres?

 

[STING2]

Its true that there are a lot of artist that make money on the road but they are the exception and not the rule. Touring can be expensive. A lot of global tours lose money even for big time artist. Mariah Carey rarely if ever tours and she has made a huge bundle of money despite not writing all the music and doing the production. TLC doesn't write most of their music, and hire session musicians and multiple producers to help them with their albums. The multiple writers, musicians, producers and others who work on the album cost a lot of money. So does a year or more spent recording in a lavish studio.

It cost Def Leppard millions and millions of dollars just to record Hysteria. Despite a good royalty rate, the band had to sell nearly 5 million copies just to pay off their debts and reach a profit. After that the cash came rolling in, the album went on to sell 12 million in the USA and another 3 million outside the USA. My point here is that there are lots of cost and many individuals involved in the recording of many of these albums before you even get to promoting the album. Tens of thousands(perhaps many more) of people work in the music industry and they deserve to be payed for their work. Its not just the four people in the band, and a record executive smoking a pipe.

Record companies often juggle dozens and dozens of artist while trying to pay very expensive artist like U2 or Madonna. This idea that they are awash in money is a false one when you look at the cost of promoting, distributing, and paying all these artist plus the BIG NAMES you have on your roster. Many record companies bit of more than they can chew.

The Movie industry has actually had some very rough times during the mid -1990s where the Recording industry has had solid growth for 18 years without let up until 2001. It think the file sharing and burning of music Compact Disk is more damaging at this point than any duplication procedures when it comes to movies although many in the movie industry are concerned. Also, its still tradition for many people to only see movies in the theater. I'm one of them, I never rent movies. If I think a movie might be good, I go see it in the theater. Many people still feel going to the Theater is a much better experience in seeing a movie rather than on ones small screened TV.

Its really difficult to compare the sell of Compact Disk to the movie industry because the movie industry is not just about the sell of DVDs. First you have the movie which comes out in the big theaters. Then there is the profit that is made from the sell of DVD and VHS and then also the renting of DVD and VHS. So you have 3 variables there compared to the one you have with just Compact Disk. It really is difficult to accurately compare the two.

If no one thought Compact disk were overpriced 10 or 15 years ago, there is no reason to think their overpriced now, since they actually cost less than they were 10 or 15 years ago when you adjust for inflation. It think the ability for consumers to get the record companies product for free is the problem in the decline of sales.

If I could duplicate a movie theater and offer free tickets to everyone, I could damage the movie theater business.

 

[pub crawler]

Wait, STING2 sleeps?














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Stamp out "silliness"

 

[sharky]

Mariah Carey is not a good example Sting. Mariah Carey got paid $50 million by Virgin to LEAVE THE LABEL! Then another $30 million to pay for a new contract.

And we wonder why the Virgin Megastore, which owns Mariah's former label, charges $19.99 for a CD.

If a company is stupid enough to pay someone millions to leave the label, that is there mistake. If they want to spend $5 million to make a Britney Spears video, that's just plain stupid. And frankly, I don't feel like paying for their stupidity.

 

[pub crawler]

Go sharky!

 

[KhanadaRhodes]

Its true that there are a lot of artist that make money on the road but they are the exception and not the rule. Touring can be expensive. A lot of global tours lose money even for big time artist.

ahh true. i forgot to think about essentially the pop artists. one person (or a couple people) singing behind like a 300 person band, so they CAN duplicate the sounds of the studio.

it all depends on the artist and the stage setup really. i'm sure U2 pulled a huge profit this time around for the elevation tour because of its simplistic set-up, whereas we all know the money they lost on the zoo tv tour because of all the screens and trabants.

 

[KevM]

Well if it wasn't for the Internet and file shareing I think I would only be buying U2 CDs ... most of which would have been bootlegs, so U2 no money for U2.

But now I can download bootlegs ... giving me money to spend on other things.

File shareing let me find lots of other music I never would have heard. I don't own every mp3 i've downloaded, but I do buy CDs of stuff I like, unfortunatly most of it I have to order online.

I have also started buying vinyl which costs $15 CDN, i doubt I would have done this without finding Trance (through file trading) and wanting to try DJing.

Anyways it will be interesting to see what happens with the music industry over the next few years. I dont think I will buy another CD without downloading it first and I will not buy a copy protected CD.

 

[STING2]

Hey, nice to see you around KEVM!