Ag3nt0rang3 wrote:

WELL PUT...


in addition the labels have been shedding infrastructure like snakes shedding their winter skins for years and as a consequence the positive effects of a handful of label reps WOULD have had on a developing artists career have become systemically anachronistic...not to forget the effect of online downloading and satellite radio...

but I REALLY agree with your premise " nobody thinks shitty music is worth buying " ...


P.S. Todd Rundgren predicted ALL of this decades ago!!!

Can't explain it, but i always seem to like this guy's voice... reminds me of the Shins' singer

Ag3nt0rang3 wrote:
What numerous studies bear out is that there is more direct competition for the same entertainment dollar than in the past: gaming, on-line music sales, and Blu-Ray/DVDs head the list. It's easy for the RIAA to blame the spending shift on piracy because it has been and still is prevalent. (BTW, there is no moral argument—i.e., "the labels screw the artists and/or make too much money"—that justifies stealing, which is what piracy is. Oh, yes, there's the dashing cavalierness of it all, but in the end it's theft, and in my world you just...don't...take...what...isn't...yours. And I'm leaving file sharing out of this, because IMHO "ownership" of the file is a gray area.) The RIAA was late out of the gate; the labels didn't get the paradigm shift; and the whole distribution and delivery system is in flux. Good time to be alive. Tons more music that we used to have, and so many ways to get to it.

And $1.00 for a song (which after all is simply a compressed, duplicated file) is IMHO a ripoff. A CD costs less and has eight times the fidelity.

I want to rate this higher, but the problem is, I heard this track less than 3 minutes ago, and I don't remember. That says something about me, not about the artist or the music.

warderblu wrote:

I was just thinking the same thing!

sounds like Supergrass....

Ag3nt0rang3 wrote:
Quite. Whenever I can I buy music CDs (can't be doing with electronic tracks) directly from artists, either on their websites or at gigs. I'm happy to pay a tenner or more for a CD if I know for sure that most of the money's going to the artist, but I don't want to enrich the record companies who've made obscene amounts of money in the last few decades out of ripping off artists and treating them as bonded labour. The more record companies go after file sharers for ludicrous damages and talk moralistic bolleaux about 'theft', the more I want them to go f*ck themselves in a corner The great thing about the Web is that artists can now communicate with, and perform and sell to, the public directly, without intermediaries, and that alone is going to send record companies to the dustbin of history where they will deservedly moulder for all eternity.

Huey wrote:
It is true. CDs and the like are considerably more expensive across Europe than in the US. We clearly live in the most cheap music saturated period in the history of the planet. And this country appears to be the epicenter.

revsully wrote:

I came here to post this exact thing. Three years after this post.

jagdriver wrote:
Je*us..you want music want even cheaper?? In Europe we pay way more than you guys for almost everything. I buy all my CD's via Amazon and have em shipped over, thats way cheaper than buying them down the road.

Smooth ... me likes ...

these guys, devendra, and a couple other vocalists all sound like t. rex—-i like them all—-glad to hear this.

I know it's early in the morning, but this isn't doing anything for me...

westslope wrote:

Yeah, well, the music industry's business model has changed. They're still in denial about it.

I read a good blog post ( here ) yesterday that put forward the idea that this is a great time for anyone producing music if they care about "music" more than "industry". It is so easy to distribute music to a large number of people globally it's ridiculous.

The sad news is that the days of making serious money off selling music is over. The pressure on professional musicians now is to make money touring or other activities that benefit from the exposure their songs bring them.

The recording industry and the old methods of distribution will shrivel and die. Should we give them a bailout like the auto makers & banks?

I keep trying to shake the notion, but every time I hear TB, it is always there - all their songs sound the same!

Bluesgrrl wrote:
Only a buck!? That still makes the average CD about $15.

How about 15 cents a track? Make it thus in the U.S. so I'm not tempted to go to illegitimate foreign sites.

westslope wrote:
Thanks for the thought Westslope. What a lot of folks don't understand is that allofmp3 is no longer available to the western world. I haven't used them for over a year. Would I use them if they were still in business here in the good ole USA? Probably.

I now have to get music like everyone else. I go to amazon.com and the library and my friends and coworkers to help distribute music. And I am buying far more music now (and did when I used allofmp3) since listening to Radio Paradise.

This station, and the internet in general, have made great music available to everyone in this country and the world. Radio Stations don't get it by broadcasting crappy, "marketable" music that only teenagers and adults with teenager taste buy. I have dollars to spend as well and won't buy into the capitalistic scheme of tastelessness.

Others in this thread have concluded that the current scheme for purchasing music doesn't work very well and that changes are necessary and are occuring.

Hopefully there will be easier ways to increase the use and distribution of music that benefits both the creator and the end user. I think the middlemen have to be trimmed back so that the consumer doesn't have to pay so much for music and the artist/musicians get more of the profits.

Sounds a little like Supergrass to me.

great song and great album!!

Bluesgrrl wrote:

The RIAA is of course claiming that CD sales are dropping due to piracy, but deeper statistical studies don't bear that out. It's more likely that music sales are dropping because the labels are selling shitty music and the radio stations are playing shitty music, and nobody thinks that shitty music is worth buying.

It's never been easy making a living as a musician, because even once you get signed to a label, the label pays you peanuts. Even the biggest stars need to tour to make decent money, and music sharing probably increases tour revenues (free publicity).

The labels always pled the high costs of distribution and marketing as excuses for charging customers lots of money and passing on almost none of it to the musician. Since the advent of digital file sharing, the cost of distribution has dropped to almost zero, but customers didn't see a drop in CD prices, and artists never saw increases in their royalty rates. Is it any wonder that former customers are downloading music free now, and that major artists are leaving the big labels and selling to their fans directly (Radiohead, NIN, and I think even Metallica was looking at getting into direct sales)?

The economics of selling music in America is changing, and frankly, if a bunch of record weasels have to find a new career because of it, I don't much care. The artists will figure out how to get paid for their work by fans who love the music.