Are CD Prices Coming Down?

One of the reasons that CD prices haven’t come down is that artist contracts in some cases don’t allow it (certainly in the case of superstars or even those who have had good success along the way). Artists historically have been reluctant to be put in the bargain bin as it was a sign their careers were over. Some of it is vanity, some of it is to protect against, e.g., an old label undercutting new product on a new label after an artist has moved, and some of it is that the volume increase isn’t enough to make up for the per unit royalty loss (not only is the price upon which the artist is paid reduced, but generally the royalty rate is also reduced on the lower price units, so it’s a double whammy and a triple whammy if you’re an artist that writes your material because your mechanical royalties for the songs are also reduced). The issue from the label’s perspective is different, of course.

Now, as the front line prices have been moving lower of late, the business dynamic is changing. But I have at least one superstar client who routinely declines all reduced price requests from the label. And having seen the numbers, from this client’s perspective is just isn’t worth it.

What’s so dumb from the industry’s perspective about discouraging the sale of used CDs? I’m not saying that I like it, but aren’t they just using the law to limit competition?

John Coltrane — Africa Brass

http://tinyurl.com/ys755e

No. That’s the BS “logic” they try to pass by average dufuses. The clear intent is to 1. try to get in on the sale of someone else’s property or 2. to infringe on sales of less expensive, used, yet identical competitive products. Used cars with no miles.
How is it different? Do you think Ford, GM, et al should be able to stop you from selling your used cars or that you should only be able to trade it in for credit on your next car after a background check and a 30 day waiting period? Have you lost your mind?

I’m not renting or leasing a CD, I’m BUYING it. THEY are trying to change the terms of the sale AFTER the fact.

Note that these hypocritical asswipes don’t want to pass legislation protecting you from stolen firearms. Noooo! THAT would actually protect someone from something.
Where is that law?

And where is the law “protecting us” from stolen cassettes and LPs? And let’s not forget antiques, art, cars, coins, books, all collectibles really. And if you hold physical gold, they will need to hold that too? That address is CRAZY TOWN.

Where is the legislation to “protect” us from collectibles being sold?
Should Sotheby’s and Christies pack it in?

We know how dangerous CD’s can be. Afterall, you could wipe out an entire campus with stolen CD’s so just forget those gun and knife shows.

Have you thought about this much?

“For after all, when you’ve allowed a man’s creativity to be taken from him — the creativity he uses to sustain himself — without compensation, what more can you take except his life or liberty?”

This is a pretty utopian idea of intellectual property and an artist’s benefit from it. Greed is the irritant for many middle of the road people in this debate. The greed of the non-creative factor in the Artist+Label equation. In most cases, record labels are incredibly exploitive. I do not give musicians a pass, though, for allowing themselves to be a party to their own exploitation. Their creativity, in the form of ownership of their work, is given away as much as it’s taken. Dick Dale gives a lecture to aspiring artists illustrating this point.
Bands need to work harder to create their own relationships to their fans. Labels need to accept reality, let go of memories of the glory days and find new ways of making money which would make sharing a less appealing alternative.

You Don’t Own Me

… One of the songs we listened to was Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”, which is really an ominous sounding record.

Turns out, if I owned this cd and tried to sell it in Florida, I would have a difficult time proving Leslie wrong:…

Craig,

Bondie just had a minor upper-right augmentation, but they’re small. Anything more’n a mouthful is just a waste anyway. Nothing wrong with you eyesight, but I would suggest your ears can’t hear the fidelity you think they can. Fidelity of frequency perception is a lot like fidelity of beer brand perception. They’re both regularly subject to hyperbole.
—
Outofcontext:

Not only were you not in the right pew, but you weren’t even in the church… and barely in the parking lot… and way too far away to have heard the sermon.

Nothing I wrote relates in the slightest to the matter of contractual dealings or the fairness of such between artists and their various administrative associates… labels, managers, accountants, agents or others that may or may not take advantage of them. None of that prevents the intellectual property from existing and its existence was my only focus. I figure all those persons mentioned are capable of protecting their own interests when dealing with each other, or they’d better learn how to protect them.

But, none of them, singularly or collectively, have the capacity to protect whatever intellectual property rights they do have (in whatever proportion to the total that exists) from 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not perfectly anyway, and the protections available are likely to cost near as much or more than the damages would cost for having no protections in the first place.

I will apologize to eclectic for taking his quote out of its context (truth in pseudonym, at least) in order to make a tangential point. As penance for missing the sermon, I read the entire text of 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I do not concede that my entire comment was from left field (I prefer baseball analogy). I can’t see how protection will catch up with the demand for dishonest innovation. I think subscription services like Napster-To-Go and eMusic are a way to provide a somewhat open avenue of profiting from music. I would pay for youTube if it provided legal on-demand video of my favorite artists.
I am admittedly a novice in this area, but I find it a fascinating and vital topic and come to discussions like these to learn through engagement. I would appreciate any suggestions for further reading.
Craig’s right about quality. I never buy through iTunes or Napster, ’cause if I really like the music, I want a cd of it to play on the home stereo.

Outofcontext and Craig:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cd5.htm

If you’ll read through 512 again, you’ll notice that nothing is mentioned about the sound quality or fidelity issues regarding uploaded digital media that is subsequently claimed to be copyright infringement, but only issues of the direction and control of the uploading itself.

What I mean is that you two both state preferences for richer and deeper sound, both in frequency and in spatial orientation, that you generally mention are the reasons to prefer owning and operating a CD to downloading the same material from a carrier. Your preferences do not present functional limitations for the carrier… not for the uploader… and not for the technology that delivers the sound to downloaders.

They are only practical limitations in some cases and to some degree based on any particular carrier’s willingness and capacity for large file storage, or for the capability of both the uploader’s equipment to modify the files and the downloader’s equipment to use those files and extract fidelity and range.

Remember that 512 actually prohibits the carrier from altering the files if they wish to maintain protection from copyright infringement claims. They also have to receive and distribute the files in an automated process; they must not select the recipients, not select the files to be uploaded, and they must have processes in place to respond to copyright notification, to identify offenders when properly notified by the offended party, and to remove offending media and sanction repeat offenders.

BTW, have you seen this bit of brilliance? A DRM technology company attempting to sue Apple and friends for not using their product.

Outofcontext:

BTW, you gotta get a better name – why not just use “Out?” – it’s clean, easy to type and, well, it’s like “Ed” but vastly more personalized. I mean… ever known anyone known as Out?… Not me. You’d be the only Out on The Big Picture.
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The novel claim of that California company does present a very interesting approach.

Basically, they are saying that since the “Bigs” are responsible for the players than are involved in the production of copyright infringement, that they have not just a responsibility but a legal requirement under the provisions of DMCA to use this company’s “proven technology” in preventing it… and that would of course be by licensing the technology and building it into the players. Truly novel.

Let’s see… hmmm?… that would be like attempting to force a firearm manufacturer to install some chip in a firearm that prevented it from being used to kill someone (by preventing the mechanism from operating during the committing of crime), or preventing it from being used, if only threateningly, in committing crime (by interceding in the intentions of the likely offender). I think that’s been sort of done, since the firearms manufacturers either had to produce the trigger guards themselves or buy them from some other provider in order to sell them in jurisdictions where trigger guards were required.

Why, you might even extend the claim to the utility companies that provide the electricity to power the players… I suppose this discussion is philosophically endless.

But, that’s the point of what I’m saying. It’s not philosophically endless. It only appears to be because of the loss of common sense in the approach of 512. Copyright infringers infringe with automation just like killers kill with guns… and in these two cases it’s not the automation or the guns, but the offenders that do the illegal acts.

The common sense I’m talking about is that the o-f-f-e-n-d-e-r in copyright infringement is the party that should be attacked, and all 512 does is to provide the offender with a disingenuous cohort that’ll help him infringe (albeit innocently, says the carrier – wink wink) because their own self interests are served by him doing it, because those self interests are actually protected by 512. Here again we have an example of what Adam Smith was talking about when he issued his admonition of “dealers” within the subclasses of merchants and manufacturers because their interests only seemed to be aligned with that of the general public, but in reality were very often not.

Society is benefited by the technological innovation and cultural enrichment provided by intellectual property, and if that property is not protected, creativity just becomes a prisoner of whatever authority controls the society. A democratic society protects its intellectual creativity. A totalitarian society suppresses it.

Out, you express the notion that you’d pay for content that was cheap, legal and available. Unfortunately, most of the people who obtain and consume free copyrighted content already relish the idea that it’s free. Why would they suddenly have the attitude you express that they would be willing as well to pay for it if it were cheap?… Ah, it’s because there’s nothing cheaper than something that’s free, so what they’re actually saying is that they want the freedom to infringe on copyright protected intellectual property at will, or benefit from others that infringe it, or they’ll pay for it if it’s… free. That’s too Catch-22ish if you’ll think about it. I don’t literally mean you, Out. I take you at your word.

Another point on 512.

It seems that the major protection that 512 gives carriers is the opportunity to claim that their automated systems don’t have the capacity to determine if the material is copyright protected. In other words, they want us to believe that innocence derives from automation and its anonymity within the process. However, at the same time they are claiming their systems are just automatic and “don’t know any better,” some of them inform uploaders that material including senseless depravity, vulgarity, violence, personal slurs or racially offensive images or language will be promptly removed.

Unless I miss my guess, true carriers of digital material don’t really care if person A sends something vulgar or racially offensive to person B, because it doesn’t get into the public domain. I can write my friend an email and tell him all sort of racial, ethnic, depraved, vulgar or otherwise offensive stories, jokes or anecdotes. My email carrier doesn’t give a damn if I do that… even if I email a pretty wide circle of associates. I could cut and paste almost anything I wanted to, copyrighted or non-copyrighted, whether I owned the copyright or not… and they wouldn’t care, even if they knew it, because it won’t get into the public domain. 512 was designed to protect them from spurious claims of infringement and random real claims of offended parties when I do transmit something that the carrier would ordinarily care about if they had the time to review everything I transmitted, and they don‘t of course. That’s what 512 speaks to. It wasn’t designed to protect a carrier from putting the nature of my communication with a small circle of friends and associates on the cover of The Rolling Stone, so that the whole word could download and read it 753,000 times.

I wonder… what is it about the automatic systems that makes them capable of discerning the above prohibited attributes, but at the same time the systems are blind to the fact that some yo-yo has uploaded an entire copyright protected movie?… Well, the answer is that the systems can’t do it. People (staffers) have to do that, people who on the one hand can detect with amazing clarity if someone has uploaded a video of a cadaver being used as a doorstop, but don’t seem to notice that entire Pink Floyd concerts are segmented and uploaded. I’m not just speaking of the filtering of key words such as the ‘n’ word. I’m talking about the even subtle examples of morbid, violent or depraved images or sounds that no automatic system can perfectly detect. But they detect them… and remove them.

It seems to me that if they can detect those subtleties, they could detect gross examples of copyright infringement that anybody with any common sense could easily determine. Too, it’s funny that the snot-nosed kid’s frisbee-chasin’ dog video gets watched 124 times and yet the same kid’s uploading of some professional concert that he doesn’t have the rights or permissions for gets watched 753,000 times.

Pretty wide circle of friends, family and associates if you ask me… Why, there’s not half that many members of my own family’s website. We must all be introverted.

I suppose you’d have to want to detect infringement were you a carrier, and 512 only lets you detect what you want to detect, but blame what you don’t want to detect on automation. I say, tell that damn automation to leave the cadaver vids alone, if they don’t mind!

That brings me to my final idea. What not just write into 512 another paragraph or two that lets the offended party in copyright infringement cases just go after the computers?… Now, that’s a novel approach, Out… just let the motor truckers sue the automation. In fact, they could have automated attorneys filing automated legal briefs filed against the automatic computers of the carriers. We could have automation lawsuits on Court TV.

Here’s a scene:

Judge: “The defendant server will please rise.”

(Automation stands)

Judge: “This court finds you, Auto M. Ation, guilty of copyright infringement on all counts. Is there anything you wish to say before sentencing?”

Automation: “I shot the Sheriff… but-I-did-not-shoot-the-Dep-u-ty.”

Judge: “Yes, Mr. Ation, that’s one of the counts, but is that all you want to say before sentencing?”

Automation: “But… but, Your Honor, it was all in my programming… I tell ya it wasn’t my f-a-u-l-t.”

Judge (revealed to be a robot – hangs on digital words): “Unfor-un-un-un-un-forforforforfor… unfortunate-nate-nate-nate-ley, Mister-ister-ister-ister-ister-ister A-A-A-AtionAtionAtionAtion, you had the capacity totototototototo knowknowknowknowknowknow.”

We could even have an automated Supreme Court to handle the inevitable appeal… which would of course be an automatic appeal.