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Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

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Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#61

Post by Semaphor »

zirgs wrote: post #40
Semaphor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me. I don’t want to fuck over later me, so I’m still buying music. Probably not saving money, but I also get some music not on streaming services.

What is not on streaming services? From my experience - if it's not on spotify then it's on youtube.

Very little, nowadays, but most stuff from Eric Ravn (metal/rock, somewhat famous for Wuthering Heights) [0] is not even available to buy other than as CDs that you order via HTML form ;) A few years ago, German medieval/folk band Die Streuner also wasn’t available on streaming services. Both have in common, that they have their own label.

[0]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#62

Post by Kuinox »

cubefox wrote: post #57
Kuinox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are trying to collerate loss of revenue with the loss caused by piracy, without any data of loss caused by piracy. Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making the data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database The music industry earnings has never been that high than today. Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not hindered earnings: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-fin…

> You are trying to collerate loss of revenue with the loss caused by piracy, without any data of loss caused by piracy. The only explanation for the complete collapse of CD sales starting in 1999 is piracy. Napster & Co. Anything else is dishonest. > Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making the data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database No, this data is lying because it ignores inflation. H…

There is so much evidence you failed to source it.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#63

Post by bondarchuk »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #54

In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...

In the Netherlands there's a similar thing: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/intellectueel-eigen...

2.60 eur for every tablet and PC

5.30 eur for every smartphone

80 cents for every hdd or ssd

etc. etc, though I don't see CD-ROMs (nor tapes) in this list strangely enough.

I wonder who actually gets this money in practice. 5 bucks per smartphone for some random non-profit is pretty huge!

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#64

Post by cubefox »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
cubefox wrote: post #17

The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s: https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes. Even 20…

If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.

But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#65

Post by jacquesm »

cubefox wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that. Before that CDs sold for twice the amount that the original records cost when they…

> The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that. That's not true. iTunes or Spotify did not nearly compensate for lost CD revenue.…

There is no 'right to revenue', iTunes or Spotify did not compensate because they are different media with different usage patterns and a different audience. It would be far more surprising if they did compensate it.

You are making the same mistake that software companies mad(k)e when talking about revenue and losses due to piracy: not every copy made is a lost sale and depending on the price points and other business model parameters you can find sustainability or lack thereof in many different places of the parameter space.

There is a pretty good chance that if the record companies had not sat on their hands lamenting all this online piracy and if they had provided a good alternative timely that those streaming revenues would be a lot higher today.

I simply stopped buying music around that time, and I don't have a feeling I missed out on anything. The very few things I love that you could call modern are by unsigned artists who are more than happy to put their art out there because they love making good stuff, not necessarily because they are going for a huge commercial success.

Record companies are very much like start-up accelerators: they are entirely optional.

sidenote: I think posting the same link over and over again in a single thread is not a very nice thing to do, even if you believe it shows you are right (which it doesn't...).

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#66

Post by cubefox »

realusername wrote: post #25
cubefox wrote: post #17

The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s: https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes. Even 20…

The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice. The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.

> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.

You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled with legal online services anyway even when they existed. 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#67

Post by cubefox »

toyg wrote: post #56
realusername wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice. The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.

By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs, effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming prices, my children will likely never have to know what a bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of "pirate skills".

> Thanks to reasonable streaming prices

What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#68

Post by ggm »

Filligree wrote: post #50
ggm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would re-encode from the original or get flac. What I have digitally is compressed because of history, more than anything else. It was a figure of speech. The point is a single DLT is huge. Well .. LTO.

It’s just a pity they’re so expensive. By rights I should be using tape for my backups, but even a single tape drive is…

For anyone who wonders a single LTO9 tape is about $250 and holds 45TB. I'm holding about 15 to 20 years data hoarding at home on 6TB zfs. So for me, cold storage for life would be at this price point. As you say the drive is heinous too: $10k+

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#69

Post by jacquesm »

cubefox wrote: post #64
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.

But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.

What you think the chart shows.

Commercial music had it's zenith and it declined. Just like everything else it didn't grow for ever and just like everything else there are reasons why you don't want to yank the chain of your consumers and your producers too much. The fact that the two correlate timewise does not mean the one cause the other. In fact I think that the music industry missed an absolutely huge opportunity. By the time I had digitized my whole collection they had royally missed the boat, whereas if I didn't have to go through all that who knows how much money I would have spent on new music by now. I used to spend a lot of money on music, now I spend none and not a dime of that difference was due to piracy.

I have friends in the music industry and got invited to a meeting of BUMA/STEMRA regarding the potential of streaming and it was like watching dinosaurs discussing the price of swampland while in the background you could see a comet heading straight for the planet. I don't think I've ever seen such a disconnect between producers and consumers. Product market fit is not just good for new companies, it is also good for existing ones. Fail at that and you will fail.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#70

Post by zirgs »

Semaphor wrote: post #61
zirgs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is not on streaming services? From my experience - if it's not on spotify then it's on youtube.

Very little, nowadays, but most stuff from Eric Ravn (metal/rock, somewhat famous for Wuthering Heights) [0] is not even available to buy other than as CDs that you order via HTML form ;) A few years ago, German medieval/folk band Die Streuner also wasn’t available on streaming services. Both have in common, that they have their own label. [0]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/

I suspect that they aren't getting many sales this way.
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