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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

#71

Post by colonwqbang »

cubefox wrote: post #49
colonwqbang wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day. One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heav…

> CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little incon…

That's true, but the music market is special in some ways.

* Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on.

* Non-fungibility. Music isn't all the same. Customers want a record with their favourite artist and not just any record of similar "quality".

There was a very limited time in human history where musicians could get rich by only selling recorded music. The norm otherwise has been that musicians earn money from live performances and now we're almost back to that. I'm not sure I think that's a bad thing.

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

#72

Post by seba_dos1 »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #15
jacquesm wrote: post #7

"Home taping is killing music" The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of. I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a thir…

Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life? My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking places often. That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of music at my dispos…

I don't, that's why my local collection is still growing.

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

#73

Post by seba_dos1 »

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.

A lot of stuff is neither on Spotify nor YouTube. One of my musical special interests is a very popular Polish rock band from the 80s and even they don't have their whole discography on Spotify yet, and I had to upload some rarer stuff to the Internet myself. It improved over the years though - just a few years ago you only had a few albums of their discography on Spotify. Now it's just one studio album missing - although most of their live albums aren't there as well and that probably won't change anytime soon; and not even talking about songs that got only released as singles.

Once you go "slightly less popular than one of the top bands in the country", stuff quickly becomes hard to find across the whole Internet, not just Spotify or YouTube, often even when CDs are still available to buy (which isn't a given either).

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

#74

Post by zirgs »

cubefox wrote: post #67
toyg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more people to publish their music. Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.

1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.

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

#75

Post by justsomehnguy »

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.…

> compensate for lost CD revenue

Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by literally making money out of thin air by literally copying digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with the tears of compassion.

You are spamming that graph, but only because you think it supports your opinion.

Except it does not. Go to RIAA, select Adjusted for inflation and select all years.

You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with 1981.

What happened in 1990-1998 what skyrocketed the revenue levels to be twice of that period?

The compact discs.

What happened in 2001-2008 what returned the revenue to almost 1981 levels?

Nobody wanted the fucking compact discs anymore.

They are bulky, you need a good player with at least 40sec anti-shock, you can't run with it, you need a fanny pack or something to even have it with you if you don't want to clip it on your jeans belt (if you don't even have a belt, eg track suit or skirt/dress) and god forbid you wanted more then one album (ie CD) with you, now you need to bring the CD bag with you.

And why people didn't want CDs no more?

Flash and for some time - 1"/1.8" HDD players.

People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums (and with HDD players - your whole library) on a small, compact device which is immune or way more resistant to the shock, doesn't chew the batteries and hey! shows the artist and song title!

'Piracy killed music industry [revenue]' is the bullshit, it's just what by 2008 you could no longer sell a $0.10 piece of polycarbonate for $19.99, people didn't wanted them anymore. Of course your 200% profit margin doesn't exists anymore and it shouldn't had existed in the first place.

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

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

#76

Post by hbossy »

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 sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?

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

#78

Post by jacquesm »

bondarchuk wrote: post #63
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!

> I wonder who actually gets this money in practice.

The record companies and the top 10 or so of the artists.

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

#79

Post by zirgs »

cubefox wrote: post #66
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.

> 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.

Piracy is a service problem. Back in the early 2000s pirates simply offered a better service. The gaming industry understood that and quickly created online marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - spent the 2000s trying to sue grandmas who filmed their kids dancing to copyrighted music.

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

#80

Post by jacquesm »

dale_glass wrote: post #19
coldtea wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tapes where great - if you mean audio tapes. Printers are crap even today.

Audio tapes were crap for most people. There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism. Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed. And even the best tape still had some…

We did - briefly - have the DAT (digital audio tape) format.
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