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Who's doing this to my internet?

veekaybee.github.io

181–190 of 306 posts

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#181

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

I really really want to know what site it was.

If it was Bandcamp, TopSpin, 7Digital, databeats or Bleep, these are hardly unknown players in the digital download industry. The price for escaping from iTunes is a bit of diversity and slightly higher prices.

Edited to remove whinge about the price, it's not relevant. The author has let me know that the shop was http://shop.coldbusted.org/music which happens to be a frontend to Bandcamp.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#182
post #63

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

I get what you're saying but that doesn't answer why a hybrid model isn't more common than it is. Show me ads to monetize my free consumption of your service, but if I'm willing to pay (as many definitely are), allow me to subscribe to disable the ads. Why isn't this model more common? Is it because advertisers tend not to want to advertise on a platform where people can opt out of their ads?

This is spotify's approach.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#183
There are ads on Soundcloud? I use it every day, and this is news to me because I use an ad blocker.

This also happened to me with YouTube - I didn't realize they were displaying ads for _months_ until I watched a video on a friend's computer.

Without an ad blocker, the web is basically unusable. I don't know how people live without one.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#184

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

I wonder if people give thought to the length of time it takes to learn an instrument, play it well, learn the recording process, record it well, learn the mixing process, mix it well, learn the mastering process, master it well etc. if they are willing to dismiss $1.50 as expensive for a song. In comparison, how much is a cup of coffee or a portion of chips (for us UK types)? How much is a trip to the cinema? It sho…

A coffee or chips is a consumable, as soon as I use them they're gone and nobody else gets to consume them. They don't compare.

A trip to the cinema, without paying for unnecessary and expensive food and drink, only costs about 6x-10x more for something that costs considerably more to produce than a song. Jurassic World cost $150,000,000 to create and I got to watch it for $9. Skipping the cinema altogether, I can buy it on disc for about the same price at a later date and watch it as many times as I want.

A song has a tiny fixed cost per unit sold. Personally I think that my compensation to the artist (not their total compensation) for their effort in creating a song is pretty fairly priced at about $1 given their investment and costs. If they made something amazing, maybe a few million other people will also chip in and they'll be rich.

Honestly, I'm also not convinced money has any impact on the quality of music either. Amazing musicians often do well for themselves but lots of the big names in music put forth formulaic crap and pandering lyrics too. We get bargain-barrel quality despite those musician being well compensated, while some of the best performances I've witnessed are local artists still working a day job to survive and playing gigs on the side because they genuinely enjoy doing it (knowing full well their chosen genre to perform will never be a million dollar mainstream hit-maker).

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#185

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

I wonder if people give thought to the length of time it takes to learn an instrument, play it well, learn the recording process, record it well, learn the mixing process, mix it well, learn the mastering process, master it well etc. if they are willing to dismiss $1.50 as expensive for a song. In comparison, how much is a cup of coffee or a portion of chips (for us UK types)? How much is a trip to the cinema? It sho…

The hilarious part about this is that the OP is not only not willing to spend $.50 USD extra on a song... it is that it is for a song that he already loves and has listened to many times! What a great way to reward that artist!

My very favorite songs I've listened to a hundred times or more. In one case, I wanted a remix that wasn't even sold as a single, so I ended up paying about $50 for a promotional copy (given to DJs) on eBay.

It was definitely worth it.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#186
This article has a click-bait title, is nostalgic for the web of... 3 years ago??? And the "awesome indie music" is... well differences in taste I guess. Looks like somebody just found out that people have to actually pay for things, and decided to throw a tantrum aiming at advertisements because they felt that would be the lowest common denominator for galvanizing support.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#187

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

I wonder if people give thought to the length of time it takes to learn an instrument, play it well, learn the recording process, record it well, learn the mixing process, mix it well, learn the mastering process, master it well etc. if they are willing to dismiss $1.50 as expensive for a song. In comparison, how much is a cup of coffee or a portion of chips (for us UK types)? How much is a trip to the cinema? It sho…

I don't think you can honestly rationalise it like that.

You could similarly rationalise selling an iPad for $2,000 by 'We have a bajillion engineers, who all went to top schools after decades of non-stop education, who worked 80 hour weeks to refine every single component of this, who tested 100 different chamfers for this edge, who polished it, who ...'

The price of something should absolutely be dictated by how much the target market is willing to pay for it (and that includes ease of purchase etc) - otherwise people simply won't pay. For music, that is one of the reasons why you have so many people whining about how much piracy there is; their target market simply doesn't think that their music is worth the amount they want to charge it for.

The consumers may be incorrect, but it doesn't change the fact that the sales will be smaller because of this.

Music is frequently expensive to produce, but the sale price is largely independent of that. If you consider production costs alone, an orchestral recording should cost many times that of a band, due to its many times greater investment (an orchestral musician will be vastly more technically talented (after 2+ unpaid hours of practice per day for all but a few years of their life) than almost any band musician) and smaller market.

Meanwhile a live recording should cost almost nothing, as it can be produced simultaneously (and frequently is) released immediately after the gig.

The price is the same, because that's roughly what people are willing to spend on music.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 45 RPM single in 1962 was $1.00. That would be $5.60 adjusted for inflation today.

I worked for a company that made CDs for independent artists, and started selling Vinyl (didn't manufacture those in house, though). Vinyl is expensive to make, and heavy and expensive to ship. So I'd guess the vast majority of that cost would be eaten up in raw manufacturing and shipping costs, without even talking about middleman costs. And if I recall, our margin was pretty small.

Plus retail has its costs too, markup for vinyl used to be around 50%, plus VAT. So you'd buy the 12" from the distributor at 5–6 € net and sell it for 9–10 € incl. tax (numbers from 10 years ago in Germany, probably haven't changed all that much). Owing to low volume (you can only move so many units), running a record store inevitably leads to self-exploitation.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#189

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

1. Open SoundCloud

2. Open your browser's Developer Tools

3. Navigate to song page

4. Click on network tab in Developer Tools

5. Press the big play logo on the song

6. Look for the request for the MP3 file

7. Save link to computer

Honestly, for a rant that detailed about how corporations are ruining the internet, I kinda expected OP to know how to save songs off SoundCloud.

The worst part about this "modern web" for me is that mobile browsers can't seem to download a file from a website using simple HTTP authentication, because someone thought it would be a great fucking idea to write a separate app to manage downloads, and they never thought that someone might still be using HTTP simple authentication in 2014. So no, sorry, you can't download that file because our developers needed to write yet another app and didn't consider your use case.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#190

Users. Users always talk that they would love to pay. The problem is, they never do. They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data. You remember how in this whole Reddit debacle Pao said that "most of users don't really care about this scandal" and got downvoted to hell? It could very well be…

> Users always talk that they would love to pay. The problem is, they never do. Perhaps there are other reasons than not willing to. Say, for example, in Germany credit cards are not that common (other methods, like SEPA direct debit are used). Or they are in principle willing to pay, but not for the product that is offered (say, because of DRM or watermarks). Or they would pay, but don't trust their credit card numb…

That doesn't really matter for a company that has already raised some money and now desperately looking to get out of red, does it? (I'm not talking about Reddit or any companies in particular right now, just remembering my mind state when I was CEO/Founder: I can almost feel that desperate depression again).
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