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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

#101

Post by Semaphor »

thallian wrote: post #99
Semaphor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Ha, die Streuner were the original inspiration for me to write my own dumb and small music streaming service. Seeing them mentioned here might just give me the motivation to pick that project up again.

Hah, that’s cool :D They are on Spotify, nowadays, though. But yeah, I own all their albums, though it took until last week for me to realize they had a 25th anniversary album in 2019. Without facebook it’s hard keeping up with releases of bands not on Bandcamp.

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

#102

Post by cubefox »

zirgs wrote: post #93
expertentipp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.

That was true in the late 1990s, but by mid-2000s everyone could get fast internet with no data caps. That's when Steam started taking off, but music industry was still stuck in the previous century.

They weren't, iTunes (and other services before that) existed before Steam. The music industry was ahead of the games industry, not the other way round. The difference is that video game DRM (Steam) succeeded, but music DRM didn't.

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

#103

Post by realusername »

cubefox wrote: post #98
realusername wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music. Buying CDs wasn't a reasonable choice anymore in the digital age, CDs were outdated and not fit in the age where people could buy portable mp3 players. The music industry was beyond late, they were a full decade late to the party and paid the…

> Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music. That's simply false, iTunes launched in 2001.

Yes I know, I specifically avoided to talk about it since it did not really meet the demand at the time. The catalog was too small and DRMs were not removable at the time (until 2009) so it was pretty much useless for an mp3 player. I still give it to iTunes, it was the only legal place to buy music for the longest time even if it was limited.

Also the Windows version and the music store only launched in 2003.

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

#104

Post by gumballindie »

techdragon wrote: post #35
gumballindie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality may have tanked but profits soared. Music, movies and any other corporate product are meant to appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore they have to be average.

Corporate profits soared, but not the profits that get paid to artists. Wholehearted support for the efforts by the WGA, SAG, and the related unions, to stop “big corporate media” fucking over everyone in the arts even if it won’t help the average Spotify streamer today or tomorrow, but perhaps eventually it will further into the future…

Indeed. As a side note i wasnt praising corporations, quite the contrary. Some of the things provided are good but overall corporations are detrimental to the society, environment, public health, security and the economy. Both in the music industry and outside.

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

#105

Post by techdragon »

gumballindie wrote: post #104
techdragon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate profits soared, but not the profits that get paid to artists. Wholehearted support for the efforts by the WGA, SAG, and the related unions, to stop “big corporate media” fucking over everyone in the arts even if it won’t help the average Spotify streamer today or tomorrow, but perhaps eventually it will further into the future…

Indeed. As a side note i wasnt praising corporations, quite the contrary. Some of the things provided are good but overall corporations are detrimental to the society, environment, public health, security and the economy. Both in the music industry and outside.

I didn’t even for a moment think you were praising them, it’s just so easy for people to forget the percentage breakdowns behind the PR pieces these companies put out. I’m sure I’ve done it myself too often enough.

Corporations aren’t inherently an evil concept… the rubicon was corporate personhood. The idea that corporations have equivalent rights to people unless we legislate that they don’t… that’s the mind poison… the rot that has slowly eaten into society and for more than a hundred years has been backing up capitalism and corporatism and all the greed and corruption with the subtle backstop of thought terminating cliches like “people have rights and corporations are people so they have rights” and normal people don’t want to learn a mountain of history to unpack the lies and bullshit…

And companies have the money to hire the best PR… so they have done a pretty good job convincing everyone on the sorts of subjects that are in the corporations best interests… sadly.

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

#107

Post by cubefox »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
cubefox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, because they had to compete against music piracy, which is hard, as pirated music is free.

[flagged]

You just didn't provide any argument that piracy didn't cause the observed collapse of the music industry.

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

#108

Post by taylodl »

More like 'When Gene Simmons Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s.' It was as stupid as Lars Ulrich attacking Napster in the early 2000's. In both cases their respective bands, Kiss and Metallica, took a considerable hit in their popularity.

Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns out to not be a very good business practice.

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

#109

Post by cubefox »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #92
cubefox wrote: post #57

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. 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…

About a decade ago there used to be a site in the Polish internet called "Strata Kazika" (Kazik's Loss). At that time Kazik was one of the most vocal anti-piracy artists who equaled copying to stealing. So the site's shtick was to take Kazik's newest album and copy it. Then delete to make place for another copy. In a loop. The site then counted how much money has been already stolen from Kazik in the process, and you…

> About a decade ago there used to be a site in the Polish internet called "Strata Kazika" (Kazik's Loss). At that time Kazik was one of the most vocal anti-piracy artists who equaled copying to stealing.

This is highly irrelevant. I didn't say anything about stealing. The actual music revenue collapsed starting from 1999. Due to pure magic apparently!

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

#110

Post by toyg »

cubefox wrote: post #94
zirgs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices. The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against pir…

> they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.

Bull. Any reasonably-sized town had at least one "dodgy" seller of pirated CDs.

CDs were expensive because they were fundamentally a vanity item, with sleeves and goodies. That empowered middlemen and official distribution chains which, in developed countries, is typically where profit accumulates. Artists themselves, under contract with labels, couldn't buy CDs at cost to sell at concerts - labels were pressured to protect the distribution chains.

CDs made middlemen rich, not artists.

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