[LAU] OT - Digital Rights

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:13 PM, alexander <axeldenstore at gmail.com> wrote:

> All it takes is a revolution of the mind.. these things takes a long time
> tho.. and all the anti piracy fud/propaganda wont make it faster...
>
> Imo it's absurd that you can charge 0,89€ for a locked down mp3 and get away
> with it.. I mean, the profit margins are 100%.. or well, they start out at ~
> -99.999...% and rise, approaching 99.99999999999999...% the more people who
> buy it.

what an interesting claim. perhaps you explain to me how it is that
this is for sale at (typically) US$0.49 per track:

   http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/album/Global-Illage-Sushilove-Sessions-MP3-Download/12031810.html:

and yet I'm still several thousand dollars in debt from the process
that led to its creation? (this wasn't supposed to be a blatant ad,
but if it turns out to be seen as such, my apologies).

you seem to have this idea that every piece of recorded music always
makes enough in sales to pay for its production. i can't cite anything
right now, but my impression is that the opposite is actually more
correct - a (huge?) majority recorded music never makes back its
costs. that's why major selling albums were so critical to the
recorded music industry of the last 50 years.

this is partly why businesses like emusic and itunes are so ideally
positioned: like the major labels of the past, they don't have a stake
in whether or not any particular album/tracks sell particularly well,
only that the overall aggregate sales from their catalog are high,
since they take a cut on every sale. they don't care if the sale was
Yet Another Lady Gaga or Maestro Boris and His Yucatan Yodellers.
better still, they don't even face any of the costs of producing
Boris' music, so even if it never sells a single copy, its not an
issue for them to list it (their marginal cost is close to zero). the
financial risks they face are almost entirely related to technology,
fraud and large scale deals with distributors - their risks from
actual sales numbers are minimal.

all of which means that you need to be fairly careful when you say
things like "the profit margins are 100%". there's more to recorded
music than selling/distributing it. it has to exist first, and this is
not a zero cost activity (more or less).