On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:13 PM, alexander <axeldenstore(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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-D…: 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).

On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:06:39 -0400 Joe Hartley <jh(a)brainiac.com> wrote: The 'investment' that most D.I.Y. recording artists forget is time! I just do it for fun myself, so I don't care, but if anyone is trying to be at all serious they should figure in their time at something like £30/hour. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

Hartmut Noack wrote: As long as no one is going around saying "Cough up $$$" for music the listener isn't interested in ... I think what some musicians want is to (1) do their own thing, whether or not anyone else likes it or is interested in it, and (2) have other people pay them for making music. That attitude has done a pretty good job of turning modern poetry into work only understood by the poets creating it ... -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On 10/24/2011 08:37 PM, Paul Davis wrote: Didn't know about that place. Perhaps digital copies will slowly go down to sane levels.. Well in the worst case it's because people simply don't like it.. but then, what is good music? I've pondered about this on a personal level, and I can honestly say that I still don't know what makes me like a certain song or band.. also, when making that. Did you expect to make up for the production cost? if not, the whole money issues doesn't really mather.. or perhaps you made it to make money? in that case it's all about marketing and making simple music that sounds like the stuff you hear on the most popular radio stations, but mostly it's really about getting known.... If you are really famous, you could probably sell your own poo on ebay and make a living out of it. And that is why I also said; "..or well, they start out at ~ -99.999...% and rise, approaching 99.99999999999999...% the more people who buy it." note the minus there infront of the first 99.999...% And yes I get your point that not all songs rise above 0% and here again lies that crucial questions of what makes a song sell, and if you make (record) music to make money or not. Live gigging is a whole other topic, cannot be copied yet... intelligent holograms anyone? The thing that bothers me with the current approach is that the price is set just as it was physical things that we sell, but it isn't. I mean I understand that the price for an actual CD can be 10-20€ but with digital distribution there are so many middle hands and steps that simply can be bypassed. On the otherhand I don't live in the world of commercial music so my opinion doesn't really mather, my music http://sharpattack.bandcamp.com/ ;D will be free at least for the time being, till I actually learn how to properly play the instruments and as I look for my sound... Will never cost 0,5€ per track tho, the financing schemes I've been interested in are name your price @ 0 - unlimited, or somekind of 'buy out system' or some really advanced 'song share holding system' that I pondered about some time ago. Where the first few buyers pay alot and as more and more people buy into it they get their money back :P

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: there's no reason to worry about establishing the value of something if you haven't actually managed to create it yet. if you can create something without an "investment" in it, that can lead to some fairly cool things. but for the most part, it tends to involve an investment of either time, or money, or both. the act of doing this is "an economic analysis" whether its done explicitly or not. it means that for one reason or another someone values whatever it is they are creating more than the other things they might spend their time and/or money on. if you have lots of surplus time or lots of surplus money, making that decision is relatively easy. if you're working on something that feels like your life's purpose (for now, at least) then making that decision is relatively easy. these two cases might be so easy that the people making the choice might not even notice that they are making it. but most people find themselves somewhere in the middle of these extremes, and thus they do tend to have to give at least a little thought to how to allocate (limited) resources to the different things that they would like to do or to have.