what happens if SOPA passes?

the economics of pricing music have always been weird. I remember reading that all the goofy "subsections" in the tracklisting of In the Court of the Crimson King were done just to get more royalties as apparently you don't get much for writing "only 5 songs". iTunes and Amazon will still price an hour-long, 7-track album at $6.93 and a half-half, 10-track one at $9.90

i liked the allofmp3 system of just paying per megabyte

then again if you start charging for albums based on length then everything will be like the 90's R. Kelly era where every release is 78-79 minutes long.

especially since it was so impossible to buy most songs as a single serving apart from parent albums before that.

That's pretty much where the music industry started digging its own grave. Majors stopped manufacturing/selling singles in the 90s, so you had to buy an $18 CD for the one song you wanted. File sharing started as "I just want this one song" rather than "I want artists' entire discographies."

it still makes me mad! i loved buying singles. i bought them all the time. i've never bought an MP3 single.

i still understand why they had to do it. you can't charge $3.99 for a half hour cd single and $18.99 for a half hour album. it looked bad.

Yeah, I used to buy singles too. I think I have a few CD singles that are longer than some albums (Yo La Tengo's "Upside-Down" springs to mind -- one of its "b-sides" is 24 minutes long).

how come the price of gas suddenly goes up and then never comes down they should do that with mp3s

what would have happened if the major labels had cut their advertising budgets by half and started putting out five dollar CDs? i would own a LOT of CDs if they had done that.

Speaking of gas, lets remember that iatee is in favor of jailing all automobile owners rather than actually working towards an effective topdown solution that reverses decades of planning America around those very same automobiles, so grain of salt in all.

In other words, like the car argument we all come from the same place but iatee takes a really different route than everyone else.

ya and a train takes me there

what would have happened if the major labels had cut their advertising budgets by half and started putting out five dollar CDs? i would own a LOT of CDs if they had done that.

Starting in the late 80s, it cost less to manufacture a CD than an LP, but CDs were sold at nearly double the price of LPs. Since sales kept rising (more people buying more affordable CD players, yuppies replacing their LPs with CDs), they didn't see any reason to lower prices. At one point, majors tried to mount a campaign against used CD stores, but nothing really came of it, and sales were still healthy, so why bother?

i wonder if the cd was to the music industry what the suv was to the car industry

http://ailicontinifield.com/projects/akbar_and_jeff/images/compact_disk_hut.jpg

I've never bought a mp3 and I've had an itunes card that was a gift for awhile now. I don't know what to do it with. I see mp3s as a transitional copy of music. If someone gives me mp3s of a record, I'm either going to seek the actual record out or I will eventually discard the mp3s. Even the mps I have on my computer are transitional and never stay for more than a year. But I'm guilty of what this bill is aimed at. I copy my records and share them with people. I've never thought that I am stealing, maybe I am. But I've never thought that owning a mp3 is really "owning" anything. But I feel like my records are mine.

was there a time when they were called compact disks instead of compact discs, or is that life in hell comic just wrong?

if it gets too risky for you guys to download files cuz of a new law or something i can hook you up. come by any time. ilxor discount.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/405487_10150547137427137_686202136_8958683_295480582_n.jpg

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/407584_10150547139562137_686202136_8958691_1342874711_n.jpg

s'opa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hve9QES_ICM

Hey scott can I send you a wish list?

was there a time when they were called compact disks instead of compact discs, or is that life in hell comic just wrong?

I seem to remember the "disk" spelling being part of NYTimes style throughout the 80s and into the early 90s. And for a brief period, the Times was referring to them as "compact disk albums."

i'm envisioning a Variety headline: SONY SOUR AS SCOTUS SCUTTLES SOPA!

yes, jacob, sure, why not, you never know......................

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

Disk and disc are the two alternative spellings of the descriptive word for things of a generally thin and circular geometry. These variations are due to the way in which the words originated. The discussion here somewhat focuses on Disk storage as an Electronic media. Generally in Computer terminology, disk refers to Magnetic storage while disc refers to Optical storage.

omg i had completely internalized this distinction w/ realizing it

we takin' over

w/out realizing i mean obv

"hard disk" and "compact disc" look and feel completely natural. "hard disc" and "compact disk", not.

wake up sheeple

Taxing the internet is pretty much the opposite of commerce. It's a solution proposed by people who imo don't understand what encourages content production and distribution – at its distant logical conclusion (i.e. a dystopian world in which all content is free and everyone 'subscribes' to everything via an internet tax) what you're doing is basically just handing a load of people some money to vaguely make some stuff, with no financial incentive for that stuff to be good. At least with subscription television (the closest analogue I can come up with) there is some incentive to provide quality/value so that people keep subscribing. All this is in my opinion, in my opinion, in my opinion.

Also in my opinion, piracy absolutely needs to be reigned in, but there's no getting rid of piracy altogether. That has never been possible and it never will be. I think the content industries know that, but it's a convenient scapegoat for them to take to govts worldwide in order to get the SOPA-like protectionism that they will actually need if they want to continue operating for another n decades in their current bloated forms, maintaining artificial scarcity, geoblocking the world &c.

btw DJP's photocopying (and therefore scanning) analogy is u+k, principally imo because it indicates that people will always pay handsomely for the same content if it's of higher quality and easier to obtain. The whole 'you can't compete with free' argument is bullshit.

"financial incentive" does not equal "good music"

people will always pay handsomely for the same content if it's of higher quality and easier to obtain

pretty sure the last decade does not bear this out wtf

ie MP3s sound like shit

not anymore!

pretty sure the last decade does not bear this out wtf

― “How you like that, Mr. Hitler!” (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 09:42 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ie MP3s sound like shit

― “How you like that, Mr. Hitler!” (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 09:42 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

256 kbps one-click iTunes download is superior to a set of 96 kbps files you found on the third torrent site you tried that day

Taxing the internet is pretty much the opposite of commerce. It's a solution proposed by people who imo don't understand what encourages content production and distribution – at its distant logical conclusion (i.e. a dystopian world in which all content is free and everyone 'subscribes' to everything via an internet tax) what you're doing is basically just handing a load of people some money to vaguely make some stuff, with no financial incentive for that stuff to be good. At least with subscription television (the closest analogue I can come up with) there is some incentive to provide quality/value so that people keep subscribing. All this is in my opinion, in my opinion, in my opinion.

ideally the music downloaded or "subscribed to" would be tracked and money paid out accordingly

obviously this is not going to happen for a very long time given how much legislation is in place already, but it's not like I'm suggesting we give the big three several million in tax money and tell them to find another Justin Bieber

Digital file music actually added a lot of value compared to what came before! I mean you have shuffle, you have cloud storage, streaming through services like spotify, you can play them on really tiny players that don't skip if you jump up and down a lot, etc.

256 kbps one-click iTunes download is superior to a set of 96 kbps files you found on the third torrent site you tried that day

― Autumn Almanac (Schlafsack), Tuesday, January 17, 2012 2:52 PM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sure and wines taste different lol

That's pretty much where the music industry started digging its own grave

Nah, the industry started digging its own grave when CDs replaced LPs. Digital copies of anything = easy to copy and distribute for free.

At least with subscription television (the closest analogue I can come up with) there is some incentive to provide quality/value so that people keep subscribing. All this is in my opinion, in my opinion, in my opinion.

i think the incentive for cable tv channels is "pls god let us be put into a basic package with espn" :/

i honestly can't fathom why ppl still buy digital music from itunes instead of amazon

Nah, the industry started digging its own grave when CDs replaced LPs. Digital copies of anything = easy to copy and distribute for free.yeah, but no one that i know of anticipated the present situation at the time, so it's hard to blame it on poor decisions made by the industry (rather than the simple progress of technology). and i strongly doubt that keeping the single alive would have changed much about where we're at right now.

i guess that's becoming my signature

yeah, but no one that i know of anticipated the present situation at the time

usenet groups amirite

sometimes there will be obscure stuff that's not on amazon, but besides that I totally agree. things you buy for 99 cents should not become a hassle because you might "mis-use" them

they were first in the crosshairs because of data footprint, albums/mp3s are so small...then it happened to movies...video games might stay ahead of the curve because data keeps increasing with each generation, it used to be crazy to fill up a double-density DVD now naughty dog struggles to fit uncharted on a blu-ray

but there was nothing they could have done, piracy was too easy

there was nothing they could have done

One thing they could have done was to not go out of their way to make it harder for people to buy and use content

I definitely don't think keeping the single alive would have prevented the rise of file sharing, but it might have slowed down certain tendencies. Also, in addition to keeping singles around, labels still would have had to seriously lower prices on CDs, and since they were making insane profits on this no-singles/$18 CDs business model, majors saw no reason to mess with it.

xp This shit was the tipping point imo

http://seeklogo.com/images/C/Copy_Control-logo-9793502DF6-seeklogo.com.gif

i mean i guess there were things that could have slowed the decline, but everyone's a fuckin' genius now but you must admit it would have been hard to understand what was going on when the ground was moving so quickly under your feet

you must admit it would have been hard to understand what was going on when the ground was moving so quickly under your feet

Definitely, although there was a time (Napster stands out imo) when it was pretty gd obvious that people wanted to download stuff, and to have some control of what they were downloading. The Copy Control image I posted above is indicative of just how desperate the big music labels were to control people's use of music, and Copy Control happened years after the Napster thing.

(For those who don't know, Copy Control stopped you ripping the CD you paid for. The notion that you were purchasing one licence for use in only a CD player didn't wash.)

yeah, but no one that i know of anticipated the present situation at the time, so it's hard to blame it on poor decisions made by the industry (rather than the simple progress of technology). and i strongly doubt that keeping the single alive would have changed much about where we're at right now.

I might be overstating this but i think in general this is the result of an industry that's been fucking over its customers for the last 40 years, trying to get people to buy the same albums over and over, promising price drops that never came, limiting the consumer's options whenever possible, introducing ridiculous stuff like "copy protection" to dick over people who tried to do things legally, attempting to bankrupt and ruin the lives of college students and single mothers for downloading songs that everyone's heard on classic rock radio for the last 30 years - I mean they are truly one of the most unlikeable industries around (even the artists say so!), and I find I'm way, way, way more likely to buy stuff when it's directly from the artist or a small label

Music consumers are the biggest whiners on the planet imo

yes

I remember how great Napster was because the interface was so much easier to navigate than any other option at that point. I remember telling my roommate that even if I had to pay a quarter for a song I would have happily done so just to have to much music at my fingertips, instantly. My argument was based on people happily paying that much a jukebox for just on play!