> From: Tom Penney <blots at visi.com> I start with one concrete point of disagreement, but really share your opinions on this one. > Yes, Manufacturing and distributing a CD costs about the same as > manufacturing and distributing a candy bar. False. The scale is probably an order of magnitude different. A new candy bar will be *expected* to sell in the millions of units, whereas a million units of a recording is still a pretty good achievement. The sentiment is right, just the numbers are off. A candy bar's costs can be amortized over a long period of time, whereas most recordings have a high "development" cost and little return. The economics of the business are further degraded by the speculative approach to A&R often taken these days, where a lot of money-losing titles in a labels catalog are subsidized by the one or two big money makers, like Christina Aguilera or whatever the current tramp-du-jour is. > The problem is the record companies have been way to greedy for way to > long. True. But this goes back to the 20's, when artists had to sing for each cylinder that was recorded. They got caught using pantographs to record multiple cylinders while only paying the artist for only one performance! > The artists don't get that much. True. It used to be that an artist got about $1 out of $8 for an LP. When CD came out, the artist typically got about $1 out of $16. Initially this was because CDs *did* cost more to produce that LPs, but when CD costs came down in the late 80's and early 90's, the artist share didn't change. > The artists (along with the > record companies) will pay the price for the record companies greed. But > everyone will survive in the end. IMHO Agreed, but it is the consumer as well. That discussion (A&R and trends in musical quality) is getting even further off topic than the rest of this thread, though. Anyway, .99 for a song is better than $15 for a song and bunch of bad ones, but heck -- I'm still having trouble finding one that's worth the dollar to begin with. ;) Phil Mendelsohn Owner / Chief Engineer Hotdish Mastering -- "To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." -- Anonymous _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list