a quick look on google turned up several things, most of which say that top earners make 25 to 100k per concert regardless of other expenses.. this is one man deals mind you im certain that number stays the same if youre a band, but...200-300 of those a year and thats a boatload of cash. all music sales aside.
The reason I support a universal license scheme is I don't think piracy can be cured, at least not in a practical way. The lawsuit system jams up our courts. Criminal charges would jam up our courts and our prisons. For what is probably a smaller cost we could give everyone all digital information for free. The cost of providing it is virtually free. That's the cost of providing it. The cost of creating it isn't free, but it's a set cost. If I spend the time to record a song, and Adam records two songs and Isaac records three songs we are each going to have a cost. We can skimp or spend lavishly on it. Say at $1 a song Adam would get three downloads of each of his songs. He should get $6. Isaac sells 2 copies of each of his 3 songs so he gets $6. I sell 1 copy of my 1 song (Thanks Mom!). I get $1.
Now, with a universal license Adam might get 10 downloads of each of his songs (20 downloads total). Isaac might get 7 downloads of each song (21 downloads total) and I might get three (3 downloads total). So how much should we get? Well, the market value of our work is $13. There are 44 total downloads. You divide 13/44 and each share is worth a little less than 30 cents. Adam gets just under $5.90, Isaac gets $6.20 and I 90 cents.
That's what the fair market value of our work is. Pretty close. You need a formula figures out how much people would spend and divide it up based on what they would buy, and lets everyone take what they need it's sounds like you have communism, but it's actually something else. The part of the market where there still needs to be capitalistic incentives (creating the music) and socialize the part that silly computers are doing. Instead of creating $13 dollars worth of usable material and creating an incentive to steal you have created $44 dollars worth of material and gotten rid of the incentive to steal.
Of course, it's not as simple as that. You still need a way to find that first number, 13, to figure out what to pay Adam, Isaac and me. And someone will offer to download 16 copies of my music in exchange for half the extra money I make, but I think as a society we will be more willing to except that person is a criminal and prosecute them, and if I use their service I will have money that you can take away from me as a penalty. Lots of people the RIAA sues steal because they don't have money, so suing them is kind of silly.
We already have examples of a system that works like this. Clubs that want to put on performances of cover songs have to pay a fee to get licenses. That money gets split up with copyright holders. This is just extending that concept to recordings.
By the way, all numbers in this article represent 1 million units. That's right, I expect my mother to buy 1 million copies of my song. She really loves me! :)
edit- And as I said earlier, auctions would be a better way to sell concert tickets. Right now ticket scalpers snap up fixed price tickets and take the difference between what a ticket is marked as and what it's worth in the fair market and pocket that money as a middle man who adds no real value to the deal. I suspect that it would also help shows that aren't going to sell out to get over the hump. Sure, the front row tickets might cost $50, but that seat in the 3rd balcony might go for $2. What does the band care. $2 is $2, the hall looks full and maybe the nosebleeder buys a shirt on the way out. ---------- Nate Facebook
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2010 2:48 PM
By charging less the money would be more likely to go to the artist? You guys have a lot to learn about overhead coasts. I suspect you don't run your own business arzajac. ---------- The Art Teacher Formally Known As scstrickland
Stick- If you steal it the artist doesn't get paid! If the artist doesn't get paid he can't pay for the groupies. A musician without groupies loses the urge to make music. When they don't make music, there is nothing to steal or buy. They end up looking for jobs flipping burgers. The sudden influx of cheap labor allows burger joints to slash labor costs, and in turn, sell cheaper burgers. Those few people who still have jobs buy those burgers and die from cholesterol. Without product members of the tax base, schools decline even further. Pretty soon, the few survivors, all of them with high cholesterol from cheap burgers and no insurance because of a glut of cheap labor, need heart surgery, but the only training the doctor has is five hours of Milton's Bradley's 'Operation'. They die. Adam's record sales crash, Isaac end up selling bootleg copies of his own albums from the back of a car so he doesn't have to pay the RIAA share and I am forced to become a merkin model, which trust me, is not a good thing. ---------- Nate Facebook
Nacoran, I wholly agree with you on the universal license, but not so on your views on ticket selling, which would work perfectly only for big venues.
What is at stake here is : musicians (performers and composers) must get paid wherever an whenever they play and wherever and whenever their music is played. The global license is the most reasonable mean to achieve this with equity, and would allow even obscure artists and independant companies to get their dues.
Live music is part of the story, and you're right to point that a partly similar system is already applied.
My concern is small venues, like your town club, i.e. the places I like to patronize, which have no 3rd balconies, and where the musicians have no T-shirts to sell. These places have fixed charges, and no room to gamble on the ticket price. And the number of such places is shrinking dramatically.
(And, please, that has nothing to do with illegal downloads, but much more with the way we live now, our access to entertainment and even the way we socialize. Last paper I've read on the subject showed that on the whole downloaders belonged to the class of people who spent more in music, and went to live music)
I may be old fashion in some way, but there are pieces of our lives that must be insulated from the stock exchange frenzy.
But the idea is that the less that a song costs, the more likely that people will pay for it instead of downloading it illegally. The inflection point on the price / chances-the-song-will-be-bought-instead-of-downloaded graph has an inflection point between the 1 and 5 cent mark.
Profitability depends on your overhead and your popularity. Bandwidth can cost next to nothing. It's easier to sell a million one-dollar tickets rather than 100 ten-thousand dollar tickets.
so arzajac if you charge a penny a minute you will get more business and therefore make more money right? ---------- The Art Teacher Formally Known As scstrickland
saregapadanisa- Your right, auctioning tickets is probably impractical at smaller venues, probably any place that is small enough so they use general admission. The idea of the auction is that scalpers have gotten so good at corrupting the system that we already have a kind of defacto auction in place, only middlemen are making all the extra money. Even in an auction a venue can set a minimum reserve price. They can also set a maximum bid, or a system where a certain price guarantees you a ticket but upping your bid gets you better seats. Venues of a certain size already have complex seating charts where you can chose a seating section knowing what the price is.
The closest thing you could do to the auction method at a general admission venue is lower the price at the door if you aren't getting enough people through the turnstile, although I think you'd need a band rep and a house rep at each door to make sure everyone got their fair share.
Nacoran, Problem here is similar to what happened to plane ticket pricing. No matter if the service, or in our case the music, was good or not. The guy who paid more will go home with the bitter feeling of having been ripped off.
I'm glad these two threads came up, I found a BW album I'd been looking for on I-tunes.....sign me up! Welcome to the 21st century Joe.........
I personally don't feel right about these free download sites, for non-music reasons. The few bucks it would save isn't worth risking my computer system.
Ahhh, Joe brings up a good point! I stopped using Kazaa years ago, and those download programs in general, because they put too much crap that ruined my computer. There are many ways other than those sites to get free music though.
Saregapadanisa- The guy who paid more probably got better seats. You could auction them by section. Say you have 50 seats in a section, you take bids and when bidding closes you arrange bids highest to lowest. You count down the list to number 50. That bid is the price the top 50 bidders pay. There are all sorts of ways to do it. I suspect that just as many people will feel like they got a deal. The problem with selling tickets at a fixed price is the scalpers buy them all up. At that point you have two choices- Consider Scalping a crime- which turns both scalpers and ticket seekers into criminals, or make scalping legal. If you make scalping legal scalpers charge whatever the market will bare, or pretty much auction price. They get the difference in price instead of the band. If the band runs the auction they get the money. They can set reserve and maximum bids. They can give away seats to the presidents of their fan clubs. The only thing that really changes is if a scalper wants to scalp tickets he pays a lot higher price (closer to street value) or the ticket and runs the risk of a lot bigger losses. The band doesn't run that risk though. They own the tickets from the start. If a scalper buys it, fine. He paid it. If he raises the price too much he won't sell it. He can't afford to run that risk so he sells it, even possibly taking a loss, to get what he can out of it. Right now he pays off some clerk to give him 100 tickets before anyone else can buy them and triples or quadruples the price.
I read an oddly related book called, 'The High Price of Free Parking'. In a weird way seating at a show is related to parking spaces in a garage. There is a demand for both, there is a limited supply of both. A privately owned garage usually tries to keep about half it's spaces filled. They could lower their rate and fill more spaces, but they'd lose revenue. Say they have a hundred spaces. Say they could charge $5 and fill every space. They make $500. If they can fill every space they raise their rates. At some point they maximize their profits. Since they charge the same rate, no matter what, it turns out that they make their best profit at about 50% occupancy.
The same should hold for concert venues (except of course once they have you there they can squeeze out more money on concessions and merchandise.) For city planning, it turns out, for the public good it's usually better for the city to step in and run the garages at a rate closer to 100%, but some new parking metering systems are adjusting the rates based on how many spaces are left. It means that parking in the middle of the busiest part of the day may cost more. That's the part of the theory that bands could use.
An empty seat is worth no money. They already charge more for better seats, but with an auction they can maximize profits, but at the same time, they can change the math so that it's better to fill all the seats instead of just 50%. Let the rich people slug it out for the best seats. That's capitalism, but the best part of the auction is that once the bidding has died down then what's left, instead of being left unsold, can be sold on the cheap. Yes, it will be more expensive to get into a sold out show, but that's tough already.
As long as it's a public bid, as opposed to a private bid, similar seats should sell for similar prices. I don't think people will end up bitter.
"so arzajac if you charge a penny a minute you will get more business and therefore make more money right?"
Stickman: I think you are missing my point. I'm not saying that artists deserve only small amounts of money. I'm saying that the model for distributing music has changed and the industry has not caught up.
I actually get a few pennies every time someone clicks an ad on one of my sites. It's not a huge site, between 30k and 50k hits per month. But it adds up.
The internet is huge. I wasn't making the point as a joke. It's not about big sums of money, but millions of very small sums of money.
Things cost money! Quit whining and pay $.99 for a song. (a very reasonable price; considering that ten years ago the cheapest you could get a CD was $13.99 on sale, for a new release, and ten of those songs sucked. For something older it would cost you $22) So quit whining and pay for what you get! If you think the price is too high then don't buy it. Better yet learn to play it yourself!
Back in 1988 when I was hangin' in pool halls, I would gladly drop 4 quarters into a juke box to play four songs. Now you can drop four quarters on one song and you can listen it anytime, anywhere; put it on your I-pod, Computer, CD. You could play it 1000 times and still people gripe that they are getting ripped off. Please!
It's a dollar. It costs less than a candy bar and lasts longer. pay up!
---------- The Art Teacher Formally Known As scstrickland
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2010 7:14 PM
This is a little left field but still very much aligned to music rights ownership and royalties. This news story made headlines here and Men at Work have copped a massive fine.
I must admit that I find this pursuit by the music industry to be outlandishly unfair.
Think about it. You have a riff in your head, can't recall from where or why, probably from childhood even......
We need to be real careful ie to the extent that we don't produce anything!!! After all there are only so many notes to play with that the combinations coming together often must unknowingly and unwittingly copy something. The same lotto numbers do sometimes happen and there are 40 to pick from!
Stick- I don't think it's that people mind playing 99 cents a song for a few songs. Everyone has a budget though, say you can afford $10 a month for music. Once you've spent what you can afford you can't get more music. If you can come up with a system that gets that $10 to the artists then is there really a reason to shut off the music at that point? Nobody financially gains if you aren't going to buy the music.
Of course the problem with stealing music is we aren't very honest with ourselves when there is no cost for something. If we could pay $10 a month for music, but we can steal it for free, what's to keep us from saying, gee, I can only afford $5 for music this month. Your right, there needs to be a system in place that gets artists their money, but since the distribution cost of electronic data is so low simply charging what we always charged may not be the best way to do it. If you charge a penny for a song, yes, you need to move 100 times as many songs as you do if you sell things for a dollar, but you may find that you do in fact move 100 times more music, because the cost of accessing your music has gotten so low that everyone is filling their hard drives with way more music. You make the same amount, but many more people get to enjoy your work. That's the model that subscription services run on. Some services actually pay the subscribers portion by running ads. The question with this model is how much does it really cost to send information over the internet. Does the model work if the internet service provider needs to take 5 cents on each transaction? Will you get 100 times the hits if you have to charge 6 cents a song? $1 a song can add up pretty quickly.
The streaming service model also opens up the possibility that songs you listen to more often make the artist more money. If the artist gets a fraction every time you stream a song they will eventually make more money on it than a song you listen to once or twice and then forget about.
Radiohead tried an experiment with paying whatever you want for the album. The articles I've read on it suggest they did pretty well. I don't know if it's because it was something novel, or it was because they were Radiohead.
why pay .99 cents a song.. most stuff can be found at www.legalsounds.com for .09 per song! there are a ton of artists too..
as for downloading music, yeah, i have done it.. but i NEVER would have paid for most of it.. and HAVE turned around and paid for some of it.. i liked it, so i bought it..
i have also recorded mix tapes off the radio, pressed the record button on a VCR, or DVR, used a copy machine to copy a page from a book, and im sure there are more ways that i have copied something for my use.. looks like im going to hell :)
I do think that it had a lot to do with being Radiohead. They were willing to gamble on their very loyal and large fanbase.
I don't think it came off as novel though. I remember when I heard it on the news thinking "Wow, that is the future and the answer!" I don't think I was alone.
They had also offered at the same time an expensive pay only package with hardcopy and art for people who wanted the full monty - smart.
I think musicians these days have to capitalize on the internet if they want a chance of making it a career.
The great thing about it is you CAN get yourself out there. It is work and being social and disciplined but very possible.
In terms of the argument, that which you resist persists. My mindset is to simply know that there is some amount of ripping off going on, and there always has been.
Focus on your fans, create value added packages, a little marketing knowledge doesn't hurt. ---------- There is nowhere to go and nothing to find, only something to create.
i've been out of town for a few days at a friends wedding, which turned into a few days bender. i did wonder how much grief i would cop in this thread. as it turned out peoples objections were civil and constructive so thank you everyone. these are things i've been thinking about a lot recently and i thought they might be of interest to other music fans. Adam sorry if i'm not very articulate. any lack of clarity, double talk and equivocations are accidental. yes i was talking about illegal downloads, no i have never signed a form or paid money at torrentz.com, its a search engine and it works just like google and i will remove the links, it's your site. buddah thanks for making me look as stupid as possible and i may max out my credit card on a couple of your harps in the coming weeks (i imagine payment will need to be in advance and this can be accomodated). Stickman i never said i "should" be able to download songs illegally just that me doing so doesn't hurt artists. as you're not the only person who interpreted it this way i'll take it as my bad. i was trying to explain why the conclusion of basically every study into the issue is that file sharing doesn't hurt artists, by using myself as an example. i probably only succeeded in complicating the issue.
anyway, i understand peoples objections to file sharing, i can even relate to and agree with some of them, however i don't feel the need or the inclination to argue why i'm right and somebody else is wrong, especially about issues that relate to moraliy and world view, as i submit that i may have it all wrong.
here are a couple of links to articles by people more articulate than me (relating to cause/effect, not right/wrong)
maybe i should have just posted these links (or others similar) in the first place and left it at that, but you live and learn. i joined this forum to try to learn more about playing the harmonica from people who play better than me and not really to discuss this kind of thing so i think i'll just go back to asking questions about harmonica playing. anyway thanks guys for your thoughts and sorry to bump this thread again if you are bored of the subject but people had asked me direct questions. ---------- conjob
Conjob- It may not be harp specific, but I think this is a good thread to have. Thanks for posting it. The music industry is changing. There are lots of different directions it can go and the more we think about solutions the better the chances are that musicians can figure out a way to exist and profit in the changing landscape.
Some people download in order never have to spend any money; others use it as a way to find out what they want to buy. In 2006 I got on the internet for the first time, downloaded a lot of stuff and bought more than 100 CDs. Until then I had bought an average of fewer than 10 CDs a year. Nowadays I don't download and I buy a lot fewer CDs. You talk about the musicians, but their managers and producers - you know, the ones with the 500 foot yachts - come in-between them and the money. So which of them is deprived of money and why? Bill Gates a year ago wanted all internet media to be pay-per-view. Perhaps we should set up a Help Bill Gates charity? ---------- Kinda hot in these rhinos!
I just read an article related to this. According to the article it costs about 5 cents to download a movie to one person. So if you extrapolate, an album should come in at less than a penny.
Of course, this has ramifications beyond illegal downloads. If you are an artist and the hosting site wants to take 40 cents a song per download...
