Politics: Blog Within a Blog
There's a good discussion going on in the comments from our post about RIAA the other day. I'm going to put my latest comment in here to tell you to read the whole thing. One of the commenters is using the handle James Hetfield, which is a riot:
I think it would be awesome if the actual James Hetfield was joining a comment discussion about music downloading on our site.
However, I am skeptical that is the case.
Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a connections between a craven industry that doesn't pride itself on creating a product worth your $20, the rise of music sharing and the death of the small record store.
Look at the numbers for music purchases today and you can see that if some adjustments were made (in quality and breadth of product offering, price points and marketing techniques) everybody could thrive.
When we were undergoing crushing austerity measures to save enough money to buy a house and start a family, I downloaded music. Much of what I downloaded I eventually replaced with purchased music, because I wanted to support the artist (several of whom have lost or dropped their labels because they were poorly promoted, badly managed and more). Today, I download songs for a buck a piece from Apple, and I buy only records that I really, really want to have in complete form (got that Frank Black record yesterday, natch).
If a record were $12 in the store instead of $19, I would probably buy more records. If I buy ten records a year now, I spend $190 bucks a year. If the price drops to $12, I would probably buy twice as many records, spending $240 bucks a year.
More money, more stores, more artists, better music on the radio, voila. World peace? Maybe not. But I think we need only look back on the summer of "Hot in Herre" to know what we don't want from record labels anymore.
It's time to think different about music. If labels aren't willing to market and promote real artists who can make a listenable cd of songs as opposed to the next 15 minutes worth of ear candy, they deserve what they get, CDs will wither and die, and even James Hetfield can't change that.
There's a good discussion going on in the comments from our post about RIAA the other day. I'm going to put my latest comment in here to tell you to read the whole thing. One of the commenters is using the handle James Hetfield, which is a riot:
I think it would be awesome if the actual James Hetfield was joining a comment discussion about music downloading on our site.
However, I am skeptical that is the case.
Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a connections between a craven industry that doesn't pride itself on creating a product worth your $20, the rise of music sharing and the death of the small record store.
Look at the numbers for music purchases today and you can see that if some adjustments were made (in quality and breadth of product offering, price points and marketing techniques) everybody could thrive.
When we were undergoing crushing austerity measures to save enough money to buy a house and start a family, I downloaded music. Much of what I downloaded I eventually replaced with purchased music, because I wanted to support the artist (several of whom have lost or dropped their labels because they were poorly promoted, badly managed and more). Today, I download songs for a buck a piece from Apple, and I buy only records that I really, really want to have in complete form (got that Frank Black record yesterday, natch).
If a record were $12 in the store instead of $19, I would probably buy more records. If I buy ten records a year now, I spend $190 bucks a year. If the price drops to $12, I would probably buy twice as many records, spending $240 bucks a year.
More money, more stores, more artists, better music on the radio, voila. World peace? Maybe not. But I think we need only look back on the summer of "Hot in Herre" to know what we don't want from record labels anymore.
It's time to think different about music. If labels aren't willing to market and promote real artists who can make a listenable cd of songs as opposed to the next 15 minutes worth of ear candy, they deserve what they get, CDs will wither and die, and even James Hetfield can't change that.
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