Would You Pay 5 Cents For a Song?

irikar writes "An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening."

Re:I will stop downloading

[mmkkbb]

Several techno labels have done just that. Backcatalogs full of hard to find stuff have been placed on iTMS

Re:Death of the CD

[R.Caley]

If i could download 15 songs for only $0.75, so why should i ever buy a CD again?

Depends on who `i' is. For variosu people there are:

• Downloads, as easily available to the bod in the street now, sound crap, so if you will ever listen to music on something other than a crappy little MP3 player you will have to buy it again.
• Downloads are ephemeral, so you have to burn CDs and life is too short to do grunt work.
• Downloads don't come with artwork, lyrics, credits etc. unless you go download them and print them and life is too short to do grunt work.
• Downloads are harder to buy than picking up a CD at the supermarket, and life is too short to do online grunt work.

Re:they don't get it, do they?

[wk633]

No, maybe YOU want information for free. Some of us recognize that various industry evilness aside, there are artists out there who deserve something in return for their creative work.

Re:No matter what free will always win...

[joeljkp]

I agree. I don't buy from iTMS now because I'm somewhat broke and $.99 adds up fast. I also don't download, because I can't stand the ethics of it.

But if songs were $0.05 each, not only would I not feel bad for buying a few, I would probably listen to (and buy) more music period.

Re:The artists make very little money from music s

[Moebius Loop]

Generally speaking, most major-label musicians *don't* make money from touring. The reason we tour is to recoup the cost of making the album.

That's right, all that money the record company provides to record the album comes out of the artist's paycheck, *before* they even begin to see revenue from royalty payments...

Re:No matter what free will always win...

[stecoop]

I was going to reply to the block pricing above but you asked a legitimate question so let me reply to yours:

First block pricing: is the first stage of the theory but it doesn't account for other hard to analyze costs. It takes a stab at how many pencils can I sell at a given price and make a few bucks instead of analyzing returns on customer transactions. If I have a widget that sells for $100 and you have the same widget for $60 dollars, the consumer may see my product as superior one because of price alone. That is why I think CDs cost more than DVDs; the music industry is trying to appear as a superior product but they are loosing their death grip.

Now your questions on profit/price curve in law of supply and demand:
Any product you sell will have a fixed cost on every transaction. If you can analyze the transaction and while you have them ready to commit to fork over money than anything you extract above that price/cost curve for that transaction is more profit. Back to the Pizza Hut thing; why shouldn't they sell pizza for $5? Well the customer already want the product and they are willing to pay $10. I have increased the price on both single point & total transaction sales and didn't impact demand by actually raising the price but reducing the price for the next pizza. I have extracted further returns from the transaction that already covered the fixed costs. These few little paragraphs can't cover 9 hours of college credit but I hope it enlightens a few on cost theory.

Re:The artists make very little money from music s

[EspressoMachine]

They get like maybe 1$ per cd.

If only that were true. Artists generally make $.05-$.12 a CD. If you want more info about the industry and contracts, etc., I highly recommend This Business of Music [amazon.com]. It's chock full of interesting details like formulas used to determine artist royalties. For instance, did you know the labels still take money for R&D costs on the "new technology" of the Compact Disc? Or that many still take out $$ to cover "breakage", which is a hold over from distribution of albums on vinyl?

Oy.

Re:No matter what free will always win...

[Vicsun]

You beat me to the punch but I also have a helpful wikipedia link [wikipedia.org].

Re:Speaking as a musician

[Shawn Parr]

As a musician you shouldn't discount things like the iTMS. It is very easy for independant artists to get their music submitted there.

CD Baby [cdbaby.com] has a great Digital Distribution system that is very musician friendly. I worked with a group, Pig Farmers of the Apocalypse [cdbaby.com], who have done this very thing. For us to publish it cost $35 to set up with CD Baby, $20 for a UPC label, and the costs of manufacturing disks. CD Baby sends it to most of the online distribution companies by clicking a link, and giving a couple more sentances worth of information. Of the $.10 and $.55 that would usually go to artist and label, CD Baby calls it $.65 and takes 9%, only 7 cents, per track. If your music is good, and it sounds like it is, than you really shouldn't overlook this opportunity. Any income to help pay for the costs involved with the album are welcome, plus they can help get the word out to a larger audience as well. If you market yourself well, this can end up being a way better system than using a major label.

Re:Speaking as a musician

[zeet]

They also spam.

Or rather, send out marketing e-mails after you've specifically made sure to uncheck the 'send me newsletters' checkboxes.

Re:Speaking as a musician

[Peteski_BC]

"Once you get word-of-mouth advertisement happening, then you can start making your money from playing live shows." Well, as someone who has toured . . . . . Very few acts make money on the road. For most acts, the cost of travel, shipping gear, tour busses, crew etc far exceeds the revenues from performance. In fact, the majority of concerts you see are there because the record label pumps in money in what is known as 'tour support'. You are 100% dead on when you say the cost of putting a demo or CD together is expensive. However, for most musicians their income will come from CD sales, and radio licence fees. Performance, except for the ULTRA huge acts, generally costs money. BTW - I think the 5/c per song idea is *great* as long as that money goes to the MUSICIANS and not some record label. Come on you guys, you can't possibly say that *FIVE CENTS* to download a CD quality file is 'too much'. You would be able to download 100 full length songs at CD quality for FIVE BUCKS!!! Dude, that's less than two Latte's!!.

Re:Yep. And it is called....

[Anonymous Coward]

Who modded you Insightful, and how do we kill them?

Monopolies are a concept ENTIRELY orthogonal to the issue of price elasticity (finding the right price that maximizes profit). You, and surely the moderators, cannot be that stupid.

Re:No matter what free will always win...

[Some_Llama]

" Only later, when they get to the point that they start to make money for those few that do do they begin to do it only for the money. "

A great example of this would be the band Metallica, when they first started out, they encoured their fans to bootlegs their concerts and distribute their music, millions of dollars later you see Lars testifying before congress about how music sharing is "immoral".

I know I would use it

[SocietyoftheFist]

I used Napster for exactly the reason that I downloaded music that I didn't think was worth buying. I downloaded litterally hundreds of songs for a theme party. I personally wouldn't want to purchase the singles or albums but I would've paid $.05-$.10 for each download of those songs, because that is about what I thought they were worth to me. I buy CD's of music I like and rip them to put on my iPod and then download music that I don't feel is worth the asking price.