Posts by Russell Brown
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Holy crap. Wikileaks just took on the UN
This will make or break them.Holy shit.
Feel free to post links to good summaries of the documents, y'all.
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__designed to KILL US ALL__
Thought you said that was System's goal?
Dude, the links between the two would blow your freakin' mind.
But I've said too much already ...
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Which is what the record labels and iTunes do so well. They tell most people what to buy.
Testify. One of the most interesting things to come out of a Fat Freddy's Drop feature I wrote for Unlimited 18 months ago was the fact that being on iTunes in lots of territories was very good for the band -- but not so much because of any revenue, which wasn't huge. The big value of being on iTunes was the marketing value for their live (and merch) trade, which did pay the bills.
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I did, the System formats them into em's and strong's in order to display them. I'd try it again for experimentation but twice might make Russell growls at me.
I thought it was quite funny when I came back to it!
The System has developed a few quirks lately ...
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Interesting interview with the digital dude at Universal Music, covering DRM, iTunes, social networking sites etc.
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refresher current break down of retail cd prices
$22.44 (19.94 plus gst) wholesale = $34.95 retail. retail cut = $12.51 a disc.So, a 35.8% markup, although it's clear that the likes of the Warehouse and JB operate on totally different wholesale prices to the rest of the retail sector.
Assuming you're not a major label, what's a distributor's cut come to?
anyone got comparable figures for 12 tracks itunes downloads.
Simon?
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Is that... Brett LEE?
Indeed!
And the woman he's duetting with is Asha Bhosle, the famous Hindi singer immortalised in the title of Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha'.
True fact.
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the providers of the service are now taking the large cut of the lunch. itunes takes some where in the region of half. pretty hard to offer your product at a lower price if someone else is taking a huge cut.
As far as I know, Apple's margin on iTunes sales is still 30%, of which it loses about 2% in credit card handling fees.
That's less than Apple's 34% gross margin as an overall company, and it pays for the server farm, the localisation and the marketing and operation of the service. I actually don't think it's an unreasonable margin.
By comparison, major label artists typically receive 10-14% of the remaining price of a download. But that's not the retail price. Or even the wholesale price. It's the price after the labels have typically skimmed 50% in questionable deductions, including the notorious "packaging fee".
It's really crap, and artists who signed away their digital rights (even as part of P&D deals with majors) are in a really difficult position.
In the independent world, it's all different. That's where you want to be as an artist in the digital download business.
PS: I should note that if you add an aggregator's fee for shopping your music to the various commercial download services, your total cost of sale does rise to about 50% -- but that generally only applies to indies and individual artists. Majors deal directly.
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I am a proponent for change, but mine is a change from the creators point of view, and its not conservative, I'd like to see protections and rights liberally extended, in favor of the creator.
But that's been the story of the last few decades of copyright law. Virtually all the movement -- term extensions, force of law, etc -- has gone in favour of copyright owners (who aren't always the same people as creators, but that's a fact of life).
Specifically, what new protections and rights do you think need to be "liberally extended"?
that's not a very popular view point with the predominantly tech head occupants of this site who care to comment.
Hey Rob, try this: rather than using the phrase "tech head occupants of this site" as if it's some kind of insult, say "I realise there are people here who've thought a lot about these issues from the technology side, but I think they're missing some of the realities of being in a creative business."
I think islander is the only one that I know of in a position of owning valuable copyright works who will be affected seriously by free media change.
But who's talking about all media being free? The original post was about iTunes going DRM-free. It's still selling stuff , it's just no longer obliged by the record companies to sell it in a way that limits the rights of the customer.
What happened with iTunes and DRM will be studied for years hence. Apple was able to get the major labels on board by offering a reasonably robust DRM system, and able to woo customers by making its DRM the least irksome on the market (those Windows Media files where you had to separately connect and download a licence to play the song you'd just bought were a truly woeful product).
But the iTunes Store's success was driven by the fact that the iPod was a product the world loved. And the millions of people who bought one couldn't play tunes from an online store that used non-Apple DRM such as Windows Media. They could only shop with iTunes, or rip their own CDs (which was a breach of copyright law).
Hey presto, Apple and iTunes achieved bonecrushing dominance of the digital music download business -- and could dictate terms, and prices, to the music companies. They'd lost control of their own industry, locked out of it by the DRM they insisted on.
They tried creating a competitor in Amazon MP3, which applied no DRM at all, but the end game was always going to be negotiation with Apple, in which both sides have clearly given and taken a little.
The interesting thing here is that it's very hard to see how DRM benefited creators in this saga. The real problem for creators on iTunes and other download services is the miserable royalty rate paid on those sales by the major labels. I think that will change as independents and aggregators start eating the majors' lunch.
But going back to islander, I'm really not sure that the networked world will hurt the writers of books. The internet has been great for books -- and last year, a long decline in the time American adults spent reading fiction was actually reversed.
As she's explained before, islander's concerns lie as much with being able to govern the use (and prevent abuse) of her work, as much as cash in hand. But I'm sure she wouldn't want her books to be published in a form that couldn't be loaned to a friend or neighbour, or traded for other books at a second-hand shop. Which is what DRM means.
Couldn't happen? That was precisely the case with the infamous Adobe eBook files whose T&Cs included the line "This book cannot be lent or given to someone else." Adobe also, memorably declared on the same permissions page: "This book cannot be read aloud."
Ironically, the book these terms were attached to was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which is out of copyright and may be reproduced by anyone.
Adobe, unsurprisingly, did not set the world on fire -- but I'm sure that here will be an 'iPod for books" eventually -- a device that works and feels good enough that people will see it as an acceptable alternative to bound paper. There will be an uptick in book piracy (although there's plenty of that in the physical world already) but also a new generation of book sales. There will be an "iTunes for books", and most people will use it, rather than the dodgy alternative -- if it's truly fit for use .
I might also point out that the book I edited, Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas About Ourselves , sold well even though nearly everything in had previously been published here.
It was a real buzz to be able to write a cheque for Donald Stenhouse, Bill Pearson's executor, for the use of Fretful Sleepers , and then another one for the reprint -- not least because various people had told Donald he was an idiot for granting me permission to place Fretful Sleepers online in the first instance, and that the work would henceforth be valueless. I deeply appreciate the leap of faith Donald took there.
So yeah, I have a little bit of experience with these things.
PS: GNZA still available for purchase here, print-fanciers!
PA is pretty underrepresented by people in that position expressing their view of what they would like to happen,
I actually don't think that's true at all. The community here is, if anything, considerably over-represented in people who make creative works. Those people might not all have the same views, of course, and I don't think any one person can presume to speak for all of them.
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And after a glass of wine, my own apologies for being grumpy. It's a difficult balance to strike, and I just want everyone to be able to enjoy being here.
That young bloke Guptill's good, isn't he?
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