Will piracy kill off prog rock ? - Progressive Rock Music Forum

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Kati

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 21:04

Prog_Traveller wrote:

I wouldn't single out prog rock. If anything prog is immune to what goes on in the mainstream. Prog fans tend to be collectors and like the physical format and as such we want to pay for our music. I think it's pop music fans who don't take the music very seriously and don't think about paying for it and just take things for granted. They aren't collectors so they just download stuff for free.

In my opinion to be honest illegal downloads have no negative effect to prog artists, pop artists maybe yes although they have a huge following many of those are happy with a low quality music download. I think those who use torrent sites to download music would never buy an album anyway thus if they listen, like it and maybe spread the music to others it might be positive

Svetonio

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 21:02

siLLy puPPy wrote:

Yep. In short, prog lovers tend to love the music enough to nurture it financially and savor it more. The music industry has without doubt changed because of piracy so it is a matter of adapting or dying but money can still be profitable its just that now the artist has to go the extra mile to attract the bees to the nectar. Take the new Mastodon album for example, how could you possibly not want that beautiful art? For whatever reason, the kiddies these days are buying lots of LPs instead of downloading.

I think market saturation in a world where everyone can make an album cheaply is more of a problem for an artist standing out in the crowd. Personally i think its exciting times in the music world

I think so too.

Svetonio

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 20:58

Obsidian Pigeon wrote:

As others have said, prog fans are probably the fanbase that buy the most physical copies of albums out there. Progressive music was also really only popular in the 70s and has survived since, in one form or another, and piracy will in my view have little to no impact on the creation, distribution, or listening of progressive music.

I agree.

Dean

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 20:52

Why Bandcamp and Spotify are not a force for Good in the World

As mentioned in my previous post Bandcamp has (almost) 1 million Artist and pays out $83 million to those Artists.

When we just count the zeros in the sales figures then this seems like A Good Thing.

When we read about the Bandcamp success stories then this seems like A Good Thing.

When we read about Amanda Palmer making $15,000 in 3 minutes then this seems like A Good Thing.

However, as I said before, this averages at 10 CD/download sales per Artist, now this no longer seems like A Good Thing.

You don't need Bandcamp to sell 10 Albums, you don't even need the Internet at all to sell 10 Albums, you can sell that many to your friends and family without trying too hard.

It only takes 100 Amanda Palmer's selling 100,000 Albums each for the $83 million paid out by Bandcamp to be completely spent. This would mean that rather than selling 10 albums the remaining 999,900 Artists have sold nothing.

If we ignore the 'Amanda Palmer Effect' and classify a successful album as being one that sold 10,000 copies then the total number of Bandcamp Artists that could have possibly been classified as successful is 1,000, this means that the number of Artists selling nothing would be 999,000. This would put Bandcamp's success rate at 1 in 999.

For an Artist signed to a Label, 10,000 would not be classed as a successful Album. Selling 10,000 albums would not break even.

However, if we accept that in this Bandcamp future no Artist can sell 10,000 copies then we can call an Artist "successful" if he breaks even.

If, for sake of argument, I ignore the physical items like CDs and T-Shirts and and for the sake of the same argument I assume each album costs the Artist $1000 to record. I will also assume that each Artist has only 1 album to sell and it retails at $10.

This means that the Artist needs to sell 100 copies of The Album to break even and be called "a success".

So 10 million albums sold on Bandcamp means that a maximum of 100,000 Artists could have sold 100 Albums each. This would mean that 900,000 Artist have sold nothing. This puts the success rate at 1 in 9. And that's seems pretty good compared to the 1 in 20 success rate offered by the Labels.

But of course breaking even is exactly the same as not making an album.

If you are a gigging Artist you can shift 100 copies of a physical CD fairly easily. If you only manage 10 sales per gig that's still only 10 gigs. You don't need Bandcamp to sell 100 CDs. Trying to sell downloads at a gig is another story.

Let's look at this from a different perspective:

If each album cost $1000 to record and there are 1 million albums on Bandcamp then that is a total investment of $1,000,000,000 or $1 billion (in short form), of which Bandcamp has contributed precisely zero. [there are more than 1 million albums on Bandcamp]

At a selling price of $10 each the total sales generated by 10 copies of each album is then $100million...

As we know, that total $1 billion investment by 1 million Artists has earnt them a total of $83 million.

No matter how you cut it, no matter how you do the mathematics, the total loss by all the Artists added together is $917 million, or each Artist is out of pocket to the tune of $917 each.

Yet Bandcamp makes $14 million clear profit from this.

And all this is legal. In any other industry we would look at those figures and go "Hang on, that can't be right". We would take one look and smell a rat. We would suspect this was some kind of elaborate Ponzi or Pyramid scheme, and in some ways that is what it is. Just a legal, non-fraudulent one.

Pyramid schemes work on expectation, they attract lots of investors each with the expectation that they will earn lots of cash, and they fail because each investor cannot generate enough sales to recoup their investment. Their investment is to buy a stock of Wizzo Bogcleaner that they have to sell. However, the only sales a pyramid scheme makes are to the immediate family & friends of each investor, when all those sales are made the investors have to sign-up new investors. Each investor now gets paid by the investment made by the new investors, essentially they are unloading their unsold stock of Wizzo Bogcleaner onto the next mug in the pyramid. These are fraudulent because the goal is to sign-up investors not to make sales, the organisers know that each investor can never sell enough Wizzo Bogcleaner to break even.

Bandcamp avoids this fraudulent aspect of the pyramid by not taking money from the investor in payment for the Wizzo Bogcleaner it cannot sell, it gets the investor to actually make the product himself. Now there is no pyramid so it cannot be a pyramid scheme. Simples.

However, the mechanism that makes it work are exactly the same - the expectation is the Artist will make lots of cash but the sales made by most of the Artists are to their immediate family & friends. Bandcamp creams 15% profit from each sale for no outlay of its own.

As I said,you can sell 10 albums to friends and family without Bandcamp.

Bandcamp is not interested in selling your album, (that's your job), Bandcamp is only interested in the $14 it earns from each of the 1 million Artists that uses it.

Go to the Bandcamp site and look around. They tell you that you can make money selling your album. They don't tell you how may albums each Artist sells, they do not tell you how much each Artist makes. But to entice you they tell you how much they have paid to all their artists in total, and that is 83 million dollars.

In reality the situation for the Artist is much worse than this - many Artists have more than one Album to sell, many artists do not count the invisible expenses it cost them to produce the Album, they don't count the cost of their time, they don't count the cost of promotion, they don't count the "cost" of giving away free copies. And if the Artist has physical product to sell, such as CDs and T-shirts, then they have invested in the stock they hold of those products, whether they sell or not. Even if it does not cost $1,000 to record an Album, the investment by each Artist is higher than it costs to record one Album. Whatever the actual cost is, it certainly isn't $83.

For all the wonders of modern technology an Album that cost $1,000 to produce is not a great deal of money to spend. A more realistic figure to record an Album would be ten times that at least. Hiring a studio can be any be anything from $300/day to $3,000/day and a recording engineer is no less than $500/day so your $1,000 is pretty much spent in just one day in the the cheapest studio you can find. One day is not enough. You could record your album without using a studio or an engineer, but if you want to have it mixed and mastered professionally (and trust me, you should) then that's $500 for the mix, $500 for the mastering and again your $1000 is all spent. And if you are no good at graphic art (and why should you be, you're a musician) then you can add another $500 for that, except you can't because you spent the budget on the recording...

What?

Obsidian Pigeon View Drop Down

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 20:21

There's still Amazon and other websites, including those owned by bands where they sell their own merchandise. Just because there aren't as many physical locations to purchase these goods does not mean that the demand has necessarily shrunk in the subsection of the population that looks for progressive albums, especially because this portion of the market does not encompass a good portion of the total demand in the music industry. It really depends on your preferences and whether or not you want to pirate them, and from experience I'd say progressive fans tend to collect a lot of merchandise, including vinyl and CDs. I don't consider digital copies (bought via iTunes or wherever) substantially different in distribution than vinyl/CDs/whatever floats your boat. Generally, people listen to music from mp3 files nowadays anyway.

SteveG

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 16:55

This thread has a lot of exposition on what should obviously be viewed as a practice with no redeemable qualities. Why is that?

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Rednight

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 16:31

Really! And I suppose you're going to hop on down to the nearest Tower Records store to pick some up.

Obsidian Pigeon View Drop Down

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 14:54

As others have said, prog fans are probably the fanbase that buy the most physical copies of albums out there. Progressive music was also really only popular in the 70s and has survived since, in one form or another, and piracy will in my view have little to no impact on the creation, distribution, or listening of progressive music.

Dean

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 11:10

Siloportem wrote:

stonebeard wrote:

If music it is popular it can be monetized and sold. Prog is really not popular. Fringe, even. There was a "physical release" bubble from the 40s-90s that made it possible to generate a whole lot of money from physical copies of music. Entirely unlike any enjoyment of music in thousands of years. We've moved past that into something entirely new. Through royalties and licensing artists can still make money, but those heady days of making insane cash for pressing and promoting a record seem to be long gone. Piracy helped, but with computers and the internet this was inevitable. And it can't be undone, even if it would be a good idea to do so. Time to strike out into the new way of doing things.

Imo piracy did a lot more than "help". There's a marketing trick: if you put a high price on a product people tend to think it's a good product. Otherwise it wouldn't be expensive.

Thanks to piracy people can get music for nothing. So the perceived value dropped and now scores of people are no longer willing to pay anything for music. Or only very little.

There was a time when even computer illiterates were using napster! I'm not saying the price was right during the bubble you describe. But piracy lowered the perceived value to practically $0 and how are they going to get it back up to a reasonable value?

That's why spotify is so cheap. They're just trying to make money from the people who aren't willing to pay any.

If the music industry would've acted sooner and created something like spotify or iTunes during the napster days then who knows what they could've charged. Even with the bad bandwidth you had back in those days.

Convenience was another thing that made piracy attractive. At least the legal services match that convenience now.

Exactly, as I have said before, value & worth and price & cost are not the same. You can devalue the worth of something but that does not affect its cost.

The "bubble" is a fallacy. Before the 1940s there was no way of owning recorded music. You could not hear music on demand. If you wanted to hear music you paid a musician to play it for you. The argument is specious.

Everyone wants something for nothing. If they cannot get it for nothing then they want it cheap. The minimum price a business can charge for something is its cost. If it cost them nothing (piracy) then they can charge nothing, if it cost them something (recording business) then they have to charge something.

The value of an Album is not its cost. The value of an Album is determined by how much you want it. When the price of every Album is the same then we decide its value by choosing to buy it or not.

A Justine Beiber album has zero value to a Prog fan and a Yes album has no value to a Justine Beiber fan - they cost the same and they are priced the same but their value and worth is dependant upon who the buyer is. It does not matter to us as Prog fans how much a Label or a Pirate charges for a Justine Bieber album, we don't want it - they cannot even give it away to us (cite: the latest U2 album fiasco). The situation created by piracy is that the value of both albums is now worth the same for both fans. What "we" have decided is that the Yes album is worth as much to us as Prog fans as a Justine Bieber album is. Is that cool or what? [A: or what]

Music distribution exists to make money for someone. Bandcamp and Spotify are a business, they exist to make money for their owners, not the Labels and not the Artist. The less they can pay for the product they sell the less they can charge the consumer.

It is worth remembering that piracy is also a business, it exists to make money. Napster existed to make money for its owners, Megaupload existed to make money for its owners.

Labels work like this:

A1. a Label pays for research and development (the Advance, the studio, the artwork)
A2. a Label pays for raw materials (the packaging, the CD disc and case)
A3. a Label pays for those raw materials to be processed (the glass-master)
A4. a Label pays for the manufacture of the developed product using the processed raw materials (production)
A5. a Label pays for the marketing and promotion of that manufactured product (marketing)
A6. a Label pays for the distribution and deployment of that marketed product (distribution)
A7. a Label earns money from the sale of that product (retail)
A8. a Label deducts the money paid in stages A1,A2,A3,A4,A5 and A6 from the money earned in A7
A9 .a Label calls the remainder "profit"

Pirates used to work like this:

B1. a pirate steals the product (A6) from a Label (theft)
B2. a pirate pays for the raw materials (the packaging, the CDR disc and case)
B3. a pirate pays for the manufacture of the stolen product using the raw materials
B4. a pirate sells the product at a cheaper price because he hasn't paid for A1, A3, A5 or A6
B5. a pirate deducts the money paid in B2 and B3 from the money earned in B4
B6. a pirate calls the remainder "profit"
B7. a Label does not recoup the money spent in A1,A2,A3,A4,A5 and A6
B8. a Label makes less "profit"

Pirates now work like this:

C1. a pirate steals the product (A6) from a Label (theft)
C2. a pirate offers the stolen product as a free download
C3. a pirate earns money from the advertising space he puts on the download page
C4. a pirate calls all the money he earns "profit"
C5. a Label does not recoup the money spent in A1,A2,A3,A4,A5 and A6
C6. a Label makes even less "profit" than in B8

Freeloaders works like this:

D1. a freeloader steals the product (A6) from a Label (theft) or a Pirate (hijack)
D2. a freeloader offers the stolen product as a free download
D3. a freeloader earns no money
D4. a freeloader does not make a "profit"
D5. a Label does not recoup the money spent in A1,A2,A3,A4,A5 and A6
D6. a Label makes even less "profit" than in C6

From this we can make several observations:

1. the pirate and the freeloader are dependant upon the Label .
2. the pirate and the freeloader do not pay for the Album to be recorded or produced so they can charge less than the Label.
3. the pirate and the freeloader have smaller overheads so can charge less than the Label.
4. the Label cares about how many copies of each Album they sell - a million copies of one Album makes them money, a thousand copies of a thousand Albums does not and one copy each of a million Albums does not.
5. the pirate and the freeloader do not care how many copies of each Album they sell - they can sell million copies of one Album or one copy each of a million Albums - the earning (and cost) is the same. (This is also true of Bandcamp and Spotify).
6. the pirate and the freeloader don't need to make money so can charge little or nothing for the product.
7. if the Label cannot make a profit then it will cease to be a Label
8. if the Label does not exist then pirate and freeloader have nothing new to "sell".

Piracy is not confined to the selling of albums, it is also involved in live music so even there the Artist has no protection. Fake tickets and ticket touts are piracy - the less than subtle difference is demand. Tickets are a limited resource so the pirate has no need to under-cut the promoter/Artist, they can charge more, the value to the consumer is more than the ticket cost, hence the price is higher.

Pirates and freeloaders are parasitical, they are dependant upon the host to survive even if that is detrimental to the host to the point where it can no longer survive. When the host is dead it will move on to a new host, that new host will be (and already is) the Artist. The pirate and the freeloader makes no distinction between a Label and an Artist, they are only concerned with the product, not where it came from. If piracy will kill the Labels then it will also ultimately kill the Artist. Nothing about this is a good thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the sake of completemess, this is how Bandcamp works:

E1. an Artist pays for the production of an Album.
E2. an Artist "pays" for the promotion and marketing of an Album.
E3. Bandcamp does not pay for the production or marketing of anything except Bandcamp.
E4. Bandcamp allows every Artist to stream and sell their Album.
E5. Bandcamp allows every Artist to sell merchandise.
E6. Bandcamp takes a percentage (15%) of every album, T-shirt, button and poster sold.

1. Bandcamp has (almost) 1 million artists and to date has paid-out $83million to those Artists.
2. This means that (in theory) on average each artist makes $83...
or to put it another way: if $83 million is 85% of the total number of sales then each artist averages less than 10 albums sold.
3. In reality high-selling artists get a bigger percentage of the sales so that $83 million is not divided equally.
4. In reality high-selling artists sell more than 10 albums by several magnitudes (i.e., powers of 10).
5. In reality those high-selling artists were selling high (by Bandcamp standards) before they moved to Bandcamp.
6. In reality the average number of albums sold per artist is a lot less than 10.
7. In reality many artists sell less than 10 copies so earn a lot less than $83.
8. In reality most artists sell none.
9. No artist can make an album for $83 so most artists earn nothing.
10. Bandcamp makes money because it does not matter whether they sell one copy each of a million different albums or a million copies of one album.

Bandcamp and Spotify are not a good models. Their current success is actually a product of "the Label system", not a reaction to it. Bandcamp and Spotify does not Invest in Artists, only the Artist makes that Investment, and the people who buy the Albums pay for that Investment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Profit is the Return on Investment, this is measured in more than just Money.

The Worth of something is more than its Monetary Value.

Investment is not about the present.

You cannot Invest in the past.

Investment is about the future.

If we do not Invest in Art then there will be no future for Music or The Artist

If there is no future for Music or The Artist then there will be no Art.

We Value Art by how much we are prepared to Pay for it.

If we are not prepared to Pay for Art then we have Devalued it.

When we do not Invest in Art it is because it has no Value.

If we do not Value Art then it has no Worth.

If Art has no Worth then it is Worthless.

If we Value Art as Worthless then there is no incentive to Create Art.

If we do not Invest in the Creative Arts then we will not Profit from the Art.

If we Value Creative Art as Worth something then we must Invest in The Artist.

Edited by Dean - October 01 2014 at 11:23

What?

siLLy puPPy View Drop Down

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 08:20

Music can be profitable that is

siLLy puPPy View Drop Down

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 08:19

Yep. In short, prog lovers tend to love the music enough to nurture it financially and savor it more. The music industry has without doubt changed because of piracy so it is a matter of adapting or dying but money can still be profitable its just that now the artist has to go the extra mile to attract the bees to the nectar. Take the new Mastodon album for example, how could you possibly not want that beautiful art? For whatever reason, the kiddies these days are buying lots of LPs instead of downloading.

I think market saturation in a world where everyone can make an album cheaply is more of a problem for an artist standing out in the crowd. Personally i think its exciting times in the music world

Siloportem View Drop Down

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 02:56

Imo piracy did a lot more than "help". There's a marketing trick: if you put a high price on a product people tend to think it's a good product. Otherwise it wouldn't be expensive.

Thanks to piracy people can get music for nothing. So the perceived value dropped and now scores of people are no longer willing to pay anything for music. Or only very little.

That's why spotify is so cheap. They're just trying to make money from the people who aren't willing to pay any.

Convenience was another thing that made piracy attractive. At least the legal services match that convenience now.

Prog_Traveller View Drop Down

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Posted: October 01 2014 at 00:19

I wouldn't single out prog rock. If anything prog is immune to what goes on in the mainstream. Prog fans tend to be collectors and like the physical format and as such we want to pay for our music. I think it's pop music fans who don't take the music very seriously and don't think about paying for it and just take things for granted. They aren't collectors so they just download stuff for free.

stonebeard View Drop Down

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Posted: September 30 2014 at 23:13

If music it is popular it can be monetized and sold. Prog is really not popular. Fringe, even. There was a "physical release" bubble from the 40s-90s that made it possible to generate a whole lot of money from physical copies of music. Entirely unlike any enjoyment of music in thousands of years. We've moved past that into something entirely new. Through royalties and licensing artists can still make money, but those heady days of making insane cash for pressing and promoting a record seem to be long gone. Piracy helped, but with computers and the internet this was inevitable. And it can't be undone, even if it would be a good idea to do so. Time to strike out into the new way of doing things.

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siLLy puPPy View Drop Down

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Posted: September 30 2014 at 22:05

Piracy won't kill off prog but maybe nanoparticles and genetically modified salmon will Pig

Dean

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Posted: September 30 2014 at 13:53

moshkito wrote:

Dean wrote:

moshkito wrote:

However, too many of us "artistes", do not want to have the patience necessary to deal with an accountant, to learn something simple about business that will get you going fairly well. In America, you CAN do this as a business and take your best shots at it. I don't know that the same "legal/commercial/tax-design" is a satisfactory idea for most people.

I do know and it isn't. Most people running a business tend to have a good understanding of legal, commercial and tax, there is only one place where people who don't can run a business, and that's into the ground.

I specifically stated this because I do not know the economic ability of the situations in Europe. I doubt that anyone can have as easy a time "making it", as they can in America. Even my "mom" does some work for a couple of artists, and will not charge for it, but she is very happy putting up the pictures at her place, read my poems, and movie reviews and such, and she helped when I was supporting a local artist as well.

Europe, is tougher and different. My sister, Manuela, who has done over 30 to 40 exhibitions all over Europe of her art, has an easier time with the art over there than she does here. Her 6 months here, meant find a job, and not work the art! Over there she still needs a job, but the art moves some more than here. She does, and this probably came from me 20 years ago, her own accounting and bookkeeping, and she has managed very well all around, except in the area of getting less time working a job and more on the art.

Typical for all of us really!

But, at the very least, over there, at least in Paris, they have more appreciation for a painting (or art) than they do here in America, where a photograph of a tomato is more important for your living room than an art piece!

You seem to be contradicting yourself here and I find that incredibly confusing: You say it is tougher in Europe then say your sister has an easier time there (in Europe). Surely it is one or the other.

However all of that it wholly irrelevant to any discussion we are having here (no, really it is). Seriously, it does not matter which country you work in, it does make any difference whether it is easy or difficult to be an "artist", it is immaterial whether it is harder to sell art in one location than another.

None of that makes a blind bit of difference to how you manage the financial, commercial and legal side. That, more-or-less, is the same everywhere in the world, and it is the same whether you are a musician, a frock designer, a painter, a photographer or a plumber, a carpenter, a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker.

If you sell something (object or skill) you earn money, if you earn money you pay tax. Every business, even the self-employed "artists", has to understand at least the rudimentaries of legal, commercial and tax matters. Here, there and everywhere.

moshkito wrote:

Dean wrote:

... That is not an example of stolen product.

What you are talking about is called WASTE, this isn't INVISIBLE MONEY, and you are right, it is NOT LOST, it is THROWN AWAY. In all businesses a degree of WASTE is UNAVOIDABLE but EXCESSIVE WASTE is NOT - that's called BAD MANAGEMENT, and in the main it is INEXCUSABLE and BAD BUSINESS.
...

NO, IT'S NOT BAD MANAGEMENT.

Yes it is, as I shall explain... [or you could read my post again]

moshkito wrote:

You projected 300 customers, you made this much salad, and then you had a massive storm, that cut the number of customers to 100, and you are hung out to dry, specially in far places, like I was in Pendleton, Oregon, when no one could drive due to the ice or wind storm.

That is not an example of excessive waste. It is not an example of unavoidable waste. If it is unavoidable then it is not bad management. [read my post again]

Your example is an exception. Exceptional expenses are classed as either extraordinary expenses or nonrecurring expenses and they are accounted for separately, the example of a loss caused by an ice storm is a nonrecurring expense. If that happened every day, or every week, then it would be a recurring expense and you would have to plan for it and it would be factored into your operating expenses. In other words you would have contingencies and recoveries in place to account for that. You cannot plan for freak weather but you would not, for example, plan 300 salads in a region where ice storms were common place... I don't suppose they sell many Waldorf Salads in Alaska so losing 300 salads to an ice-storm would then be an avoidable waste and it would be bad management.

I have no idea what the annual climate is like in Pendleton, Oregon, but since you lost 300 salads because of an ice-storm I'm going to take a punt and guess that kind of weather doesn't happen very often and that winter temperatures seldom, if ever, drops below 32ºF, because even here in the UK where we average daily temperatures also rarely dip below freezing and we get may be a couple of inches of snow a year, salad isn't the most popular menu choice in winter. Unless you are running a restaurant for rabbits and gerbils.

All that, however, is irrelevant.

You equated these 300 lost salads with the lost revenue from pirated albums. It was a bad analogy. Specifically you equated albums that do not move (sell) with albums that were pirated (stolen) - and they are not the same thing at all.

Albums that do not sell are albums that no one wanted. Pirates, being profit making businesses, would not be able to shift those albums either. Pirates make money out of successful artists, they do not make money out of poor-selling artists.

moshkito wrote:

It's a matter of control, and doing the best you can to ensure that you do not have waste. And you are saying that you would not have to do so if you were a musician. I'm not going to dignify that since I am not a full time musician.

I did not say that. [read my post again].

Misread what I have written by all means, but do not attribute me with statements I did not make.

moshkito wrote:

It is FAR BETTER management, when you work the ups and downs, as tight as possible so as not to lose your butt on it. And previous managers had lost money for 5 years in that place, and the first year I broke even and made profit the 2nd year ... in a small town of 14k people! It's about your management ... there is no bad or good ... there just is "management" so you can improve it, not waste it!

Good for you.

moshkito wrote:

dean wrote:

... All industries have waste, ...

Yes daddy ... anything else you want to say about sex, now?

Cute.

moshkito wrote:

dean wrote:

... Waste in the record industry is pressing more CDs than you sell. In the days of vinyl those returned albums were melted down to make new albums, these days those CDs are either sold off at discounted prices (remainders) or sent to land-fill sites where they will remain buried underground for eternity ...

Waste is relative.

I like it when you see a record company get lucky and artist X sells 1.5 million, and then on the next year and pressing, they put together 1.5 million of the next single, then they blame "piracy" and whatever else for the lack of sales and the loss of money from the bad decision to make so many units in the first place. A bad decision, becomes the excuse for another idea, to "protect" the music business.

You are guessing, and it's not even smart guessing, it's just making stuff up. Not very well either come to that.

If this "example" was in any way representative, which it blatantly is not by the way, then it would not be an example of unavoidable waste. It would be avoidable waste and as I said, that is bad management.

moshkito wrote:

Dean wrote:

... No, not magic, I mean practical punishment. If someone steals from me I want them punished to the full extent of the law. If nailing their head to the table was the legal punishment for stealing then I may have second thoughts, (and then so would they, that being the nature of deterrent), but wishing them bad karma, nah... that doesn't work for me.

I am a pacifist at heart, and I do not like to be mean, or waste time in negative and bad stuff. You're discussions for me, are good ... it wakes me up and makes me make sure I'm saying the right thing. But, hate for me, is one of the things that makes me lose sleep and rest and prevents me from seeing all the images in my head and write freely. I do not write for anger or because I dislike something. There are plenty of films and music that I do not care for, but I will not take away the right of it being said or stated. I, personally, believe that the time wasted in negativity, instead of the work you want to create, ends up going backwards and not helping.

I believe it dilutes the beauty of your work! And the 20th century was full of too many ugly images to help us all be more optimistic and helpful.

I just don't want to be one of those ugly 20th century images!

Wishing bad karma on someone is negativity without the guilt. I try to avoid having ill-feelings towards anyone, for some people making me feel bad for hating them is half the trip for them and I will not give them the satisfaction. I believe that people who do wrong should only be punished once for any wrong doing, the punishment must fit the crime and the wrong-doer must be aware of why they are being punished - if someone steals from me and they are punished by law then the score is settled. Stealing from me then falling foul of some unrelated misfortune does not fit that brief.

I do however love a bit of anger and unfettered aggression, especially when the cause of that anger is something stupid I have done. I am never more angry than when I am angry with myself. Good art can come out of that but not directly, it is cathartic, the release of tension in spew angry words or a thrashy trashy blast of music, then when calm is restored, chuck that in the bin and start again. Liberation. Clear out the garbage.

My favourite button when posting here, believe it or not, it is the [Clear Form] button. Posting when pissed-off is like posting when pissed-drunk - it seems like a good idea at the time but never is. I've seen the painting I paint when I'm drunk, read the stories I've written while pickled and heard the music I make when inebriated - it's never good. Tongue

What?

altaeria

Forum Senior Member

Joined: March 05 2004
Location: Philadelphia
Status: Offline
Points: 178

Posted: September 30 2014 at 13:22

I still think that all the record companies were duped into licensing their stuff for streaming services.

The hype about "progress", along with the industry's exaggerated fear of piracy,
pushed them into making a dreadful business decision.

Overall, their profits have plummeted since partnering with streaming services.

If they stubbornly continued to embrace selling tangible items (as the Japanese have),
then there would still be profitable stores selling actual products that people will buy.

Sure, a small percentage would pirate--

but it's still better than this so-called "business model" that they're stuck with now.

moshkito

Forum Senior Member

Joined: January 04 2007
Location: Grok City
Status: Offline
Points: 18688

Posted: September 30 2014 at 10:47

Dean wrote:

Typical for all of us really!

Dean wrote:

... That is not an example of stolen product.

NO, IT'S NOT BAD MANAGEMENT.

It's a matter of control, and doing the best you can to ensure that you do not have waste. And you are saying that you would not have to do so if you were a musician. I'm not going to dignify that since I am not a full time musician.

dean wrote:

... All industries have waste, ...

Yes daddy ... anything else you want to say about sex, now?

Waste is relative.

I believe it dilutes the beauty of your work! And the 20th century was full of too many ugly images to help us all be more optimistic and helpful.

I just don't want to be one of those ugly 20th century images!

Edited by moshkito - September 30 2014 at 11:50

Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told!
www.pedrosena.com

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