Chris Sommovigo: The Great Digital Swindle
184.95.55.18 |
||
| Posted on April 17, 2014 at 08:34:06 | ||
|
Posts: 4585
Location: New York City Joined: August 24, 2012 |
Beautifully written article that mirrors my way of thinking: "The active, almost bustling market for used music media made the hobby of collecting music — LPs, CDs, tapes, et cetera — much more enjoyable. Just like baseball cards or coins or stamps, the physical media itself is collectible and an aftermarket trade highly active. As the owner/possessor of a particular physical medium, you have the legal right to sell the physical object to someone else in exchange for anything else of value … or possibly nothing at all (i.e. if you wanted to give a record or cd to a younger sibling or a friend as a gift). Pregnant within this is the assumption that, although you do not own the copyrighted material encoded on the medium, you own the medium itself and therefore have the legal right to engage in the transfer of ownership in valuable trade. This is serious consumer power and it is what makes these collectible things “valuable” in the first place. It also mitigates the risk of acquisition by attaching a portion (sometimes a large portion) of the cost to physical item itself and with a clear ownership and built-in transferable value. Your risk in purchasing a record was mitigated by the fact that the thing itself was worth something and you could sell it. With the advent of digital downloading via commercial services, as pioneered by Apple’s iTunes, we’ve thrown all of this connection and value to the curb" and "If we compare a download to a physical CD (or record, or tape), we find some things that are similar, especially when it comes to the basic costs of creation. Artists and musicians need to be paid, studio time rented, engineers and producers and mastering engineers compensated. All of these fixed up-front costs are common to both downloads and physical media. The real difference with downloads is distribution and production, because they are a weightless, massless medium that can be replicated infinitely at almost ZERO cost. And this is not true of physical media, which require materials, factories, processes, teams of trained workers with specialized skills, a distribution network of retail partners (i.e. record stores), not to mention the shipping and handling. Think about all of the costs of doing business that the record labels have managed to sidestep, all of the other people they have cut out of the process, and a neat little picture should be starting to take form: A weightless product, infinitely replicated at incredibly low cost, efficiently distributed through an electrical-signal network that the end user actually pays to access. All of a sudden, the profit margin on distributed music just exploded into another dimension of huge, rainbow-skittle-shitting unicorns made of money. Big Rock Candy Mountain, baby. And it gets much better (for them, not you, of course). When you “purchase” a download you do not buy anything other than the right to listen to it. That’s it. It’s an extended rental. Did you download Slim Whitman’s Greatest Hits at 3am and decide — after you sobered up the next day — that it was a mistake? Sorry, Charlie. No refunds, no returns. And especially, no trading to others. Ever."
|
|
| RE: very good article, posted on April 17, 2014 at 10:58:09 | |
|
Posts: 4585
Location: New York City Joined: August 24, 2012 |
+1000.
|
| RE: Chris Sommovigo: The Great Digital Swindle, posted on April 18, 2014 at 06:36:47 | |
|
Posts: 738
Location: Boston Joined: April 8, 2004 |
thanks for posting the link. Good article.
|
| Guess I better stop making mix tapes then... nt, posted on April 18, 2014 at 10:57:52 | |
|
Posts: 7211
Location: Kansas Joined: January 28, 2001 |
nt Dman Analog Junkie
|
| RE: They wouldn't, posted on April 19, 2014 at 09:39:35 | |
|
Posts: 762
Location: Kansas Joined: February 7, 2010 |
One should be able to buy and sell used digital downloads as well.
|
