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In Reply to: RE: Good Points But posted by Dynobot on June 19, 2012 at 08:01:18
"A new universal method that allows manufacturers/retailers to profit from selling music content in hardware form. This method must also gain wide acceptance from consumers as to show substantial profits ie. > CD player sales and hardcopy CD's."
I don't believe this can happen. The economies don't permit it. Physical goods need a meat space supply chain and distribution network. The distribution network is likely to be hierarchical, with multiple levels of markup required to support inventory, which is a significant cost for commodities such as CDs where there are millions of separate titles. In addition there are production and shipping cost which are paid by some combination of the record label, the supply chain and the consumer.
Now contrast this with the situation with file transfer across the Internet. There are no inventory costs, other than the cost of storage space on the server for one copy of an album. (About 4 cents at the present Amazon cloud storage pricing.) The "production cost" is the CPU time required to drive the bandwidth. Typically with a hosting provider this is bundled in with "transport cost" which is the charge the hosting provider pays for Internet backbone service. The combined production and shipping costs are also around 4 cents for a 44/16 album download. (Again figuring this at the Amazon cloud storage pricing.) The customers get their product sooner and at lower cost. They don't have to take a trip to their mailbox or post office. They don't have to wait for days for mail to arrive. They don't have to drive or walk to a record store that happens to order the titles that interest them. They don't have to struggle with shrink wrap, rip the CD and scan the art work.
All they have to do is make a few mouse clicks for the purchase, and a few more to enter the resulting files into their music library. In addition, they can play long works or concerts non-stop, without being subject to an arbitrary time limit around 75 - 80 minutes. Hi-res albums are typically 3 to 6 times larger than 44/16, depending on download format. This translates into inventory and production/shipping costs of $0.12 to $0.24.
There are old farts who get a feeling of security holding a physical CD. (Obviously they haven't had many CD-Rs or pressed CDs go bad on them.) These people will die off.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
Speaking of downloads,is there a program (or utility) that will allow me to "prioritize" my downloads ? In other words, is there a way to prevent my OS from performing other non- downloading processing functions while a download is in progress ?
Even with broadband, downloads are very slow compared to the speed of modern computers, so there is little effect of a download on other system activities (except possibly audiophile playback). So in general local activities and downloads don't interfere with each other.
It is a different situation with respect to network I/O, so if you are doing multiple network activities at the same time as a download there will be interference. The effect on the download is to slow it down temporarily, and this won't matter for sporadic networking activities such as sending and receiving emails and web surfing. However, if you are doing more extensive networking functions such as watching videos, voice telephony (e.g. Skype) they may be degraded, in which case it is best to avoid these until the download is over. (There may be interference even if separate computers are involved if they share a router.) Home routers are not designed to handle multiple networking streams at very heavy load. One can avoid these problems by purchasing an expensive enterprise grade router, I suppose. The best solution is to upgrade to a higher speed Internet service. I routinely listen to music, download new music, and upload and download gigabyte files without interference using a DSL service that has a download speed of 12 Mbps and a (pathetic) upload speed of 1 Mbps and the "free" router that came with the DSL service.
If you have a large number of downloads that need to run at the same time it may be useful to use a download manager. These programs will queue multiple downloads and do them sequentially (e.g. one or two at a time). They also allow you to limit the speed of any downloading so that it won't choke other network usage. If you have an unreliable Internet service these allow resuming a partially completed download as well as allowing you to suspend all downloading and resume at a later time. I have used a program called "Free Download Manger" but I generally don't use it. Some music download sites come with their own download manager program and these are convenient.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I understand what you are saying Tony.This is the reason 'in a nutshell' why industrial lossless music downloads [ie Sony Records, BMG et.al.] are not common place...note this is 5+ years old. My business instructor explained, as with all things time=money. Servers on the industrial scale needs to be able to make X-amount of profit/time period. Downloading lossless music has not yet been able to prove itself profitable enough to replace the hardcopy CD in terms of profit/time and demand for product. For small companies who servers do not download 24/7/365 individual sales of lossless data can tern enough profit to justify sales.
Still, imo CD'players aren't going anywhere soon. There is just too much legacy product around.
Dynobots Audio
Music is the Bridge between Heaven and Earth - 音楽は天国と地球のかけ橋
Edits: 06/19/12
In my cost comparisons, I deliberately chose the Amazon cloud service model, with their lowest usage tier. They provide the industrial size replication and engineer their servers accordingly. If one is running a high volume operation, it is possible to do much better, cost wise.
I run a low volume download service. We pay a fixed monthly rate for our hosting, so far we haven't raised any red flags with the hosting provider. The costs of providing the downloads are effectively free, as far as bandwidth is concerned, but I did want to understand what the options would be, hence my investigation of Amazon cloud services. Our biggest costs are royalties to the copyright holders, credit card processing, and support costs, especially hand-holding new download customers, some of whom are a help-desk nightmare. But these costs are the same regardless of format.
I also pay a fixed monthly fee for the free recordings that are on one of my personal websites. No billing costs, no support costs (so far) and, obviously no revenues.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Good post with lots of detail.
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I think that independent labels may be more receptive to lossless downloads and high res. downloads as a business than the major labels.
The major labels' golden goose may not be laying as many eggs as before but the labels are still conservative about protecting the stream of eggs from the old distribution model. The old model didn't work nearly as well for small labels so they have less to lose and more to gain.
Bill
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