Did Steve Jobs Kill Music? - Page 4

What do you mean the artist doesn't cover other losses?

When an artist received an advance of (say) $100,000 from the label to create the album, the artist should repay that $100,000 back to the label from his/her royalties. If the artist is only making $2 per album, that means the artist will be required to sell 50,000 albums to break even before he/she can actually spend the money his/her own way.

In some contracts, the artist even have to repay the difference if the artist is not breaking even the advance given to him/her.

and when the artist is paying session musicians, recording engineers using his/her advance money, that means the artist is paying somebody's salary.

now of course the artist also make money from radio play, licensing etc and most of the money is actually made from radio play and licensing (concerts used to be a way to make money, but not quite as much anymore -- it's more of a promo-for-the-upcoming-album -- which again advanced by the label and required to be repaid to the label.)

This I agree wholeheartedly !!! After all, it's BUSINESS !!!

But they can only do that if they can actually make enough money to do so. But yeh, it's an 'advance', not a gift. So it is to be repaid. The person who takes the risk is going to get his back first. That's always the case.


I meant to actually run the business. Those are not ongoing salaries that they are responsible for every week, but one time expenses during the recording of the album. And those people are mercenaries, not people that work for the recording industry.

And, frankly, they are getting paid less and less as well because of all of the problems. High quality studios are dropping like flies. I so wish I was rich because there's soooo much good quality hardware out there for good prices because of this fact.


But what's the reality though? Some 18 year old kids who probably often aren't qualified to do much more advanced than fry station if they don't make it as musicians? How likely in reality are they to pay that money back any time soon? And, there again, if you don't want that obligation, don't sign. No one is forcing you to sign.

Wow, interesting read here on this thread. Lots of interesting opinions from lots of different people. I had a couple thoughts.

First off, what a douche Bon Jovi is. To say that Jobs killed music because now you can sample songs before buying? There is no more anticipation of popping an album in and hoping the songs are good? What bunk. Try before you buy is an essential part of being a consumer. We see it everywhere from the dressing room at clothes shops to the little food samples at the grocery store. How can we buy without sampling first? I no longer buy CDs because of crappy artists like Bon Jovi who will publish a CD with 2-3 listenable tunes and 9-10 more of absolute garbage filler. You want people to buy your entire CD? Then fill it with good songs and I'd be happy to. Nuff said.

I would go so far as to say that the iTunes model has broadened my musical tastes and increased my purchasing because I can check out a large number of artists in a short period of time and very conveniently. I tend to like artists who are great but aren't exactly mainstream and popular such as Built to Spill, or Stephen Malkmus. So, using the sampling on iTunes I've been able to listen to some of their work on older rare albums and buy what appeals to me. Without iTunes, I never would've had the chance to check out some of this music in the first place.

Boooooo Bon Jovi.
Kudos to Steve Jobs.

i didnt read the whole thread, and certainly is a great debate topic of who killed the music industry, but i think music on the go, via our portable players and mini headphones instead of at home on full sized speakers, is how more of us listen to music, (except hollywood movies in bluray and home theater audio systems) and thus, less push for high fidelity music from artist releases has happened. when digital cds and discmans moved us to clearer audio sound away from analog hiss cassette, but when mp3s came out up to generally now, we've been stuck on mp3s even though storage media, broadband, and recent file formats like FLAC exist. For this i do sorta blame Apple's marketshare/popularity and doing nothing much with it in keeping the masses from moving forward.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2011...llionindamages

Best of luck with that RIAA.

It's BS. Even as a royalty recipient I don't believe that number.

Their numbers are based on the loss of potential sales... Which is bogus. Most people who dowbload illegally will not buy music to begin with anyway. They are the radio listeneres, people who used to record from radio/friends' music collection. There's hardly any loss of sale from those illegal downloaders.

What kills the music industry is the lack of quality music and recording quality.

For example: I used to ike Michael Buble, but the last 2 albums' sond and song quality have plumetted insanely making the difference between illegal download vs original CD virtually non-existent. Will I ever buy MB's albums again? Heck no!

Yep, it's just more evidence that the RIAA's greed knows no bounds.

Sigh... What's it going to take? That might have made some kind of sense in 2000. But when sales halve and downloads have gotten huge, that's just silliness. Clearly many of those people were buying before they could steal and now they just steal it. When the theft rate is 5%, you can reasonably argue that you are dealing with the lunatic fringe who would never buy. When there's as much being downloaded as purchased, if not more, then that's just a baseless claim.


Again, this is just wrong. Lady Gaga is enormous. You may not like her, but that's not the same as not being any good. It's just not your kind of music. Same with Bieber, same with various others. If the problem was that no one liked it, it wouldn't be getting downloaded by the container load.

It's just crazy to argue that sales are lacking beacuse no one likes the music when the very music you are saying no one likes is the stuff being downloaded the most. Go to Youtube and see how many downloads the average Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift song has and how many the average Led Zepplin song has. The numbers speak for themselves. It's not classic 70s or even 90s rock that's making up the bulk of downloads. Probably Nirvana does better than Led Zepplin, but the kids out there now are NOT downloading old music because they think current music sucks. Please accept this and get over it. They are downloading new music because they like it.


Because there's no money to pay for high quality recordings hardly anymore, other than at the highest level of sales. And of course you read in this same thread other people using as their justification for stealing music that it shouldn't cost much to make it because it could be made in your bedroom now. So, what is it? Should they be making lower quality music for less, or should they be making more expensive and high quality music and charge more? You can't have both. And you know perfectly well that if they had to charge more, that the theft rate would go up even more.

This is like stealing your neighbor's lawn mower and then complaining that he doesn't cut the grass.


And of course you completely ignore the fact that the judge didn't think that a billion was out of the question, which means that clearly Limewire is seen, even by this obviously not particularly record industry biased judge, as being a huge infringer, not exactly the poor victim that you are seemingly making them out to be. That's the problem with this whole thing. No matter what happens, the people getting ripped off are the ones blamed. It's just a massive self-serving bias in the population who seems to desparately need to believe that what they are doing isn't wrong.

I don't have anything to do with the record industry or make any money from it, and if it weren't for this situation I'd probably be on the other side of the fence and worrying more about artist's rights and such, but the massive hypocracy that's going on just makes me want to puke. At this point the greatest theat to artist's rights isn't the record industry, it's people who steal music and then try make out like they are the good guys.

Ummm, did you read my post at all? I AM a recipient of recording royalties and I put the blame back to us (the content creator).

And where did you get that I dislike Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber? I own all Lady Gaga's albums. And as far as Justin Bieber? I only own his My World Acoustic. Why? Because the recording quality is good and he didn't use as much Autotune as he used to use in his My World 2.0 album.

In the case of Michael Buble, his latest album recording quality is absolutely atrocious, and to cut a couple of hours of session time (approx $10,000 in studio time at the high-end of studio time) he chooses to use Autotune.

Are there thieves out there? Of course! But claiming the slowing down of sales due to abundant theft is insane! I own more than 2,000 CDs and the older the albums, usually there are more songs that I like within each album compared to the newer ones.

What I wish to have today is the ressurection of CD singles. I'd rather pay $10 for 2 CD singles of the songs I like rather than $12 for an album of 10 songs which only 2 songs I like. Why? Because too many of them aren't even worth to be listened to.

Ummm, did you read my post at all? I AM a recipient of recording royalties and I put the blame back to us (the content creator).

And where did you get that I dislike Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber? I own all Lady Gaga's albums. And as far as Justin Bieber? I only own his My World Acoustic. Why? Because the recording quality is good and he didn't use as much Autotune as he used to use in his My World 2.0 album.

In the case of Michael Buble, his latest album recording quality is absolutely atrocious, and to cut a couple of hours of session time (approx $10,000 in studio time at the high-end of studio time) he chooses to use Autotune.

Are there thieves out there? Of course! But claiming the slowing down of sales due to abundant theft is insane! I own more than 2,000 CDs and the older the albums, usually there are more songs that I like within each album compared to the newer ones.

What I wish to have today is the ressurection of CD singles. I'd rather pay $10 for 2 CD singles of the songs I like rather than $12 for an album of 10 songs which only 2 songs I like. Why? Because too many of them aren't even worth to be listened to.

It's just the constant 'music sucks and that's why sales is down' thing, and the most commonly quoted reasons are Lady Gaga and Bieber. But the fact that this music is being massively stolen proves it's not because people think it sucks. It just absolutely does, and the constant argument that music sucks is just wasting time because it's wrong and people should drop it.


Almost everyone does these days. I think it sucks, but the situation has gotten to the point where a real human performance isn't considered acceptable anymore for pop music anyway. It's just the nature of the beast right now. I hope it will change at some point.


It's anything BUT insane. It's completely common sense. I've pointed it out time and again in this thread, but it just gets ignored. Sales was going up continuously until 1999, the year after the Napster case. It's been going down ever since, and downloading has been going up. You don't need much more proof than that, but you can of course go to any place on the internet and see the completely ingrained opinion towards theft of music, movies and software. It's completely the norm now among most younger people.

If you don't think that's massively hurting sales, I have to question your grip on reality. Do you really think that music just happened to stop selling by half over the last ten years as file sharing has grown to enormous proportions? If it wasn't music that was a driving aspect of that file sharing, you might have some solid ground to stand on, but it is.

The fact that you have 2000 CDs is meaningless. I have a lot of CDs as well, but that's not the norm. The norm is a kid with an iPod or iPad or whatever that's full of music that wasn't paid for, often none of it unless their parents bought them some as a gift. Do you really think that these kids (who have been the major purchasers of music for decades) would just stop consuming music if they had to pay for it again? They clearly would not. They would start buying it again. No, not all of it that's currently stolen would be purchased, but it doesn't have to remotely reach that point for the music industry to get healthy again.


Then you listen to crap bands I guess. Spend you money on bands that have CDs full of great music and ignore the rest. Vote with your dollars. But the CD is dead, not because I think it's a good thing but because kids have voted against it en masse. It's not going to survive as a mainstream medium for much longer probably. CD singles would even be less likely I imagine. Any hard format is probably doomed. I think it's unfortunate, but it's the way things are going. It's either going to be stolen online or purchased online. It's not going to go away tomorrow obviously, but the clouds are visible on the horizon.

And unfortunately, that vote won't really make much difference either on the recording quality front unless you convince kids that music quality matters, which the bulk of them don't really care about. Until that happens, it makes not much sense to spend a lot of money creating high quality music if almost no one listens to it on anything but ear buds and computer speakers. And it's not because the people involved don't care or want to make nice quality music. But if almost no one cares, it's hard to justify. Some will still do if they have some reasonable chance of making it back, or if their audience is more tilted towards the more mature crowd probably.

And, as I said above, the same people stealing the music will say they stole it because it's low quality crap and that they stole it because the record companies are charging too much. It doesn't matter what happens, they'll still steal it, unless the government steps in and makes it reasonably dangerous to do so. They have been taking some steps, but not a huge amount. And that theft is going to continue to push the industry away from what you would prefer, better quality music and the survival of a high quality digital format.

That's a new revenue stream of over a billion dollars a year that they didn't have before, with lower overheads than physical copy distribution I might add.

But unfortunately it ignores the fact that many more billions than that have been lost and are continuing to be lost, and digital sales aren't remotely enough to make up for it. And the lower overhead isn't that much lower. The cost of the physical CD had for some time been not much of the cost, and Apples takes a considerable bite of that apple as well.

And when you consider that probably as many songs get downloaded illegally per month as iTunes sells in a year or so, and probably almost as many in a year as iTunes has ever sold, it puts the problem a lot more in perspective. And that the other legal online methods (streaming services, Youtube, etc...) pay almost nothing and that they also massively outweight iTunes. Lady Gaga herself has more hits on Youtube than iTunes has ever sold in its history I think. So clearly even in the legal (to semi-legal, since a lot of those uploads to Youtube are not official), iTunes is a small potato, and Youtube, being add supported, pays very little in comparison to even iTunes sales.

But artists have little choice. It's either put it on Youtube yourself and get what benefits there are, or have it up there anyway and don't get them. You'll never keep your stuff off Youtube, because by the time the process works for you to ask it to be taken down, another will be up. Youtube has gotten better about identifying songs no on official channels and counting them as plays, but still it's a losing game compared to actually selling your music. And the streaming systems pay even less really.

10 billion illegal dowloads a year? If you are going to make outrageous claims like that I suggest you back it up with evidence. At least if you want anyone to take your posts seriously.

That chart speaks for itself, iTunes downloads are skyrocketing.

I suggest you do your homework. Go back to the original Harvard study, the one that the pro-theft forces crowed about so much and look at the numbers, and this was many years ago, and look at their extrapolations for the future. And this study, the original one, was attempting to argue that even that level of theft had no real impact, so clearly they were not some biased bunch of people trying to skew the results. If anything they would have been biased the other way.

They then subsequently put out another study, where they admitted that downloading represented a 20% loss, and look at the numbers they report. And again, if anything, they would be on the conservative side because of their position, not on the liberal side.

And ten billion downloads isn't nearly as outrageous as it seems. Think about it. If you just look at iPods and no other type of device, there's been something like 350'ish million of them sold I believe. So if only around 35 songs were downloaded in an entire year just per iPod, that would cover it basically. And there are various other types of devices out there and home computers, and so for forth.

Go do some research about the pecentage of traffic on the internet that is estimated to be illegal downloads. There are probably not far from a billion people on this planet who are in a position to download music (out of the 7 billionish all together.) It would only require 1 song a month on average to hit 10 billion. If someone downloads three albums, he's covered that average for three people for the year basically.

I've been to the homes of quite wealthy people who just steal music and movies as a matter of course, and never even think about it. It's got nothing to do with the ability to afford it. It's that it's doable, there are no consequences, and there is a massive propoganda machine on the internet to explain to people why it's ok.


They are piddly sales compared to what is being lost.


And, BTW, your own post up above proves how bad the problem is. And the whole situation has gotten so bad that you don't even realize it. There's a company, Limewire, which has contributed to huge copyright infringement, as indicated by the settlement (a billion dollars worth, which is actually not representative because that's acting like only one copy of each song was stolen.) And did you post a message expressing outrage about this? No, you posted a message about how horrible the record industry (the people who were getting stolen from) are for demanding as much as they could legally be entitled to, and then accepting what they got.

That's how stupid the whole thing has gotten. You are completely on the side of the infringers, as are most of the young people out there these days, because they have grown up on an internet disseminated theology of the evil record industry, so as to feel better about stealing.

Thanks for that vote of confidence I don't listen to a band or an artist. I look for and listen to good songs with good production quality. I'm not going to deprive my musical experience from an artist/band if they only have one good song. A good song is a good song no matter what.

And I do vote with my dollars. I only buy the songs I like or if that one song is not available as a single or can be purchased in "high quality" MP3, I won't be forking my money at all.

Do you honestly think that every ipod sold since 2001 (the number is around 300 million btw) is still functioning? That's like citing VCR sales numbers from the 90s to indicate how many people are still using VHS.

You're killing me here, and you've yet to post any links backing up your statements.

Finally, if you read my posts I've never defended people downloading music illegally. My whole point is that the RIAA is far from without fault by refusing to price their product according to demand, and has helped to create an environment unsympathetic to their concerns.

That is so true. I own 5 iPods and in fact I no longer use any of them for music. The music-only iPod have now only being used as a portable HDD, the multi generation iPod Touch are used to read e-mail and forums such as this.

IMO the very thing that made JBJ popular was the begin of the decline of music as we knew it....it became a visual experience more then audio. We were for a time fo
rced to view MTV on crap tv speakers..atleast those of us 40 and over. So the start of poorer sound and listening wasnt enough was born now we multi task and few think an album a chair and an hour is a cool experience. MTV started it....Jobs just took it to another level and without rabid demand his idea would have went bust. So Jovi can blame whoever he wants but he should remember his wealth was built first on his face........not his music.

No I don't think that. I was just providing some indication of how many portable devices there are out there. There are huge numbers of them, and they aren't all iPods obviously, and every internet connected desktop or laptop is another download point. It doesn't take many downloads per person in a position to download in order to reach very large numbers.


I told you to go look up the Harvard study. It's widely linked to on the net. There are two of them. One was like 94 or 96 or so and another was more recent. Look at the numbers that they indicate from their sampling, and keepin in mind that these folks were arguing no damage, so you cannot claim that they were biased towards overly high numbers.

So strain yourself and look up the study and read it and look at the numbers. If I post something, you'll just claim it's bogus. Look it up yourself.


And I've refuted this silly argument time and again. There IS NO PRICE that will compete with free that is sustainable. The price of CDs has not gone up and has in fact gone down considerably in dollar amount, while inflation has gone up 2.5x or more since they came out. What did a car cost in 85 vs. now? CDs are actually a very good value, but of course because people want to steal it, they try to make out like it's some sort of rip off.

I just purchased the first three volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it cost me $65. Now, if I could have just walked out that store without paying, with zero chance of getting caught, what do you think that the price would have to be to get me to go to the front desk and pay for it? Do I have the right to tell people what to sell their product for? No, I do not. And it's ridiculous to claim that somoene setting what they feel is the right price for their product as a justification for their being stolen from. No economy can work like that.

And no, you didn't openly defend people downloading music illegally. But everything you've said in this thread puts you square in the downloader's camp. That's what so funny about this whole thing (in a sad way) is that we know that there is huge amounts of downloading, but almost no one ever admits to doing so, but 95% of the people in these types of threads seem to spend the entire thread condemning the people being stolen from as the ones doing wrong.

BTW, here some info from a market research company called NDP about the Limewire thing.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...web8230339.DTL

Just a few bits from it:

1. It says that up until Limewire was whacked that about 16 percent of the US population was using P2P to download music. That's just P2P of course, not all the other schemes such as bit tor-ents.

2. That the number before that was 28 million in 2007, at an average of 35 files per person. That comes out close to a billion songs just on the P2P front, and just in the US, not counting other sources and the rest of the world.

3. That other P2P clients were increasing now that Limewire was whacked.


I don't know what bit tor-ents are like now, but I was under the impression it was now considerably larger than P2P in terms of number of users and files downloaded.