RIAA Tired Of Not Getting Paid By Single Mothers
It looks like the RIAA has finally decided that their heartless and meanspirited lawsuit strategy to stop illegal downloading and sharing of music just isn't working. So they've called it quits! Well, sort of.
They have announced that they will stop their random sueing strategy. Instead, they will work directly with ISPs, essentially tatle-telling on people that are uploading music. In turn, the ISPs will tell their customer to stop, then throttle their connection. In theory at least.
The RIAA isn't saying who they are or are not working with, so it's possible that no one has signed on to this program just yet. However, what it does mean is that you won't be getting a loverly summons in the mail because you downloaded Miley Cyrus' record.
Takeaway? Get to downloading! Everything! You won't get sued anymore, and if you get throttled, you can just switch ISPs! Oh... oh, wait. They're still gonna sue, apparently, but only if you don't learn your lesson when your ISP slaps your wrist. hmmmm.... maybe, and don't hate me here, but maybe we should all just go ahead and pay for the music we download? Just an idea...
RIAA drops lawsuits; ISPs to battle file sharing [CNET]
Jesse James
Posted to Hot Stuff, In the News on 19 December 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: ISP, lawsuit, quits, RIAA, throttling
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
Do you realise how much that would cost? I mean, the pricing structures would have to be radically changed.
Let's examine the cheapest ipod. The ipod shuffle—$49.
240 songs, average capacity.
The average CD has 10 songs, that's 24 CD's.
If we're buying retail CD's in stores, that's $17 apiece, that 24*17=$408, 8 times the cost of the ipod.
But that's not realistic, no one buys CD's in stores any more, it's all itunes downloads.
So, 24 CD's at $10 per cd is 24*10=240, 4 times the cost of the ipod.
And that's just to fill up the cheapest ipod once.
What's that, you say, "But I already have tons and tons of CD's that I can put on my ipod." True, but music is continuously produced and released, and you'll want to buy more. Also, the sheer expansion that digital media provides means that there is more available, than, say, 20 years ago, when your only option for a different CD selection was to find another CD store. Now, the entire world catalogue of music is essentially (barring sales restrictions due to licensing,) at your fingertips.
Do you remember economics, one principle is that of scarcity, that as a product becomes more scarce, prices rise. In this case, it's almost the reverse. The product (music) has increased by orders of magnitude, but the prices don't reflect that. From an economic point of view, the scarcity question is mind boggling, "If there's so much music available, why does it cost so much?" Even if we consider quality, that should be reflected in the pricing structure.
The problem is that the recording industry has an established infrastructure that was very expensive. Print and television advertising is considerably more expensive than online advertising, which is where more advertising should be spent, if the product is going to be distributed digitally. That reduces overhead, overhead which was necessary when that was the only means of advertising.
Recording companies need to make their profit margins too, they just needed to find a way to fit into the dot-com era, which they didn't. And the result is that the dot-com era found a way to fit into the recording industry.
In all reality, the biggest obstacle I can see to the economics of the recording industry are concerts. Live concerts are incredibly expensive to produce. And if ticket prices to the concerts had to reflect that, there would probably only be arena shows in large cities that lasted for 2 weeks at a time.