Re: The Future of Music (was: Re: e-book pricing)

From: Max Møller Rasmussen (maxm@normik.dk)
Date: Wed Aug 02 2000 - 02:54:52 MDT


Fra: Zero Powers

>Its no secret in the music industry that over 75% of the cost of a CD goes
>into manufacturing, packaging, distribution and record company profit.
Only
>about 1/5 of the price pays for actual production of the recording and
>payment to the artist. It is *only* that 1/5 that I have any desire to
pay.

The cost of a CD consists of several layers:

Demo
Recording
Graphic-artwork
Music video
CD-Production
Advertising campaign
Distribution (transport/stores)
sales tax

A CD-Production costs about $1 including packaging and printing of the
booklet.
So yes you can save that.

You can also save most of the distribution costs. Especially as bandwith
gets cheaper.

But that still leaves:

Demo
Recording
Graphic-artwork
Music video
Advertising campaign
sales tax

The more bands that makes and receives CD's the more need there will be for
marketing. This is happening allready now where it is practically impossible
to break a new band without TV advertising.

So probably free distribution will not make it cheaper to sell music as
there will be a bigger need for marketing. This might be leveled somewhat by
the fact that more people probably will buy music if it is readily available
on-line.

I don't know about you but I would like to see more and better music video's
and I would like even better and more progressive music. Furthermore I will
like to know about music that I like in the Fringe of the techno scene.

A million artist doing their own website for promoting music will not do
that. I have no time to search all that information. I don't even have time
to do it on mp3.com as they take in everything. All I have ever heard (well
almost all) on mp3.com is demo quality at best. An artist is not the best
judge of his own work. Thus I want a filtering infrastructure that can give
ME the high quality music that I like.

This is what a recording company should do (You can also call them editors,
critics etc. Same difference.). So I don't think they will go away. I don't
want them to go away.

Regards Max M Rasmussen (Denmark)



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