Rupert Murdoch may be swing vote in Apple's 99 cent TV rental pitch - Page 2

+1.

Not to mention all of the other things that go into distributing a CD. From production to the B+M stores that need to shelve them. It's a huge, wasteful beast that need not exist anymore.

...rosebud

If you don't see the same behavior by all the other broadcast companies - and many more news distribution sites, then you're willfully ignorant. And stupid.

Are you suggesting that the $12 CD in a store yields less profit than a $9.99 download of said album?

Music producers may have to be more diligent in what they put out now, because it is much easier for the consumer to scrutinize tracks and buy only what they like. If that is your sentiment, then I completely agree.

Saying that they can't peddle garbage to the masses (suggesting there is something right about doing so) is of no concern to my conscience. A music producer, manager, or whomever needs to see that an act has marketable talent now, instead of just wasting resources on junk.

I like CDs. They're my archive medium. I just don't buy many any more. Of course, I don't buy downloadable music either. I just don't like today's music.

Looks like we might not see the .99 cent deal tomorrow after all. Although I am sure a part of the presentation [keynote sorry] about this has been prepared just in case there is a last minute deal.

Edit:

I guess people in Texas are not as uniformly crazy as I thought they were.

Excellent post! You didn't even have to mention the poor excuse for music we've been subjected to from the major labels.

Bands & musicians are no longer known for their albums, instead they are now known for their song(s). I say you put an album together that someone wants to hear and they will buy it. I just went out of my way a few weeks ago to get the new Jack Johnson CD. Wouldn't do that for a lot of the other junk on the radio....

I think hes saying that buying a physical album to get the few songs you want is likely to yield more total profit those buying the few songs they want digitally á la carte.

That was kinda true before the removal of DRM from iTunes. Now it's simply not the case. I have hundreds of AAC files that I paid for and can play on any compatible device. If I deleted them and gave the files to one of my kids, it would be the same as giving them my CDs. Different in a legal sense, but I wouldn't be too worried if I got called into court in that case.


This "lump sum payment" issue is a red herring. I'm almost certain that that's now how things work nowadays. Wal-Mart and before that just-in-time warehousing changed all that. Did you know that Wal-Mart doesn't buy products wholesale and sell them retail? They effectively act like a giant swap meet. Wholesalers/vendors only get paid by Wal-Mart when the product actually sells.

Any person who agrees with the other news channels would agree with that. Using the general population's beliefs as the mainstream, however, would yield a different conclusion. As for a Fox content deal being a "Pack [sic] with Satan," I'd rather have the option *not* to rent Glenn Beck than not have the option to rent "Bones," "Family Guy," "Fringe," "House," "The Simpsons," or "24."

Of course. Apple keeps 30% of the album, so the publisher gets $7 on a iTunes $9.99 sale.

If the CD is being sold through retail, the retailer keeps around 50%. That means that the publisher receives $6.50-7.00. But that doesn't factor in all the costs of physically producing the CD, packaging, waste, and shipping.

They probably DO make more on an album sale via iTunes.

The problem for publishers is that most iTunes purchases are individual songs. They probably make less when I buy a $0.99 track than when I buy a $12 CD.


For a tiny percentage of people, the quality matters. Heck, some people are still buying vinyl. But for the majority of the market, it just doesn't matter.

As for the 'album vs individual tracks' comment, you can also buy albums on iTunes, so your point is moot. Heck, a publisher can choose not to offer individual tracks at all.

Nope. I'm only saying that people no longer buy entire albums of music. People buy only the cream of the album and leave the filler. As a consumer, this is great. As a music producer, I'm not so sure. This takes away some of the financial incentive to produce music.

And does this matter to us as consumers. Maybe. Let me speculate a little. Albums no longer sell well. So producers now have to concentrate on the "hit single". You end up with producers spending an inordinate amount of time, money and effort to get some glamorous little sex kitten a hit. You're trying to appeal to the most popular musical genre and audience. You have to gamble heavily on creating those hits, lessening the funds you have to produce other bands. I personally dislike most of the new music I hear today. Could this be because the funds to produce the type of music I like is not available? Damned if I know. I only know that if there were a single answer to the problem, it would be fixed and we wouldn't have anything to complain about.

Yup. Walmart has suppliers line up and offer discounts to be sold in the store. Since shoppers there don't care about brands at any time one brand can be thrown out in favor of the other. You've already talked about JIT so I'm not gonna repeat that. What I do want to say is that Walmart to their suppliers is what iTunes is to the music industry: they dictate the pricing and ask for deals.

lol!

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"TV executives reportedly believe that the plan would break the current economic model."

And that's a very very good thing. I work in the industry so I know some stuff the average person does not.

For example. The Nielsen Ratings, those 12 million viewers counts etc, doesn't even count 1 million viewers. They count 25k with an additional 100k during 12 weeks of the year. Weeks timed at points where tons of shows have failed in ratings before the first week hits. When they say a show got 12 million viewers they really mean more like 1000 and if the sample is accurate it would be 12 million. but this is not like sampling units on a production line. This is about people, psychology plays a part, personal taste plays a part. And the sampling is very likely not enough. Plus the demos are based on the Census so they are 1 to 10 years way out of date at any given point.

BUT those numbers are the all holy. They are how the advertisers pay out and that is the only money that is used in budget make good to decide a show is a hit or fail. There's no credit for hulu, official site streaming, netflix, itunes buys, amazon buys etc. That's all community pot money. And yet you can have a show that falls short of its promised '12 million viewers' but gets a million itunes buys in the first two days after airing every one of the 6 weeks it is on the air and no one stops to say 'wait, somethings going on here.' Nope, they just cancel it.

If a plan like this goes into effect yes it will force a change. But perhaps a good change. Perhaps networks will give credit for all sources of money and make the math simple. the show is recovering its budget and increasing viewers (seen via increases in downloads etc) it stays. If not, it goes.

Especially if it is as I have heard and it's actually $1 a month per show. So a kind of Zune like system where so long as you keep paying the fee you can have unlimited downloading. Even if its just the current season and the files are timed to delete after 24-48 hours (you can always download it again), many folks would probably go for it. And the nets can track viewers, continued payments etc. And so what if cable subscriptions go down. It will be a lot of the folks paying you for cable based internet. So you'll drop my 'two service' discount and raise my internet bill back up that $15. fine. I'm still saving $50

All the other news organizations gave a million dollars to republican governors? Please post links.

Yeah, but you have to figure into that argument that if someone only wants one or two songs off a CD, will they buy the whole thing. I would never buy a whole CD on impulse from a single track, but I have bought single songs from iTunes. So are they gaining or loosing?

No...Curmudgeon had it right. While it's true that pirates would have killed the business if legit digital downloads didn't come along, what is killing the music business right now is the transition back to the single as the primary music "product". I don't have the numbers in front of me, but digital downloads are not even coming close to making up for the loss of CD album sales. In fact, even if Apple (and others) had charged $2 a track instead of a dollar, it STILL wouldn't have made up for those losses. (And manufacturing/distribution cost was the lowest cost in producing the product - general overhead, sales, marketing and artist advances are the highest costs.)

And unlike the 1950s and early 60s, where an artist would go into a studio and record 2-3 tracks in a single session, artists spend six months to a year on an album, working in multiple studios and with multiple producers and multiple mixing and mastering engineers/studios. Singles cannot sustain that kind of recording/production.

At the current rate of decline, which is about 20% a year, there won't be much of a music industry left in five years.

I agree, but why do I find myself cheering for him in this case? Think of it as a Nixon to China event.

There is certainly an argument to be made on that point, but the counterargument is that the revenue and profit is still heavily in favour of CD sales for those wanting only a few songs.

Another argument is that the Internet already hurt the labels by making digital copies easily transferable, but that Apple's model of per song purchases was the best method for making digital downloads a profit center for the labels.

Ahem! It's a rumour.


Love the Simpsons & Family Guy.

solution: make better albums.

you are downloading anything more compressed than lossless. The average consumer does not have a critical enough ear nor the equipment to appreciate the difference - and won't. For the average consumer it is good if it is "good enough". For ardent audiophiles who love the hiss and rumble of tube technology because it makes the music "warm" then nothing short of pure vinyl or master discs in CDs will suffice. Given the amount of noise that has to be removed after studio recording, let alone "live" venue recording, it's a wonder anyone claiming to be an audiophile can listen to any recording at all! If it isn't live - it isn't music!!

Critical videophiles and audiophiles are a tiny, tiny minority who wax vocal from time to time, but somehow fail to realize that the standards expressed are entirely unworkable for the average consumer. A trip through most Best Buys, Walmarts or other big box suppliers will demonstrate this conclusively, as most of the equipment affordable for the average consumer is woefully inadequate, introduces sonic and visual artifacting that would (and does) drive a purist nuts.

So yeah. And for the record, fresh milk tastes very different than the stuff your buy in the supermarket too. So does home-grown vegetables and fruit, meat and fresh-caught fish. But you pay a steep price (or grow your own and discount your time and effort spent) for that freshness and quality as opposed to the convenient of picking it up at the supermarket. Just sayin'...

David Attenborough's not bad though.

Is in fact the overhead. The entire music recording industry is built around the overhead - not the production and delivery. One of the issues here is that fact that the recording industry is losing control of the music. They cannot, as they did for so long, cherry-pick the music they wanted aired to drive sales where they wanted them.

Another issue is they built a lot of profit into production - CDs, as consumers discovered, are really cheap to produce in mass quantities, and with digital processing, the entire stream from studio to pressing has lost much of the cost overhead it once had. How artists produce the music varies widely from artist to artist and group to group. That was a very sweeping statement to make about studio time and not really reflective of reality across the board.

The problem with album sales is not that they are losing money on them but that they have not created a compelling argument with the average consumer FOR them. Usually the marketing captures one or more cuts that they choose to put out there and then are surprised that consumers only want those cuts. Album sales were higher when radio stations hit the FM band and played whole album sides, giving the attention to the whole of the music not just the cuts thought to be most popular or saleable. That dropped off when they returned programming to highlighted cuts with supporting music videos.

Rupert Murdoch became an 'American' to take over our media. Murdoch is a threat to Apple and all of us.

Rupert backing Apple to compete with his own Sky?

The same can be said for playback devices. I'm under the impression that people watch movies on their iPad using the built-in mono speaker. I'm also under the impression that Apple is selling bazillions of iPads.

That was the quote that leapt out at me too. Looks like it did for several others here, before this thread descended into political bickering.


I somewhat disagree. What torpedoed CD sales was greed on the part of the RIAA and the corporate retail giants they struck deals with. Even though CDs were cheaper to produce than tape or vinyl, offered superior sound quality to the former, the same portability as the former, and was more durable than the latter. Yet after a while, CD prices climbed such that the average CD was $13 to $14. What happened?

Well the big box stores like Circuit City and Best Buy made a deal with the RIAA. Let us sell your CDs cheaper than our competition. They sold/bought the RIAA on this and the big box stores were able to drive the small music stores - who actually catered to music fans and not just top 40 listen-in-their-car folds - out of business. Once the competition was out of the way, the big box stores slowly could demand their own price until most older material was normally priced in that $13-$14 range.

People, of course, weren't going to tolerate this forever. Especially for the top 40 listeners who only wanted the latest radio hit and not all the fluff that constitutes most of your normal album.

About the same time as the big box stores had solidified their monopoly of CD sales, Napster hit the scene. Right away it attracted two distinct groups of music listener - the aforementioned top 40 listener who wanted only wanted a song or two off an album, and the music affacionados who wanted out-of-print material or import stuff that the RIAA wouldn't release in to all countries.

So what really killed CDs wasn't digital downloads, it was the greed of the RIAA and the big music retailers who built up public apathy to the point that when digital downloads became available to the masses, they flocked to it and never looked back.


Yes it's a concern but CD sales were slowing well before iTMS, maybe even before Napster came along.

I could also make the case that the changes to way we get our music - namely radio - has changed too. Thanks in large part to corporate monoloplies of our radio airwaves, we have more radio stations than before but they play less and less variety of music. Everything is some slice of adult contemporary, classic rock, or modern country, often with very narrowly defined playlists compared to just 20 years ago. Jazz and classical tend to only exist on public radio, and any other format (indie rock, folk, bluegrass, etc.) is not available except in the largest of markets.

This means that many of bands and music formats that specialized in the album format don't get widespread attention. The acts that do get the radio airplay are - wait for it - tailored for the radio and its 4 minute pop format.


The sales of the blank CD suprassing music CDs is new to me but it makes perfect sense. I agree completely that iTMS saved the music industry from complete piracy. The RIAA wanted to live on their CD monopoly forever and the public wasn't going to sustain it. Even if digital distribution over the Internet was delayed a few years it would have been more apparant that CD sales would have plummeted on their own. The emergence of Napster gave the RIAA a scapegoat. Instead of giving up their old-wolrd monopoly and embracing digital distribution before it destroyed them, the RIAA tried to sue their way back to the status quo. Before they had time to watch that fail, in came Apple with iTMS which embraced the new world while still making a profit off of it and the rest is history.


The TV and film industry are just starting to hit the growing pains that the music industry has hit. While TV and film are not as easily consumed as music, they are still commodity items that people buy faster than they can consume. Note that no one bought whole seasons of shows on VHS (which would fill a row on your bookshelf each year) but they became popular with the DVD format. Few wants the same mountain of DVDs at home like that they had with CDs and of course with the emergence of mobile devices, digital video has greater portability than DVD.

And more and more people that their montly cable or satellite bill, which just keeps growin, is just not sustainable.

In comes Apple again, offering these old-world industries a chance to jump into the new world quickly and profitably. But they all want the same lofty pre-recession profits they once had when money was flowing freely (and arguable, irresponsibly and unsustainably) even though all the predictions and guidance suggest they will lose more and more if they don't change with the times.


Agreed wholeheartedly Crusty. It will be an intereting 5 years. And whoever can get the content people want in the way people want will win the spoils.

No, he is a millionaire because he is a capitalist and was hand-picked by big moneyed interests as the one to most effectively make them even richer.

What friggin planet do you live on if you don't think Obama is a capitalist? You think he'd get to be president if he intended to upset the apple cart? How do you imagine these things work? You think he got elected via contributions from Daily Worker readers? He's a Democrat. He represents huge wealth.

He is not a communist or a socialist.

I would be shocked if any audiophiles love hiss and rumble.

Your premise appears to be extremely flawed.

Does that explain why Best Buy and WalMart sell so little Apple product?

That SHOULD be a concern! They got so used to filling albums with crap and selling them on the basis of one or two songs, there's no wonder they want to keep the status quo.

Hope this drives them to fill albums with songs that are worth buying. I still buy some albums. Some are class, some are not. The good producer + artist combinations will still move albums.

I see no reason for someone like Keisha to move albums, songs yes. Albums no.

Wow. "worker ownership of the means of production"? Right out of Pravda - and nearly all American Universities during the 60's. Love the rhetoric.

Exactly.

So it's important to you that no Apple TV customer have the opportunity to view Fox content because you don't like Murdock? You're seriously full of yourself, huh?

He is using the proper terminology of economic theory. You don't have to be a communist to use the correct language to describe it. Lighten up.

So is hysteria.

exactly. Give the kid a break, he probably just learned that term in his first week of Econ 101 and he's eager to share his new "expertise." Classes DID just get back in session for the youngsters, after all.

I beg to differ. Certainly all his policies lean socialistic. More government control of everything.