Google makes most of their money from ad sales, but if everyone blocked all ads and only used Google through web scrapers, no one would buy ads from Google. If you rob traffic from Google's page, you are robbing from Google, even if they make no money from their page.
What they need to do is market themselves effectively. I've known one band that signed a record deal... but they were already popular in their particular niche. So their record deal has an expiration date on the length of time that the record label owns the copyright (10 years in this case, IIRC). Had they not already had a following, the label would have screwed them into signing over their copyright indefinitely.
You need to work on your following on a small scale, and then let word of mouth, internet marketing, etc scale up your fan-base. The 'hit it big' idea is largely a fantasy. Most bands that sign a record deal to 'make it big' end up failing and then being locked into a contract with the record label for the next X years.
To say that bands need the record labels is a fallacy. Most of the bands that the record labels sign are failures. Record labels take the 'shotgun' approach to finding the 'next big thing.' They are opportunists that prey on people's hopes and dreams of becoming the next huge band. They sweet-talk them into thinking that it's a slam-dunk as soon as they are signed.
The problem with most musicians -- or at least the 'rock' musicians -- is that a lot of them don't do it for the 'love of the music.' They do it because they want to become a large popular rock band so they can party, binge on drugs/alcohol, and get fans/groupies/etc to have lots of backstage sex with. If someone is following this path, and they get screwed by the record companies, I have little sympathy.
My point was that a band will make more money on tour because the record label takes a huge chunk of the albums sale.
The real money is in producing music. :-P
The above must be true because my local radio station 2CR (which we reckon is short for 2 crap records) is still being asked to play "I think i'd better leave right now" by Will Young which is the most hideous song EVER created.
My point is that the industry is not dumber then the comment which appears on any music industry thread on the internet. Copyright is important to them. They have a chance of keeping it from disappearing, or at least slowing down the process.
Go netaudio instead. You get publicity be giving away music and then you get gigs due to people knowing you and listening to your music.
It's awesome aside from that though.
In exchange for my loss of right of first sale, Steam continues with the aggressive pricing.
Not being able to resell games matters to me less when I can buy games cheaper in the first place.
This is especially true of archival titles, which (when I could find them) would often be a forgotten beat-up box on a shelf, with an ancient $39.99 price tag still on it.
Steam also does a good job with the price drops on recent games. If the game isn't something I necessarily have to have at $50 on release day, I usually don't have to wait too long for a price drop.
Obviously, price drops depend on the publisher, but Steam is a storefront geared toward price mobility, and Valve has created a model with their aggressive sales for other publishers to follow.
This is a solved problem--it's legal and fairly priced.
The only problem is that Apple is using its huge market share in portable players to keep subscription music from getting a foothold. Spotify's iphone app is approved, so hopefully they can start to crack this market open.
It also doesn't help that people don't want to lose access to their music if they all of the sudden can't come up with the $15/month... I would say that people are probably more willing to give up cable/satellite tv for a month than deal with losing their music.
Problems with the subscription model:
* Need a portable music player that supports the particular DRM
scheme vs just getting an MP3 that plays on almost any
portable music player (save for Sony's players that only play
their ATRAC crap).
* Don't make a monthly payment and you lose all access to your
collection/playlists/etc.
* The service could implode. Then you've sunk $15/month * x
months and you have nothing to show for it.
* The DRM scheme could become unsupported. Microsoft has
proven this with their abandonment of PlaysForSure.Last time I checked they said that players 'supported mp3', but what that really meant is that you had to use their software to load music onto the player, and their software transcoded from mp3 -> ATRAC. They just don't announce it outright that internally the player is using ATRAC.
> Second, options like Microsoft's Zune Pass let you do both: paying $15/month gets you access to the entire catalog of music, but you get to keep 10 of the tracks (in a no DRM, quality mp3 format for most songs) every month -- making it equivalent to only paying around $6/month for the subscription.
In that case, it's not really a 'subscription service' but a hybrid 'subscription/pay-to-own service.' More like a 'rent-to-own' service. {edit} Not to mention that Zune is Windows-only. {/edit}
If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
I'm not claiming that it's perfect for everyone, it's a personal choice: you can get all of the music now but have to keep paying, or you can slowly build up a library but start out with not much.
The other advantage of subscription is that you can easily try out new music. It's incredibly easy to discover new music when it's all in one catalog and there's no marginal cost of listening to entire CDs.
The only problem is that switching from one model to the other is going to be painful--but this isn't an advantage either way.
You're not locked into a specific player with mp3 audio either, and IIRC there aren't any subscription services that give you mp3 audio... so you are limited in your choices of music player in the first place since subscription services all use some form of DRM.
If you buy CD audio, or are able to find a service that sells FLAC/APE/ALAC audio, then you're also not 'locked in' to a particular codec or audio quality (because at that level you can easily transcode downwards in quality and/or to lossy codecs).
> If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
This is assuming that the subscription services use compatible DRM schemes, or that your player supports both DRM schemes... Otherwise you're stuck needing to buy a new player. And that's not to mention any time and effort that you put into building custom playlists that won't transfer to the new subscription service.
It's sort of like all the personal information that people put into Facebook. They are investing a lot of time into one vendor of social networking services. The more time that they spend on Facebook, the more heavily invested they are in staying with that particular vendor, because it becomes more and more painful to rebuild all of your information/connections/etc on the new service.
Or, it could also be that people just don't want to pay for subscription music. I know that I don't.
I recently discussed Napster with a group that had never heard about it and they were very excited until I told them that it wasn't compatible with iPods.
I certainly won't deny that iPod compatibility (or lack thereof, rather) is a pretty big minus in the subscription model.
(One qualification: It's limited in how many times you can re-download so that you don't use it as your personal file-transfer service to download the same album 20 times on every computer you or anyone you know owns, but assuming you don't abuse the ability to redownload it'll be there if you ever lose your files.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566825
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=emusic+spam
I urge you most strongly not to use them.
It seems their music distribution is on the up-and-up. Such underhanded tactics to add to the bottom line make me wonder whether their legitimate business model really is sustainable.
I really wish iTunes operated like Steam. You buy a song, and can download it as often as you need to. You dont have to worry about deleting/losing your MP3, because you could just go download it again, no charge.
I commend bands like NIN and Radiohead, where they offered an album for digital consumption at no cost. In reality, bands make most of their money from touring anyway