If anyone cares, the streaming services like Spotify and Pandora pay fractions of a penny to the artists for royalties. Less than even radio stations. I know quite a few artists are not happy about these services, but I suppose they need to use them to get their music out. However, some people capture the audio and save it for their personal use.
I know, it's the same as borrowing a CD from a buddy or the library and ripping it, but in case this sort of thing interests/bothers you ...
First off, Pandora and the similar services aren't ripping of the artists, they are paying the required royalties. If the artists aren't happy with the amount they are paying maybe they should complain to the people who negotiated the terms of those agreements.
Next, I am getting really tired of hearing the whining and BS statistics about piracy from the record and movie industries.They love to throw around numbers about how much money they are losing to illegal copying when the reality is that there losses aren't but a small fraction of what they like to quote. They come up with number that estimates the number of copied units, multiply it by the full list price per unit and then cry that this is how much money they lost to pirates during that time period. Well that number is just bogus on a number of fronts. First off, as competitive as media sales are right now, what percent of those sales are made at full MSRP? Yet when projecting their losses they assume that every single thing they sell goes out the door at full price. Next, and most importantly they make the ridiculous assumption that every song or album that gets copied represents a lost sale. This just could not be further from the truth. If a 13 year old kid downloads 100 albums in a month the record industry would like us to believe that they "lost" almost $1700 in that process (100 albums X $16,98 list). But the reality of the matter is that if the kid did not have access to these downloads and had to pull cash out of his pocket for every album he obtained, he would be buying 2 or three albums a month. So even though he downloaded 100 album the real revenue loss the the record companies is a lot closer to $50 that it is to $1700. There is a big difference between what people will take for free vs. what they are willing to pay for.
Likewise with library copies not everybody who borrows a library CD or DVD would have paid for their own copy if one was not available from the library. How many time do I make a comment in the What are you listening to now? thread to the effect of "that sounds interesting, I'll have to see if ALIS can find me a copy." I certainly wouldn't be listening to more than a small fraction of those thing if each audition involved a significant cash outlay, especially tin the case of experimental listening to artists or music types that I haven't heard before. but on top of that library collections account to chunders of thousands of CD sales every month so they significant source of revenue for the record companies as well. All the people who are predicting that primary will kill the music business need to do is look at the Grateful Dead. For the past 4 decades the Dead have not only tolerated privacy, they encouraged it, setting up special sections at their concerts for tapers. And how many gold records and millions of dollars have they made over that time in spite of the pirates?
Anyway, the people most often whining are not the "starving artists" who cannot make a living because of this piracy, but rather the corporate executives who are trying to justify why they should keep getting their multimillion dollar bonuses. Quite to the contrary, the internet distribution model has been a real boost to emerging artists who can now easily self publish their work without being held hostage to the big corporate entities now running the music business.
That this is all about is not so much sales lost to copying, but rather a large industry that is digging its heels in trying to hold onto the old ways in the face of a technology driven paradigm shift. rather than complaining about how the old system is not working anymore they should be putting that effort in trying to find ways to generate cash flow with the new system. The business literature is full of examples of once industry giants that have fallen because of an unwillingness to change with the times (Rail freight vs over the road trucking, pagers vs cell phone etc) And if they don't change and adapt they will die. Look at Kodak. Who would have thought 20 years ago that a company like Kodak that was so completely dominant in its field would ever end up in bankruptcy court? Either run with the change or get run over by it.
Rant off.
Sorry if this got a little off the original topic. But then I'm not sure if it is officially a thread-jack if it was your thread in the first place.
