I appreciate everyone's responses and am understanding the situation a bit better now. I do think it's time for the music industry to entirely overhaul their cost and distribution structure to be more fair to the artists and the consumers.
Something Christian wrote got me thinking and I wanted to respond: "Christian Pernegger" wrote in message > In the first case you hopefully get a big screen, nice sound, the cinema > experience but only one showing - fine. But these are essentially canned > goods that cost next to nothing to duplicate. About the only people working > for the money are the cinema staff in the first case. The work's the same > for the artists regardless of the number of DVDs or tickets sold. > > A ticket at local theatres (as in live actorst) is 5-15 EUR (low end for > students etc...) > > Excuse me?? That money has to pay the theatre staff, the writer, a bunch of > costumes and props people and most of all the actors who have to perform > EVERY EVENING to earn their keep. But who cares, they're all subsidized > anyway... </sarcasm> > > The price I have to pay for my entertainment has nothing to do with the work > involved in the first place - so much for artist compensation. This isn't true at all. Certainly the one-time cost and the work that goes into producing a high-quality movie is far greater than the amount that goes into a play by a local theater even during the entire run of a show. The price you pay for the entertainment is proportional to the work involved: if low quality movies were made then theaters would charge less to see them. Conversely, if the price of going to the movie theater were lowered to simply the cost of keeping the building up and paying the ushers then we would see a bunch of crappy movies since no one could afford to make $150 million productions (ok, I know, spending more money on a movie doesn't always mean it's going to be better...but still...). > If they want to earn my money they're free to WORK and do an open-air in my > general vincinity. Terribly sorry, but the value of something that can be > reproduced for 50 cents is 50 cents. This makes no sense. This totally disregards the value of any kind of intellectual property. Just because what artists (or even consider scientists at pharmaceutical companies) create while doing their WORK doesn't take a physical form doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Would you say that a 10 cent blank CD is equal in value to the same cd with music on it? I think not. And how much in excess of 10 cents is to be determined by the market. And right now the market has settled on $10~$15. New technologies are changing things, but there still is value to the music. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
