3 ms·

I'm not sure where you live, but here in the US, I can go to most ice cream shops (Marble Slab Creamery, for example) and try various ice creams for free before

I'm not sure where you live, but here in the US, I can go to most ice cream shops (Marble Slab Creamery, for example) and try various ice creams for free before I buy. ;)

amix 18y ago
You get a taste of ice-cream - it's the equivalent of hearing a snippet of a song or seeing a trailer for a movie. You don't get a full banana split.
- Xichekolas 18y ago
  I'd argue that is a flawed analogy. When you taste the ice cream, you get the full essence of it. All the subsequent bites will taste like that one. You know what you are getting. When you hear a 30 second song clip or see a movie trailer, you get a selectively packaged subset of the full product. I have heard many clips and seen many trailers that are simply awesome, and then the actual song or movie ends up being terrible. So the analogy would be better if you got to hear the song once for free, and then had to buy to own, which is kind of between the two extremes now (leech it or buy it unheard). Radio (traditional or internet-based) does a decent job of this now, but only for singles. There is still no way to try a whole album before buying unless you catch it on the headphones in Best Buy. The trouble with movies is that generally you don't watch them many times. I can't really speak for everyone there, but I know I would be much more willing to pay for movies if I could get a good 720p copy of it for say $10-15. The reason I don't buy movies now is that I don't want a pile of DVDs in my tiny apartment. I could buy them, rip them, then resell them, but as I understand it, this is just as illegal as downloading them to begin with. So to summarize, give us some format options besides just a DVD that costs $23.
seertaak 18y ago
So you'd agree to the try-before-buy principle for oh, say, condoms? There was no obligation to "try-before-buy" policies handed down to sellers of wares by Moses, you know. I fail to understand how paying for the music that you listen to is a sub-optimal arrangement. All this talk about obsolete business model is just bullshit. If you dig underneath all the "freedom" hyperbole and "fat-cat record companies" self-righteous finger-wagging, what you really have is desire to rationalize behaviour whose analogue in the real world nobody has any difficulty whatsoever to see as stealing. These self-described pirates deserve nothing less than jail. I say that as a musician who in an ideal world would find record companies that can finance producing or promoting an album, and instead finds a record industry hollowed out by a 50% decline in revenue within a decade. How does the idiotic "expert" professor for the defense explain that figure in the context of massively more pervasive access to music? It just doesn't compute. People are stealing music. Period. We need to stop it, so that the whole ecosystem of jobs related to music (most of these are not fat cats. People like mixing and mastering engineers, session musicians etc) is allowed to flourish. It's currently the case that a lot of the talent in mastering, for example, is being lost. Simply because it's too expensive to have it done by these people now idea. Result: over-compressed albums with totally fake dynamics. I'm an example: I'm a programmer, who would really love to be able to do music. But I don't really want to live on a tour bus the rest of my life. Now, ten years ago, you could go the Steely Dan way and just record studio albums; no touring. That approach simply doesn't work now, and inevitably that means that some real talent is not coming through; the incentives simply aren't there.

I'm not sure where you live, but here in the US, I can go to most ice cream shops (Marble Slab Creamery, for example) and try various ice creams for free before I buy. ;)

amix 18y ago

You get a taste of ice-cream - it's the equivalent of hearing a snippet of a song or seeing a trailer for a movie. You don't get a full banana split.

Xichekolas 18y ago
I'd argue that is a flawed analogy. When you taste the ice cream, you get the full essence of it. All the subsequent bites will taste like that one. You know what you are getting. When you hear a 30 second song clip or see a movie trailer, you get a selectively packaged subset of the full product. I have heard many clips and seen many trailers that are simply awesome, and then the actual song or movie ends up being terrible. So the analogy would be better if you got to hear the song once for free, and then had to buy to own, which is kind of between the two extremes now (leech it or buy it unheard). Radio (traditional or internet-based) does a decent job of this now, but only for singles. There is still no way to try a whole album before buying unless you catch it on the headphones in Best Buy. The trouble with movies is that generally you don't watch them many times. I can't really speak for everyone there, but I know I would be much more willing to pay for movies if I could get a good 720p copy of it for say $10-15. The reason I don't buy movies now is that I don't want a pile of DVDs in my tiny apartment. I could buy them, rip them, then resell them, but as I understand it, this is just as illegal as downloading them to begin with. So to summarize, give us some format options besides just a DVD that costs $23.

seertaak 18y ago

So you'd agree to the try-before-buy principle for oh, say, condoms? There was no obligation to "try-before-buy" policies handed down to sellers of wares by Moses, you know. I fail to understand how paying for the music that you listen to is a sub-optimal arrangement. All this talk about obsolete business model is just bullshit. If you dig underneath all the "freedom" hyperbole and "fat-cat record companies" self-righteous finger-wagging, what you really have is desire to rationalize behaviour whose analogue in the real world nobody has any difficulty whatsoever to see as stealing. These self-described pirates deserve nothing less than jail. I say that as a musician who in an ideal world would find record companies that can finance producing or promoting an album, and instead finds a record industry hollowed out by a 50% decline in revenue within a decade. How does the idiotic "expert" professor for the defense explain that figure in the context of massively more pervasive access to music? It just doesn't compute. People are stealing music. Period. We need to stop it, so that the whole ecosystem of jobs related to music (most of these are not fat cats. People like mixing and mastering engineers, session musicians etc) is allowed to flourish. It's currently the case that a lot of the talent in mastering, for example, is being lost. Simply because it's too expensive to have it done by these people now idea. Result: over-compressed albums with totally fake dynamics. I'm an example: I'm a programmer, who would really love to be able to do music. But I don't really want to live on a tour bus the rest of my life. Now, ten years ago, you could go the Steely Dan way and just record studio albums; no touring. That approach simply doesn't work now, and inevitably that means that some real talent is not coming through; the incentives simply aren't there.