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New York, 5:01 AM
Tue Dec 1
59 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/22/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
People simply don't buy products that are too expensive, especially if they're luxury goods.
Going back to the first point, people like free stuff. I can understand that there's a cognitive dissonance with doing something illegal (pirating free copies) and imagining yourself as a law abiding citizen, but reality is that it's illegal and bad for the industry.
Best selling albums on the charts this year are 150,000 (yes, with digital sales added), whereas it was 500,000 in 2003, and several million sold for best selling albums in the 90s.
Now, artists don't really make jack off of albums. Usually $1, sometimes $1.50 or $2 for massive artists like Michael Jackson. The rest goes to stuff like R&D (roughly $3.50 an album) to shipping & production (another $3.50 an album), $2 going to other projects that don't make a profit (about 90% of albums released), and so on, and so on.
Record companies, idiots that they are, only made $3-4 per CD sold back in the day. They maximized profit by selling more albums, not by jacking up prices, which would cause them to sell less albums.
This... pictures like this... only perpetuate the myth that record companies were jacking up prices, which somehow justifies pirating, and does nothing to further the debate.
Sure, stuff like the monopolization of radio has also lead to a decline of breakthroughs of good artists these days, but so has lack of exposure through record companies that would otherwise promote bands through traditional media to increase sales & profits.
tl;dr - What a dumb picture. #satire
10/21/09