Musicians and the Digital Revolution

[PDH]

Old news, Hungarians have not paid for music, videos, or computer games for years.  Everybody wants to do it.

[Siege]

Interesting blog post on the effect of the digital distribution revolution on the music industry and musicians: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/

TLDR: musicians are getting screwed worse than they were by the record companies.

So waht?
There was a time when musicionas were nothing. About a 100 years ago or so.
Now, technology is correction the mistake.
Or rather life is always in change and their time is pass, like the actors from hollywood time will pass when we develop the technology to make movies entirely on a computer. Think of the creativety. There will be no limits, no more need for special effects because everything will be created out of nothing , in a computer.

[Razgovory]

This would be deeply unpleasant.  And Siege, people made good money being musicians 100 years ago.  In fact many of the composers of yesteryear are still remembered.  Irving Berlin, Scott Joplin, and George Gershwin did fairly well and are still remembered.  One of the things is, unlike films or video games it really doesn't take a great deal of money to make music.  And many people would make music (and do!) even if nobody paid them.  Lots of people do it as a hobby.  Making a film is a bit more difficult as it typically requires the skills of over a hundred people.  Stage plays are a bit easier, but you still need quite a few people.  One guy with an instrument (or just a singing voice) can make music.

[DontSayBanana]

Huh.  Way belated, but after another glance, I have to say, the author was erring on the generous side when he estimated our (bigger retailers') profit margin on pressed CDs.  Which actually sheds iTunes in a WORSE light.

Except for the super-biggies (Walmart, Best Buy, Target), even the bigger stores' procurement chains look like this:

Disc publisher > purchasing agent/wholesaler > corporate inventory > retail inventory

The profit margins might be 20% at the wholesaler level, but speaking as someone who occasionally has to do ordering and cut straight to the wholesaler, there's no way in hell we average 20% profit on a pressed disc.  The profit margin gets successively smaller the newer the disc is, and automatically plummets to near-zero if the wholesaler's had to import it.  The last DVD I ordered retailed for $14.99, because the wholesaler charged us $14.98 per copy.  That profit margin would be 1/1499, somewhere in the ballpark of 0.007%.  Considering it also had to be shipped to our store, that title was probably actually a net loss.