Cant remember the last time I bought a new album (sometimes buy 2nd hand CD's off ebay)

Cant see the point when they are free on the internet. Why would I want to give £10 of my money to make some record label (who do what exactly?) rich

I'd pay a quid for an album though.

Apple have already proved with iPhone apps that the 'sell it cheap - sell a shedload' system works.

Most of my music listening is through radio or Spotify now though. I've bought 2 albums in the last year but I've bought loads of 59p apps in that time.

Yeah because all albums are put out by rich record companies!
What about the 99.9% of all albums that are put out by bands trying to make a living!
All this does is make music worthless!

nobtwilder your missing the point its already worthless
spotifys a step in the right direction but no one i know pays for their music this is a way to change that, the same money will still be made 20 albums at a quid is giving you the same returns as 2 albums at 11pounds!

If music was realistically priced I might pay for it, and those struggling bands might make a living.
Or they could get jobs, and continue to make music as a hobby, which is what it is. There is no great value in music IMO, why are the spice girls millionaires? Because of their great talent?

No, because of greedy gits such as C*ck Ache and W*nkerman

"Right now if you buy a bottle of water it's £1," he said. "A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."

sort of sums up the up there own arse prejudice I have towards most folk in the music industry...

I think a quid is prob too cheap, but £2-3 per album and I'd buy loads. The downloading of 'free' music is self-inflicted by the music industry IMO, and if they want things to be 'fair' they should charge reasonable money.

Yeah because all albums are put out by rich record companies!
What about the 99.9% of all albums that are put out by bands trying to make a living!
All this does is make music worthless!

Get a proper job then. Just make music because you enjoy it. If you want people to hear it then release it and play some live gigs.

I dont know why alot of people seem to have this idea that musicians should be rich and famous.

It's a bit like football (everyone supports Man U sort of thing), everyone swallows what the marketing men want you too. Everyone needs to get off the beaten track and find the gems and talent for themselves!

+1 davidtaylforth

Play / create music for the love of it. End of

I don't think doing it for the love of it/as a hobby is a realistic way to get great music nor a variety of music IMO . Musicians need to know they can make a living out of it.

The industry does need to change though and accept that things have to be done differently these days. One way to get people to pay for music is to make it cheaper. £2 an album, £3 for something big, and LOADS of people will buy. Just look what happened when amazon cocked up their pricing and were knocking albums out cheap... they sold LOADS.

I dont even mind musicians making a few quid, when they turn up and put the work in. The Grateful dead played around 300 live gigs most years, and let anyone record them from a special area in front of the sound desk. They did alright.
If I sent in a tape of me working last year, instead of going in I wouldnt expect to get paid.

I guess those that think music is worthless and can be made for free as a little part-time hobby have never tried to make music/been in a band?

Why isn't a musicain a proper job?
Surley if there were no proffesional artists/musicians/writers/actors then the world would be a much duller place!
I am not saying they should be rich and famous, should anyone that likes their job do it for peanuts!
The Greatful Dead made a hell of a lot of money from selling records!

I suppose those who think music is a route to making money just dont get it.

"A piece of music is a valuable form of art" says the manager of N Dubz!

If albums is to be sold for £1 the music industry would have to become much more DIY. No label is going to sign a band and finance the recording of their album if it thought that they would only get 30-40p from each sale. The radiohead experiment was interesting but they were already wealthy enough to self finance the album and the distribution. That said, the idea that music must be expensive to make people appreciate it as art is just garbage

I guess those that think music is worthless and can be made for free as a little part-time hobby have never tried to make music/been in a band?

I have a go, Im not very good though.

Its so frustrating, if I made more money from it then I'd be able to go for lavish nights out, good pub lunches and buy a fast sports car and a big house that I've always wanted. I'm sure these things would make me much happier and I'd imagine this would come across in my music.

Great Music is an outpouring of the soul, of the emotions, not a bottom line on a balance sheet.
If a tune is great, and sells a lot of copies on the strength of this, making the musician money, thats great.

But it really grips my s**t that the manufactured bands use a formula to sell music, written by committee, purely to sell to the biggest cross section of people, in the pure pursuit of profit

ok if we executed simon cowell the world would be a better place!

Surely the £1 download album* is ideal concept for up and coming artists?

If a site was developed where they could upload and manage their song library and release it to a global audience free from any record company demands it could be ideal for them - a bit like iStockphoto but for music!

*I know that producing a physical CD isn't possible for this price.

Soulseek?

Kimbers, no, he brings a great deal of pleasure to a lot of people

Kimbers, no, he brings a great deal of pleasure to a lot of people

I imagine they'd be able to "open their minds" a bit more and probably enjoy lots of more betterer things if he wasnt about

[i]Its so frustrating, if I made more money from it then I'd be able to go for lavish nights out, good pub lunches and buy a fast sports car[/i]

Are you really that clueless??

Are you really that clueless??

Hey man, I'm a musician, what do you expect. I have "pie in the sky/out there" ideas but I've never done a proper days work in my life. I prefer lounging around in my slacks, strumming away on my acoustic guitar all day. I dont have any commonsense, ask me to put up a set of shelves and I'd be knackered

is irony like aluminiumy?

[img] [/img]

i recently bought a couple of cd's in the 2 for £10 deal at HMV. they are the first new cd's i've bought in years mainly because £12-£15 is too much.

downloads are shit and i refuse to pay cd price for them. what do you get? a bit of didgital encoding that is generated for free? i woulnd mind paying an artist direct but i'm buggered if i'm paying amazon to hit copy and paste for me.

Where does spotify fit into this then?

there is so much wrongness being spouted on this thread I don't know where to start

no doubt the record companies have got things very wrong in the last few years, but people who expect to get decent music for free - and continue to get it (decent music I mean) are deluded

musicians need to make a living - people who listen to that music need to pay for it.
Artists like radiohead can get away with releasing music for free/ contribution only because they are already rich - thanks to having EMI behind them in their early career. If EMI didn't exist radiohead would never have reached such a wide audience

And its pointless discussing the relative quality of "manufactured' music - all music is manufactured. It doesn't appear in the air like some form of magic. Whether you like it or not is purely subjective. The idea that the record companies have a magic, perfect formula for making music that always sells is a myth.

Van Halen, i've often D/L off Juno and its normally only a couple of quid for a hight bitrate rip, but granted i would never pay full CD prices for a rip

Right then, example: Goat Dance - In the System.
Not signed to a big label, youve probably never heard of them, but i have.
I play the track out, people ask what it is, they go and D/l it too.

I D/l the tune off Juno. £1.70 or so for a 2 track ep.
The only people making money are the artist and juno getting a percentage of each sale.
Goat dance aint gonna get rich doing this, so its a fair bet they have a day job. Every D/l earns them a bit of money, maybe enough to buy better instruments equipment?

The big labels these days are needed like a hole in the head.

So DezB - if you use the statistics from your Pie chart and cut out the record company, and lets assume the 24% distribution cost went as a cut to the website host.

A band selling 1000 £1 downloads would make a damn site more money than if they sold 100 £10 CD's through a record company. In fact they'd only need to sell about 170 downloads to be better off!!

wow..... just to throw a couple of extra examples in here for you all to argue over.

mates band, released 2 albums through sony, recorded in america, produced by same guy who did the red hot chilli peppers, had their tracks on BIG computer games, toured the UK, america, Japan, did all the festivals, sold out the astoria etc etc.... sold over 244thousand albums.... havent seen a penny, all of them work in places like tescos to survive.

Another mates band is due to release an album next year, already signed up to a major booking agent, in talks with a major international label and have been promised over 200 shows a year, havent released anything yet and theyre driving to germany to headline a festival next weekend, BIG things and big buzz around them already.... they wont get paid more than £150 per show next year. that has to pay for the van, fuel, etc etc.... then whats left is split between 6 people, so even with over 200 shows and not having the ability to have a part-time job or anything... they will all be constantly broke and living off vegetables they've grown themselves and renting out their studio space to other bands and hopefully selling some t-shirts and CD's at shows....

sad state of affairs.

before arguing about i-tunes and spotify plays i suggest you look deeper and find out exactly how much the label or artist gets per play or download!

I remember reading an article written by Steve Albini that was pretty interesting and covered what everyone has mentioned here. Have a search on google, you'll find it easily enough.

CDBaby is a great idea for unsigned bands, and people looking for new music. I've got a load of stuff off there I'd never have found anywhere else, including Regina Spektor's initial demo CD.

[url= http://members.cdbaby.com/whatwedo/howitworks.aspx ]http://members.cdbaby.com/whatwedo/howitworks.aspx[/url]

It's about time I had another trawl through...

yeah - itunes certainly have things nailed. what is it? 79p/song?
mostly what? 10 tracks/album, so that puts an album at about 7.99 then?
most current albums can be bought on the high street for 7.99.
seeing as there's no physical stock, other than data on servers, i'd say old jobsey is rubbing his hands together.
throw in 'regional pricing', otherwise known as 'charging what the market will stand', however you justify that, and things just get better and better, don't they?

It's not my piechart, just thought it was quite interesting!

from 2007
[i]Apple boasts that more than one billion songs have been purchased from its iTunes music service. That sounds like a great number—until you consider that an estimated ten million users of Internet-based peer-to-peer (p2p) networks are logged on at any one time to swap music.[/i]

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5594.html