[Rumori] re: Songwriters Say Piracy Eats Into Their Pay

[Taylor McLaren]

Hey-nonny-nonny, matt davignon wrote:
>> Although songwriters typically earn only pennies for every sale of a 
>> recorded song, if every person who downloaded "Hard Knock Life" had 
>> bought a CD instead, Mr. Strouse would have collected at least 
>> $46,000 in royalty payments, assuming he would have received 4 cents 
>> a download.
> This is flawed reasoning, assuming that all (or even a large amount) 
> of downloaders would shell out $20 for a full length cd if they just 
> wanted the song.
How is it flawed reasoning? "If every person who downloaded... had 
bought a CD instead, he would have received..." sounds like a perfectly 
sound conditional statement to me. Obviously, one can't assume that 
everybody who downloaded it *would* have bought the CD, but that's not 
what the article said.

> If they offered the singles at stores for a reasonable price, I'm sure 
> more folks would buy 'em.
Isn't that happening already? The last time I poked around in a music 
shop in an American mall was about eight years ago, but at the time, I 
was amazed by the bounty of cheap (three to five dollars, including a 
remix or B-side or two) singles.
   I don't know if the situation has changed since then, and I know that 
most shops always devoted more rack space to albums than to singles, 
but I don't see any reason why stores couldn't shift back to the 
single-oriented format that dominated music sales for decades before 
the '60s came along and wrecked everything for those of us with short 
attention spans. (Mind you, it would have to be a pretty whole-hearted 
change: because of the limited retail attention paid to singles at 
present, you basically can't buy CD singles as anything other than 
import curiosities in a tiny market like Canada... the local arms of 
the major labels won't bother with cheaper-than-average titles that are 
only going to sell a couple of thousand copies.)

> Has anybody tried this Itunes thing? Are their downloads in mp3 
> format? Or some non-useful proprietary format?
Yeah, the format is proprietary, but the playback software is free for 
Windows and Mac users, and a perhaps not-entirely-legal addition has 
been made to VideoLAN software for the Unix crowd that will allow 
playback there, too. If you want to screw around with it digitally, 
it's no more inconvenient than dealing with vinyl.

-me