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We have an interview with Shotgun Honeymoon and a few jokes today on Mike’s Hotdish. See the full show notes »
Not really a news item, but I found it interesting. Can you hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3s? Can you really?
I got dang lucky and got it right. I couldn’t hear much a difference. Now this leads to a question, how did he get it to sound like that? I publish this show out a 160kbps because I thought it sounded better than 128kbps and the file size wasn’t that much bigger. Hearing those side by side, I did hear a difference there. So do do you think he encoded it? [digg]
I woke up this morning with more buzz from NIN (Nine Inch Nails). They have now released their album (with lyrics) for free. Even better, the offer 4 formats: High-Quality MP3, FLAC, Apple Lossless format, and “better that CD-quality” WAV format. Yours truly am downloading a couple of the formats now. Oh, did I mention it is DRM (Digital Rights Management) free? On top of that, they released all of the tracks as Creative Commons. Thus, I can play their music on my show. Expect my favorite track(s) on a future show.
Despite your opinion of Wal-Mart, they are doing some things that we all can benefit from. Wal-Mart has become the number one seller of music accounting for around 20% of the market so they can go to the music industry and demand certain prices. According to an article on Rolling Stone, Wal-Mart has been willing to sell CDs at a loss but lately have been pushing to get the prices lower. I’ll let you read the article for the full details. What I found interesting though was a breakdown of the cost of a CD as it is today.
$0.17 Musicians’ unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists’ royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
Lets break this down a bit. The union fees, packaging, distribution and publishing royalties I have no problems with these are things you really can’t change much. Overhead you can’t change much either, that is the cost of administrative staff, building costs, equipment costs, and anything else that you really need to run a business.
So now are are down to profits and marketing. I am not against making money, but the Label should not be making more than the artist. They could cut this in half and get better artists on the label so they don’t have to rely on one person to make up for 10 or more failures. Marketing and promotion could be cut by getting more creative in how you market a new artist. Put them on the PMN, do some sort of social marketing, or better yet, have the artist cut a single song and submit that to radio. If the the demand comes in for a CD, cut a CD. I know this may be a backwards way to do it, but create the demand, and people will want it more (just look a the Wii).
I think if the labels could get a bit more creative to trim off some of the fat, and get better artists off the bat. They may be able to cut that cost down.
Vinyl Records… What is that you say? Most thought that the black Frisbees went out of style years ago replaced by the far superior sounding CDs (that was the marketing hype). It seems the next generation of music lovers are discovering this older but better sounding “technology. MinnPost has an article about how the MP3 Generation is rediscovering Vinyl.
I find it interesting that kids are discovering this. I would be interested to see what the audio difference is. My mom still has some records (not sure the speed) that probably have an inch of dust on them. Perhaps I should pull one out some day an listen to it.
