A sad day for free enterprise

[dysfunction]

Looks like the Music Industry using the British Phonographic Industry have won.

According to CD-WOW they have managed to unfortunately restrict UK and Irish consumers the right to enjoy the freedom of the World Wide Web.

From this weekend any CD ordered from CD-WOW for delivery to the UK and Ireland will incur a surcharge as we are only able to deliver CDs manufactured within the EU.

The surcharge will be £2.

Luckily DVD's and games are unaffected but I wonder how long that will last for!

So much for the freedom to choose...

 

[Sharma]

They can bloody well fuck off if they think they are going to restrict the orders of games.

 

[SilverHood]

That's bullshit, sadly

The whole point of trading on the internet is to be able to buy from the cheapest suplier.

Music biz shouldn't be able to setup cartels like this... whats next? Region encoded CD's?

 

[Cdr]

Apparently they're also currently investigating Play.com, in order to make them add the £2 onto their CD sales

 

[GDW]

Yeh so lets all cut the salaries of people in the EU to match the salaries in those parts of the world were they can produce things cheaper. Come to think of it lets cut taxes etc as well so that things manufactured in the EU or nice and cheap, and we have an even shitier education, health service etc etc etc.

Makes sense really

 

[jaba]

The music industry are such a bunch of crooks.."damn we didnt make the ten trillion pounds we needed off this record..what shall we do? I know lets sue the pants off some small children and then add more money to the price of cds"..great.

 

[Scooba da Bass]

The music industry are such a bunch of crooks.."damn we didnt make the ten trillion pounds we needed off this record..what shall we do? I know lets sue the pants off some small children and then add more money to the price of cds"..great.

It's not really anything to do with the "music industry", and much more to do with trying to encourage consumers to buy items from the EU. Yes, it's a bad thing in the short term for the consumer, but a protected market is very good for businesses in the affected area. Of course you then end up with other countries doing exactly the same thing (the US is notoriously protectionist).

It's all a big giant mess.

 

[fatbusinessman]

One major problem I can think of with this:

I (and many others, no doubt) think £9 is a pretty fair price for an album. I am certainly willing to pay that amount for a decent album.

The more money that gets added onto the lowest price around, the less likely people are to buy from them, and the more likely they are to simply download the tracks.

 

[RandomBastard]

i will gladly pay £10 for an album for an entire album if its good, however i refuse to buy singles cause there a rip off and theyre never any good anyway.

If record companies came up with a way to pay 50p to £1 for a single track that wasn't a rip off i'd prolly go for it. But as things stand..... i refuse to pay for shit songs.

 

[raw]

Hopefully it wont affect dvds but i can't see it, i think its piss poor they can force them to do this.

I havent bought anything out of hmv in ages, just because its such a fucking rip off, they want to try and cut down on pirating, well this surely isn't going to help their case much, if they keep on with shit like this it will only get worse.

 

[Dubbs]

It's not really anything to do with the "music industry", and much more to do with trying to encourage consumers to buy items from the EU. Yes, it's a bad thing in the short term for the consumer, but a protected market is very good for businesses in the affected area. Of course you then end up with other countries doing exactly the same thing (the US is notoriously protectionist).

It's all a big giant mess.

What a completely hypocritical mess! If the large corporations can go out there and select the cheapest supplier for their manufacturing then I, as a consumer, can sure as hell do the same for my supply of goods. This really infuriates me, from Wal-mart in the states forcing local produce growers to use their selected v.expensive fertilisers (i.e, Monsanto produced and selected due to corporate ties not efficiency/goodness of product) through to our own UK suppliers doing the same Asda, Sainsburys, and others! The cost of goods gets higher whilst large corporates are forcing manufacturing/producing industries to their knees.

And then.... to bring it all off a "green, hippy, treehugging" level (and those that know me, know I'm no eco-warrior!) - I can't even getting Dido Life for rent on my iPod!!!

What makes me feel better?

1. They can never fully stop this, the Internet will win out in the end. I'm sure the piracy will eventually be brought back to a normal level (so it's not different to your mate copy an album onto tape - for those of us that remember pre-cd days!) and the total of this will drive music costs DOWN.

2. The US economy is soooooo knackered right now and the financial pundits reckon there's no real way off the slope they're currently sliding down. As a result the EU is now starting to look pretty formidable. Not necessarily a good thing I grant you but it does mean serious competition is starting to brew up in the world economy imho. As a consumer that's gotta be a good thing.

 

[WPKenny]

They said on Ear Candy on CH4 last night that despite the record industry's constant bitching about piracy, album sales ROSE by 7% in 2003.

I also heard somewhere that despite one of Eminem's albums being pirated and out on the internet a couple of weeks before release it actually managed to break sales records when it was eventually released.

It's amazing how these things don't make headline news but you hear all about the pirating that goes on daily and how bad it is for the music industry. It's all just a load of bollox.

Album sales are better than ever thanks to people being able to download pirated music from the net and sample a huge variety of music they can then go out and buy in full. The net gives huge oportunities to even the smallest of bands to compete with the big boys if their music's good enough. I know there's albums I've bought despite knowing I could get hold of the whole album off the net just simply because the artist deserves it.

 

[L_Plates]

the word *twats* pops into my head.

 

[Doh_boy]

There's two reasons why I buy albums I've got mp3's of.

1) A sort of half-placebo effect. The mp3's I have are wildly different in encoding quality meaning that I have some really quiet songs and some really loud ones. Buying the cd and ripping them gives me the same level.

2) Morals, I could't have a large music collection without spending a decent amount of money for it. It just seems right.

----

Also I agree with dubbs, when people complain about call-centres going to india people reply with 'well that's globalisation for you'. So the same should be for us, should it not? Then again I see scoobs' point. Still, it makes you wonder how much the recording industry actually cares about the customer?

 

[itcheh]

the word *twats* pops into my head.

You and I both know that it has nothing to do with this thread - you just can't stop thinking about sex

 

[Sharma]

Well, what i generally tend to do, is download say 2 or 3 tracks from an album, if theyre good i go out and buy the album its what ive been doing for a while now.
So :kissit: to the record industry.

 

[Dubbs]

Then again I see scoobs' point. Still, it makes you wonder how much the recording industry actually cares about the customer?

Not wanting to start a rant but I disagree with scoob. The very idea of "protected" marketplaces just drives the black market into a spiral upwards. A protected marketplace doesn't protect the consumer it protects the corporation. That's a bad thing when that very corporation isn't bound by the same rules.

Force the corporation to only operate (in terms of production, manufacturing and resource) in that same protected marketplace and then you have a better working model. Otherwise all that happens is consumers are forced into buying overpriced products whilst the corporation is allowed to buy from the lowest bidder and drive up their profits. At the end of it all they're trying to shag us all up the ass!

 

[Doh_boy]

. At the end of it all they're trying to shag us all up the ass!

Well, imho, most (if not all) business' want, basically, to do this.



/edit and that wasn't very rant-like.

 

[Scooba da Bass]

Still, it makes you wonder how much the recording industry actually cares about the customer?

Not at all. None of the majors give a shit about anything beyond protecting their little bit of turf and keeping the cash rolling in. Hence the RIAA's overzealous protection of copyright. Hence the dragging of feet over mp3s. Hence the hideously slow take up of DVD-A. Imagine a big slow blind lumbering monster and you've got 99% of the people in charge sorted.

As an example I've been given instructions by A&R men before to deliberately (in my opinion) make tracks sound worse by increasing the compression to make them louder, and thus "stand out more" when played on the radio. If you take almost any recent succcesful album (the last Foo Fighters' album is particularly bad for this) and look at the waveform in a spectrum analyser you'll see that everything is crushed up around 0db, there's no air in the music and virtually no difference between 'loud' and 'quiet'. This is done so when played on the radio the music is as loud as possible for as long as possible, aparently this gets people's attention, despite every other song that's played on the radio doing the same.

 

[dysfunction]

Good news!!

CD Wow have managed to remove the extra charge they were forced to impose on all deliveries to UK and Ireland!

Glad to hear they made so much progress against the music industry.

 

[SilverHood]

Good news!!

CD Wow have managed to remove the extra charge they were forced to impose on all deliveries to UK and Ireland!

Glad to hear they made so much progress against the music industry.

Link?

 

[dysfunction]

Erm...It was just in an e-mail i got from them so no link.

Sorry


their website is http://www5.cd-wow.com/

It says it there.

 

[tRoG]

Victory!

*does a happy dance*

 

[Tom]

As an example I've been given instructions by A&R men before to deliberately (in my opinion) make tracks sound worse by increasing the compression

Scooba you have actually been instructed to do this? I'm not surprised, many albums of late sound distinctly dodgy. I imagine the 0dB threshold is exceeded in some cases, some albums sound so bad. I can't think that they intentionally want the album to sound any worse, but they will have been told that compression = louder, without necessarily understanding the dynamics (and failings) of this process.

If you have any written or typed evidence of this, I'd very much like a copy to forward to a group I am a member of (Institute of Broadcast Sound). There was recently a very large discussion on this topic, it can even be found in cinemas, where the projectionist has to lower the preset Dolby level from its '7' position, because of the loudness of the adverts.

Myself I find compression extremely irritating, I just wish that the UK had the engineering clout to forcibly remove compression from the recording and transmitting process. Standards are now being defined by accountants.

 

[RandomBastard]

I take it compression in this instance is a bad thing as when we do live events we run stuff though a compressor ocassionally (generally to either stop the dj being a *insert rude word* or to equalise levels on vocals...) although i dont pretend to understand it all as im still learning and hence mainly do grunt work.

 

[Tom]

Compression is a tool used to reduce the dynamic range of (on this occasion) an audio signal. In layman's terms, it makes quiet things sound louder, and loud things sound equally as loud. You'll notice the effects of compression on radio stations, when you tune between Radio 1 and Radio 4. Radio 1 is compressed, and sounds louder (although the peak levels should be around the same between the two stations).

Compression on a live event can be quite useful, particularly for drumkits, where you don't have the environment for people to hear the subtle nuances that musicians would like you to.

Compression in a studio also isn't necessarily a bad thing, in fact there are any number of tools you can use to improve a recording. What Scooba was referring to was compressing the finished piece of music, to make the entire thing 'sound' louder. That, is a bad thing. Its unnecessary.

I only have limited studio experience, so Scooba will be able to explain it in more detail for you.

 

[Damini]

Is it the same thing on telly where some adverts are ridiculously loud? And some theme tunes to shows too? That always really bugs me.

 

[Tom]

Yes, basically, although the networks don't themselves actually increase compression during ad breaks, they're just recorded that way. Its a delicate balance, because the dynamic range of a drama or a film is much greater than an advert, which is generally why films are much quieter than anything else.