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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | MCGaudio@aol.com |
| Subject | Re: too much and or not enough |
| Date | Sun, 13 May 2007 16:43:21 EDT |
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"Jaimie Vernon" <bullseyecanada@hotmail.com> writes:
> Interesting perspective. Let's see you apply that to gas stations, car
> dealerships and auto insurance companies. Just "try" and tell them you won't
>
> pay their prices.
Except a) those things are more necessities than music, so people can't as
easily just decide not to buy, and b) there aren't tens of thousands of
gas/auto/insurance providers willing to give you their product for nothing or next to
nothing on their websites or myspace pages. If that happened you can bet the
prices on all three would plummet dramatically.
Music is being devalued because there are tens of thousands of musicians who
apparently don't care about making any money. That's always been the case,
it's just that before they couldn't easily control the means of production and
distribution. Now they can. So you need to either get that competition to not
give their product away, or make your product of such an intrinsic higher
value that people are willing to pay a premium for it. People trying to sell music
are not only on the bad end of a supply and demand situation (almost infinite
supply), they are also handicapped by the fact that much of the supply is
free.
It's not as much the consumer that's killing you, it's your fellow musicians
and their impact on the perceived value of music. Not so much a Wal-mart
versus Mom & Pop store situation as a Free Beer versus Mom & Pop.
And the situation will only get worse, since the technology just keeps making
music easier to write/record/produce/encode/post/etc., etc. Will much of it
be bad? Sure. Will it be hard to sort through for the good stuff? Sure. But pe
ople are more willing to put up with that kind of thing when it's free.
Mark
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