63% of its revenue goes to the record companies up from 52% last year. The licensing fees are scheduled to rise each year to eat up more of Pandora's revenues. The record company fees have made the model of "legal" Internet unsustainable!
Re: Re: SO, let's ENSURE low prices result by taking excess profits away!
Actually Bill Gates has not given away much money. He's transferred a lot of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where it's able to sit and collect interest and dividends tax free. He's based it on the Rockefeller Foundation where it has many times more money today than Rockefeller ever contributed to it. It's just a way rich people preserve their wealth instead of letting the government take 70% through death taxes.
The bottom line is paying an artist $80 when the record company takes in $700 and promises you 50% is just plain wrong. And adding fees related to manufacturing and distribution when there is no manufacturing costs and Apple apparently does all the storage and ripping is wrong too. (I also remember articles saying that Apple paid record companies 89 cents out of the 99 cents it charges, so some additional money seems to be missing from the equation too.)
Well, when a deal sounds fishy, it usually winds up in court. In this case, there's certainly some doubt about whether Ryan Leslie handled the attempted data recovery properly. Why was the hard drive sent back to the manufacturer? You only do that when you want a new hard drive, not to recover data. And then there's conflicting testimony about whether they went to data recovery companies to retrieve the data. In the end, it just sounds like the rapper tried to get out of paying the $1 million reward. He should have been careful about what he offered.
The station could just say that it wanted to see if viewers were paying attention and to look for an inappropriate picture in every newscast. Ratings could skyrocket!
The bottom line is the recording industry doesn't want to admit to the facts because it sees its dinosaur business falling apart. Recording companies are actually in the retail business, not the music business, and it didn't understand what its business would be like without retail. They needed to adapt just like sheet music publishers did a century ago. Music publishers stopped printing sheet music and started collecting royalties for their songwriters. Recording companies need to give up their notion of distributing plastic disks and concentrate on promoting MUSIC not records.
He just thinks he's going to make a million dollars from Taylor. Look at what happened to the Katy Perry song where Snoop Dog "talked" the Beach Boys' line "Don't you wish they could all be California Girls?" The record company took Snoop Dog off the album and put out a Snoop Dog-less version!
Well, Mellencamp must have actually gotten some royalty checks back in the day from his publishing company and his record company. But he should talk to the 98% of artists and bands who never saw anything but advance money from their record company and meager royalty checks from their publisher. Because of file sharing, bands are able to get bigger crowds to their concerts and charge higher ticket prices. Concert money is the highest it's ever been. If you want to make some money, give away your old stuff and get out and tour. Otherwise, as someone blogged about above, the 20-somethings have never even heard of you and they won't be going to your concerts.
Hollywood is always complaining about something. Pirates are stealing our movies. Film production has moved to Canada. Special effects and animation companies have moved offshore. DVD sales are down. Ticket sales are down. Production costs are up. Etc.
It never talk about the real problems. Most movies are crap. Ticket prices are too high. Hollywood executives are the ones moving production to Canada and overseas. 99% of movies made are unavailable for purchase or stream. Etc.
Also keep in mind that the movies available at Cannes are mostly independently financed meaning there are still plenty of people who want to invest in making movies.
Let's think about this. If Amazon were required to make every film ever offered available to stream in perpetuity, it would need to be able to provide a streaming service for every single film it intends to offer, and ever HAS offered, EVER! This, at the moment, is not feasible - for technological reasons, for licensing reasons (boo hiss).
If 100 customers purchase PIB, and after 6 months 99 of them have watched it and haven't watched it *again* or data shows that the average re-viewing after six months is 1 in 100 customers, should Amazon continue to offer the movie? I say no. They've provided it for a reasonable period of time and offered the customer a chance to download it.
Well, the problem with your argument is that Amazon tells you you have bought the movie to enjoy at any time indefinitely, so whether it's feasible or not, that's what the contract is.
And it's not technology unfeasible to offer this. YouTube is now having 40 hours of video being uploaded EVERY MINUTE! That's the equivalent of 100 years of movies being uploaded every 50 hours.
And other responders have talked about the criminality of a studio taking your money and then deciding to pull the movie from Amazon. It's theft, pure and simple.
Well, the greater issue is that these royalties killed off personal Internet Radio Stations and drove them underground (or at least, to Shoutcast, which sort of exists semi- underground). I would have happily paid anywhere from $100-$500 a year for an Internet license to broadcast legally to probably no more than a handful of people at a time. But no little guy could afford the royalties at the established rate. Pandora still hasn't made a profit, it's just funneling $50 million or so a year to the record labels, which is the way they like it. It's easier to run a pirate FM radio station! The FCC only looks for you if someone complains!
Well, it's all a fight by traditional publishers and record companies to delay the inevitable. Eventually, books will be written AND published by their authors (except for maybe a small group of future Stephen Kings) and promoted by retailers like Amazon and iTunes, cutting out publishers (and with it, the 90% of profits they take). With print on demand, anyone who wants a paper version could still order one. But publishers will be unnecessary.
I have to say I agree with the Levin estate on this one. The author purposely did not want to hit audiences over the head with the gay subplot. Obviously, that wasn't enough for the LA Gay & Lesbian Center which wanted to remove all doubt. And then because it couldn't do what it wanted, it canceled the production. The Center can do its production when the play goes into the public domain 70 or so years from now.
About 95% of everything printed is never reprinted and those works are being kept out of the public domain by the 5% that do get reprinted. And of that, probably less than 1% of works actually generate any substantial income, so 99% of works are being held hostage for 95 years by the 1% that actually generate any money through the years. It's not a fair system.
As several people have noted, I can't believe UStream instituted a program that they themselves couldn't shut off in time to restore the Hugo Awards stream. You should never give an automated program that much power!
Gee, I just wanted to operate a "legal" not-for-profit hobby online radio station and by 1998 it was basically made illegal. I wish I had millions of dollars to try to come up with a create way to get around the copyright laws.
On the post: New Zealand Government Admits That Order To Suppress Illegal Spying On Kim Dotcom Only Such Order Issued In 10 Years
Re: Re:
Actually, Pandora has NEVER been profitable. As it gains listeners, its losses widen!
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:68OtCnuBIyEJ:online.wsj.com/article/B T-CO-20120829-713803.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
63% of its revenue goes to the record companies up from 52% last year. The licensing fees are scheduled to rise each year to eat up more of Pandora's revenues. The record company fees have made the model of "legal" Internet unsustainable!
On the post: How Software Piracy In Developing Markets Creates New Customers
Re: Re: SO, let's ENSURE low prices result by taking excess profits away!
On the post: Fight The Power: Chuck D Sues Universal Music For Hundreds Of Millions In Unpaid Royalties
On the post: Don't Promise $1 Million For Your Lost Laptop Via YouTube & Twitter If You're Not Prepared To Pay
Fishy
On the post: Denver News Crew Accidentally Livens Up Broadcast With An Inappropriate Image 'Borrowed' From The Web
Paying Attention
On the post: RIAA Prefers Customers Who Buy A Little To Pirates Who Buy A Lot
Extinction
On the post: Is Using A Single Lyric From A Musician You're A Fan Of 'Theft' Or 'An Homage'?
Money
On the post: John Mellencamp: Thou Shalt Not Permit The Internet To Derail Our Gravy Train
Old School
On the post: The Proof That Movies Won't Get Made Any More Is That... More Movies Are Being Made Today
Hollywood always complaining
It never talk about the real problems. Most movies are crap. Ticket prices are too high. Hollywood executives are the ones moving production to Canada and overseas. 99% of movies made are unavailable for purchase or stream. Etc.
Also keep in mind that the movies available at Cannes are mostly independently financed meaning there are still plenty of people who want to invest in making movies.
On the post: Studio To Amazon Instant Video Customer: Thanks For The $$$. Enjoy Your Blank Screen.
Re: But wait one moment...
If 100 customers purchase PIB, and after 6 months 99 of them have watched it and haven't watched it *again* or data shows that the average re-viewing after six months is 1 in 100 customers, should Amazon continue to offer the movie? I say no. They've provided it for a reasonable period of time and offered the customer a chance to download it.
Well, the problem with your argument is that Amazon tells you you have bought the movie to enjoy at any time indefinitely, so whether it's feasible or not, that's what the contract is.
And it's not technology unfeasible to offer this. YouTube is now having 40 hours of video being uploaded EVERY MINUTE! That's the equivalent of 100 years of movies being uploaded every 50 hours.
And other responders have talked about the criminality of a studio taking your money and then deciding to pull the movie from Amazon. It's theft, pure and simple.
On the post: Universal And Fox Sued Over Simpson's Theme Park Ride... By A Musicians' Union
Banned
On the post: Digital River Loses Patent Suit Despite Doing What Was In The Patent Two Years Before Patent Was Filed
Testify
On the post: Senator Wyden Introduces Bill To Bring Some Sanity To Webcasting Royalty Rates
Death of Internet Radio
On the post: Publishers Can't Seem To Celebrate The Ebook Boom Without Slipping In Odes To Copyright
Inevitable
On the post: This Is What's Wrong With The Music Industry: Musicians Have To Pay To Pay Themselves
Bootlegs
On the post: Dead Authors' Estates Preventing Even The Slightest Revisions To Works
Not minor changes
On the post: Copyright Killbots Strike Again: Official DNC Livestream Taken Down By Just About Every Copyright Holder
Uber Kill Bot
On the post: Why Does Copyright Last 70 Years After Death... But Licenses Expire At Death?
Copyright Hostages
On the post: Copyright Enforcement Bots Seek And Destroy Hugo Awards
Can't shut it off
On the post: How Copyright Has Driven Online Streaming Innovators Insane
Online Radio