huh
http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2007/09/12/how-sams-club-would-sell-music/
Music for the price of a text message.
That’s what Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of Music Industry at USC, thinks would save the music industry. Personally, I think he’s got a point. According to Colliano, texting is big business for mobile phone companies because the price is right. Because text messaging is so cheap, the youth market purchases them in bulk. Could this possibly be an answer to the music industry’s problems?
texting2.jpg
“The record industry — before it gets the lights on the way out the door — might want to consider making the purchase of music virtually non-consequential financially. Envision the youth market on their computers and cell phones buying — I said buying — music at will, on impulse, 24/7 — like they use text messaging. In bulk. So much for theft. So much for needing DRM. Sell volume and welcome to the new world of music. Several cents is next to nothing — just as it is for text messaging — but it adds up to big business. Between that and what they’d save on lawyers, it would be the 60’s all over again.”
I don’t know what the 60’s were like, but I can imagine the music industry was in much better shape than it is now. And at this point the music industry needs to take a look at any possible solution to its declining sales. I would imagine it would be extremely difficult to convince the record industry to drop the price of a song to the price of a text message, but imagine what that would do for music in general. For one, it would probably curb piracy, because if I won’t stop to pick up a penny off the ground, I’m probably not going to waste my time pirating a song just to save a couple cents. Not only that, but increased music sales would encourage record labels to explore more music in general because the overall demand for music would increase.
It sounded crazy to me at first, but I’m all for it. Music for the price of a text message.
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interesting............ i can't be fussed to do the math at 5:30am (i am in vampire mode), but let me see.......
let's exclude videos, touring and tour support and all that. would complicate matters.
let's assume a song is sold for $0.25. a quarter. that's about 30 Yen. assume that an album production budget is going to be about $50,000 (dude, labour, studios, etc). divide that by 12 (per song), so that's $4,166, fuck that, make it a round $5,000. divide that by $0.25=20,000 sales.
hmm.......a $50,000 production budget is actually not that high, all those shiny shiny albums by major artists usually cost in the region of $150,000 to maybe even $300,000. right now, $5,000 would get you a "radio friendly" super duper mix engineer for a song, and that does not include studio time, which in those instances, would range from $1,000 to $3,000 (probably lower).
could work for a lot of independent acts though. hmm.........