Tony --
> >Most of what we pay for when we buy audio CDs are the atoms and their
> >distribution.
>
> Surely not. It's mostly the A&R, the marketing, etc.
Of course, you pay for those things. But there's a substantial amount of
money that retailers make from the CD's they sell. I don't know what the
delta is between the wholesale and retail prices, but it's got to be in the
25% to 50% range. Eliminate the retailer (and their marketing), the trucks
and shipping, the CD manufacturing and the liner notes printing. Change the
marketing strategy as a result of all of this. This may not all drop the
actual price by an order of magnitude (as I suggested in the original note),
but I'd bet it's pretty close.
> >Like all DRM, it protects the content hopefully to the extent that
> >the price of the content is lower than the cost of defeating the
> >protection scheme. That is, of course, where all DRM has failed to
> >date -- the cost of defeating the protection scheme tends to be very
> >low. DeCSS and "unfuck" were two great examples of that.
>
> In particular, the cost of defeating a DRM is negative for some
> people, i.e. they do it for fun, for its own sake, for political
> reasons, rather than to get at the protected content.
You could almost view this as an economic form of civil disobedience.
jeffrey kay <jkay@engenia.com>
chief technology officer, engenia software, inc.
"first get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure" -- mark
twain
"golf is an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle"
-- sports illustrated
"if A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is
work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." -- albert einstein
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:51 PDT