Justin G
Member
Not exactly Hoarders material.
And I'm not knocking digital music. It's still buying music, and I buy my books exclusively on Kindle these days. It's the Spotify approach that bothers me.
How many releases do you buy a year?
- Thread starter General Zod
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Not exactly Hoarders material.
And I'm not knocking digital music. It's still buying music, and I buy my books exclusively on Kindle these days. It's the Spotify approach that bothers me.
lane_miller
Space Ghost
I buy around 120 CDs per year and typically only a couple MP3. I fully admit to being behind the times, because I like to have my grubby little hands on a piece of hardware.
False. Unless they're slimline laptops (which accounts for maybe 30-40% of the selection nowadays) they come with optical drives, as do all desktops. Maybe in ten years they'll be obsolete, but there's still demand for it now.
Justin G
Member
AeonicSlumber
srs
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The only exception is if you're custom building your machine, like in the case of Dell as Justin G pointed out (although, even most prebuilt Dells are sans disc drives), or if you go full Newegg and build a machine on your own. However, these are the vast minority, and I can tell you straight up that the VAST majority of personal computers are omitting optical drives. This is for 2 reasons. Firstly, to cut costs - with everything digital nowadays, it saves manufacturers money to skimp on a drive. At this point, all Apple computers have no optical drives, and almost all windows machines come without them unless you're custom building it. Or if you stumble upon one of the last few prebuilt PCs that have that "tower" desktop structure - but many of those too don't have disc drives.
Reason 2 for why this is, is because tablets are now outselling computers, so PCs are becoming more and more tablet like. I would guestimate optical drives for computers to be pretty much 100% obsolete within the next 2 years if tablet sales keep up the way they do. The manufacturers that DO offer the classic desktop style tower PCs with drives are already in financial shambles for this reason.
dcowboys311
Member
Justin G
Member
Mine was not a custom job. This was standard equipment. And it's a 1-piece (no tower) setup like the Mac, and has a touch screen.
Justin G
Member
I'm not sure Netflix is a valid comparison, because most movies have theatrical revenues before Netflix comes into the picture.
The kindle library is great if you want to borrow books. I think if you're a serious fan though, you want a copy you can call your own and read on your own terms.
Building off of what Justin G said earlier about theatrical revenue, I think that Netflix pays the studios X dollars in order to keep whatever show/movie as part of their library for X amount of time, vs Spotify which only pays out $0.0033ish per play. Not to mention that actors (usually) get some kind of pre-arranged flat-rate paycheck for their movie/show which doesn't depend on its ratings/ticket sales. There's a lot more money to go around in the film/tv industries than in music.
dcowboys311
Member
Yep, you're absolutely right, and both Justin G's points are very fair and valid. The payment structure for Netflix and Spotify are not equal, same for the Kindle library. However, I took the earlier discussed "devaluing" comment to mean that $10/month for unlimited to access to music devalues the music in the eyes of the consumer. I could be wrong. If I'm not, I think that $8/month for unlimited movies and TV shows is equally devaluing.
Justin G
Member
Possibly. But I have a shelf full of Blu-rays, so I can get on that high horse if I have to.
And in theory most TV episodes are free to begin with.
It could be argued that, to an extent, it's devaluing, but Netflix also does not provide access to every single tv show and movie ever made, while Spotify (more or less) provides access to almost any song you can buy on iTunes.
The difference between Spotify and Netflix, which I mentioned before, is that there's a LOT LOT LOT more money to go around in the tv/movie industry. If TV shows were only available to buy episode-by-episode or as a full season and you couldn't just turn on your TV to watch a show for free*, then there would be a real (for lack of a better term) "devaluing crisis" like there is with music.
*Sure you may have a cable subscription to pay for, but the money to keep whatever programming on is coming from the advertisers, not you [unless you subscribe to a station like HBO]. It could also be said that cable devalues tv shows and movies because you (essentially) pay for the right to stream them.
Also, if I really like a movie or TV show, I will buy it on blu ray/dvd. I have a pretty decent sized collection and i've also been upgrading some of my dvds to blu ray as well.
dcowboys311
Member
Possibly. But I have a shelf full of Blu-rays, so I can get on that high horse if I have to.
And in theory most TV episodes are free to begin with.
You're a good man, man.
Just recently finally got my own place and getting adequate media storage is the biggest PITA...
Justin G
Member
dcowboys311
Member
Depends on who you are and what you dig. I'm not a big movie or TV guy. Netflix works just fine for me. Sure, it doesn't have The Simpsons or King of the Hill, but there's plenty to keep me occupied. OTOH, I am a big music guy, and like to find new bands daily. I find that there is stuff missing on Spotify daily. It's all in how you use it.
I agree that there's a lot more money in movies and TV than there are in music. The key thing we're talking about here though is the value in the eyes of the consumer. The average Joe/Josefina doesn't pay attention to the behind-the-scenes stuff. Just the fact that unlimited tunes are $10 and unlimited viewings are $8. But I'm not the one making the devaluing claim anyway, just questioning/debating it
AeonicSlumber
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I see. And fyi, for the record I'm not entirely at a disagreement with you on the whole Spotify thing. It's just that I'm not of the mindset to deal scorched earth policies on people who use it exclusively quite yet.
AeonicSlumber
srs
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No that's not at all what their case is. "Devaluing" as in, Spotify's payout rates in their eyes are too small and that the royalty rates from CD sales are higher (which is both correct AND incorrect depending on a lot of factors). Therefore, the more people that exclusively use Spotify, the less people will buy CDs and the less revenue the overall industry will receive because of it.
hoodaman
Is it live or is it Dave?
- Dec 19, 2006
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less than 25. I just got a turntable so my numbers are skewed but on average I've been buying less than a dozen new releases a year. With so many ways to legally listen to albums before buying them it's almost fooling to blind buy much of anything.
skyrefuge
Member
Not really, at least not that many "LOT"s. Last year's total revenue for the US film industry was $31B, and it was $15B for the US music industry. So only 2x as much money to go around.
The difference is that in the film industry, it can still be divided into chunks that are meaningful, because it doesn't have the supply glut that music does.
In 2011, 2910 films were released in the US. In contrast, 76,875 albums were released. That's 26 times more releases fighting for half the money, so from that perspective, you're right, each production can theoretically get a share 50 times larger in the film world than in the music world.
In another view, of those 76,875 albums released in 2011, 2% (1500) of them accounted for 88.5% of the sales. The least-popular 98% of albums sold an average of 172 copies each.
Via my Spotify subscription, I'm currently sending about $13 into the pockets of artists per year. If I bought 45 CDs per year (which seems about "normal" for here based on the poll results), I'd be sending about the same amount into their pockets. So Spotify vs. CD is clearly not the problem.
And say I doubled the amount that artists get from each CD sale, or even tripled it. When you have a 98% chance of selling only 172 copies of your CD, even if you make $10 in profit per CD, that's not going to do a damn thing to pay your rent or put food on the table.
The number of competing artists out there is clearly plays a much bigger role in the failure of artists than the method we each use to compensate them.
Not exactly Hoarders material.
And I'm not knocking digital music. It's still buying music, and I buy my books exclusively on Kindle these days. It's the Spotify approach that bothers me.
Nice of you to have that whole room for just the collection! I have also +6000 cds, but had to start throwing cases putting them in sleeves, so my order got out of whack! Now I am trying to compile my collection and putting it cataloguized, which will take me forever! Is that in alphabetical the way you have it? I imagine you have to leave spaces to fill it out if so! I remember having to make room for new titles and displacing most rows.
