deleted
(@thom imagine here a capture from the Oops page with the word Ooops! replaced by Opaque! in the same font - can't get the dratted picture to link for some reason.)
Well well well, my post over there was intended to test the waters, and I got a much more direct, quick, and honest response than I expected. Perhaps a hopeful sign.
We know youll still find value in having a dedicated page to locate great deals on really great music.
Actually, they don't know that. The whole site is supposed to be dedicated to locating "great deals" on music, so to have a special page that says "these are great deals" when they're not is simply deceptive.
If they're not going to price anything lower than usual, they should get rid of that page altogether. There shouldn't even be a decision here from their perspective; it should be treated like a bug, which is sort of what it is, and removed from the website.
I was pleasantly surprised at how direct the response was.
It's good that they graced you with a response, but the phrasing is definitely verging on more doublespeak from the Ministry of Truth. The lowered expectations of my already lowered expectations expect only to be lowered. My mission as of now is to get through the SFLs, download what I deem of quality and value, and then stand by the lifeboats.
@BigD-Bluez I'm not so sure. Certainly the response is upbeat and bushy tailed about a crappy part of the service, and conceivably offering questionable post-hoc rationalizations for a bad move, and in that sense double-speak. But I was really expecting something along the lines of 'thank you for sharing your concerns about us, we understand that it can take time to find the deal you want, but we think our sale items offer excellent value' (i.e. some combination of utterly missing/evading the point while appearing to respond politely, like often comes back in the first two rounds from CS). I was not expecting 'yes, we agree the description is inaccurate, we've taken it down and are changing it', however smarmily it might be expressed. It's the actual concession of point and plan of action that surprised me; I thought was a little breath of new air, even if emitted from a not-very-fresh chamber. If the pressure to calm the boards means that they actually try to act in some way on concerns, perhaps that should be encouraged, even if they are unlikely to stop sounding like advertisers or recant the overall direction.
True, which is why I only vented my misgivings here, rather than over there. I never had any sentiment for them as anything other than a business, but my limited reservoir of good will has been expunged by all the nonsense of late, and the diminution of value. Dagnabbit.
When eMu was bargain basement, I could deal with less than ideal customer service. They are no longer bargain basement. Discount, maybe, but I do expect more when I pay more.
I don't get that whole argument nestled on a position that emu is a discount site so we should have lowered expectations. It's faulty, because it's based on the presumption that .99 is a reasonable price for a DL track resultant from a free market environment, when in fact, music companies have been colluding to overcharge listeners in both the physical and digital music market for years. So, because emu doesn't gouge its customers as bad as Amazon/iTunes, then that is a valid basis for offering an inferior product? Nope.
Jonah, "what the market price of an MP3 should be": please detail how you would determine that. The general fact is that the market tells people the price, not the other way around, because there is no "should" price in a market.
I don't think price collusion has been a big factor in music over the decades. Music's always been available at much cheaper than "retail price", and independent producer street prices haven't been much cheaper than major label street prices. And music in the cd age was at least as cheap and often cheaper than in the 60s/70s (easily seen using an inflation calculator).
Additionally, really small producers, e.g. unpopular genres where sales of 1000 are high, generally offer prices on par with the middle or big stuff, so I think it's apparent enough that lots of the music price is cost-based, and not due to profiteering.
I don't think price collusion has been a big factor in music over the decades.
No offense, but when 4 or 5 companies that control over 80% of an industry work together to decide both the wholesale and retail costs of their products, how can you say that it wasn't a big factor? Especially when they continue to complain that they aren't making enough money? The big 4 are complaining that not enough people are willing to buy mp3s at 99 cents, but their solution is never to lower prices. Isn't that how the market should determine the price?
Inflation calculators are not really that useful for showing comparisons over decades especially when you're talking about items heavily affected by changes in technology. CDs were supposed to usher in lower costs for music because they were cheaper to manufacture than vinyl. Similarly items like computers, TVs, VCR/DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc. all get cheaper over time because the cost to make them go down.
Thom beat me to my primary point that prices on cds and mp3s have been relatively flat, even though the big boys in the music industry have either been trumpeting huge sales or massive losses (more often and more frequently). The .99 cents per track also has seemed relatively resistant to changes one would expect in a free market when an industry complains about dropping sales figures. In the instance of mp3s, the price flatline is even more pronounced when one is faced with the obvious fact that music companies aren't saddled with additional production costs from having to produce a "new" run of mp3 batches like one would with a physical cd.
And it's no different than most industries where a small handful (or less) of players dominate the field... all the smaller players just fall in line. Small players might try to alter their prices a little bit, maybe an indie label sells their albums for ten bucks and mp3s for .79, but typically a small fry doesn't want to attract the attention of a big boy... that's how you get stomped on.
No offense, but when 4 or 5 companies that control over 80% of an industry work together to decide both the wholesale and retail costs of their products, how can you say that it wasn't a big factor?
I thought I explained why - based on personal experience spending many thousands of dollars over the years on a large variety of product, and comparing to unit prices in the past, it seems to me collusion didn't artificially inflate prices. I remember in the late 90s I'd buy 30 cds at a pop from alldirect.com for an average of <$11 (and that 30 was generally an eclectic batch). That's a 1975 price of <$3.35, which I think is under the typical street price at the time for albums. Also relevant is that fact that prices don't differ significantly between tiny and giant music producers (though I grant part of that could be an anchoring effect, though I don't think it could dominate compared to market forces).
Medium cost has generally been low compared to marketing, packaging, and multi-tiered distribution costs. At no time in the history of CDs has there been some obvious level of "excessive" profiteering (I've participated in a number of discussions about this over the years, it's pretty clear when one takes a look at typical distribution chains where the costs are distributed, and they are pretty mundane results).
The .99 cents per track also has seemed relatively resistant to changes one would expect in a free market when an industry complains about dropping sales figures.
It would be different if they had a big warehouse full of unsold mp3's to unload!
I think relatively flat prices reflect not collusion but the dominance of fixed labor costs plus multi-tiered distributions chains. Given the many cheap options that have existed in the digital domain, and the general movement upwards with time, I think that still supports that music creation costs (time/resources) still dominate. What do you think are the profit margins of small indies pricing product at levels similar to the "colluding" majors? They are small and not large.
Most of us here had good ways to beat the system, but that's a small sample. Most people are reliant upon the major music resellers to buy a CD. And back in the 90s those stores went from selling new CDs at $10 - $12 each to $15 - $17 each towards the end of the decade (over 40% of those prices is labelled overhead, by the way). Walk into any major CD store in the late 90s and early 00s and you could find hundreds of dusty CDs marked $15.99 and up that would never sell at those prices but were required to be anyway.
No doubt there are many fixed costs that keep prices higher than they should be, but once again it is the major labels that fix most of those costs. As for smaller labels, most of them have higher production/manufacturing costs as they are significantly smaller.
In the digital realm many of the cheaper options simply haven't been able to compete because the major labels control so much of the music.
I overstated when I referred to "big factor in music" - I meant a more specific "big factor in street prices". I don't think the perfectly mundane, legal, and accessible ways "we" bought music at value-prices over the years qualifies as "beating the system". That most people relied on overpriced brick & mortar mall stores seems to me more a testament to their preferred shopping strategies than particularly objectionable record company methods.
I still have no idea what anyone means when they use the word "should" about prices.
I am sure that the higher prices charged for CDs and downloads in the UK and the rest of the EU, compared to USA, is indicative of the trend to charge what you can get away with. Given that there is a fairly level pricing structure between the majors, they must have either colluded or it just suits them not to go out on a limb. It is amazing that the EU has not picked up on this. Perhaps it is because they have bigger fish to investigate, like car manufacureres?
In this case "should" means that the price is not reached by illegal means and is not kept artificially high while those responsible claim sales are down through no fault of their own. I will also use it occasionally to point out what I think would be a more reasonable price, but in this case I am referring to the above.
As for "mundane, legal, and accessible" ways to purchase music - by the end of the 90s less than 25% of households had any Internet access at all. Buying CDs that way was far from accessible for the majority of the US.
As for "mundane, legal, and accessible" ways to purchase music - by the end of the 90s less than 25% of households had any Internet access at all. Buying CDs that way was far from accessible for the majority of the US.
Point taken, my view of the marketplace is a bit cloistered in that historical context. Internet usage was ~44% in 2000 in the US.
I am skeptical that these complaints were/are all that relevant to posters here, nor do I think that current street prices are at artificially high levels due to collusion. (I don't think "$1 pop tracks is too high!" comprises much of an argument for that claim.) I'm unaware of any historical recorded-music price baseline that would support that, either.
I'm not sure if that last comment was directed at me or not. But if anyone is summarizing my points as nothing more than the vapid comment of "$1 pop tracks is too high!", then that's not a debate I'm going to allow myself to get drawn into.
Cheers.
Comments
(@thom imagine here a capture from the Oops page with the word Ooops! replaced by Opaque! in the same font - can't get the dratted picture to link for some reason.)
If they're not going to price anything lower than usual, they should get rid of that page altogether. There shouldn't even be a decision here from their perspective; it should be treated like a bug, which is sort of what it is, and removed from the website.
It's good that they graced you with a response, but the phrasing is definitely verging on more doublespeak from the Ministry of Truth. The lowered expectations of my already lowered expectations expect only to be lowered. My mission as of now is to get through the SFLs, download what I deem of quality and value, and then stand by the lifeboats.
And another thing, I missed out on the golden age of emu, so all you people who got a gazillion DLs for ten bucks a month can go suck it.
I don't think price collusion has been a big factor in music over the decades. Music's always been available at much cheaper than "retail price", and independent producer street prices haven't been much cheaper than major label street prices. And music in the cd age was at least as cheap and often cheaper than in the 60s/70s (easily seen using an inflation calculator).
Additionally, really small producers, e.g. unpopular genres where sales of 1000 are high, generally offer prices on par with the middle or big stuff, so I think it's apparent enough that lots of the music price is cost-based, and not due to profiteering.
Inflation calculators are not really that useful for showing comparisons over decades especially when you're talking about items heavily affected by changes in technology. CDs were supposed to usher in lower costs for music because they were cheaper to manufacture than vinyl. Similarly items like computers, TVs, VCR/DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc. all get cheaper over time because the cost to make them go down.
And it's no different than most industries where a small handful (or less) of players dominate the field... all the smaller players just fall in line. Small players might try to alter their prices a little bit, maybe an indie label sells their albums for ten bucks and mp3s for .79, but typically a small fry doesn't want to attract the attention of a big boy... that's how you get stomped on.
Medium cost has generally been low compared to marketing, packaging, and multi-tiered distribution costs. At no time in the history of CDs has there been some obvious level of "excessive" profiteering (I've participated in a number of discussions about this over the years, it's pretty clear when one takes a look at typical distribution chains where the costs are distributed, and they are pretty mundane results).
It would be different if they had a big warehouse full of unsold mp3's to unload!
Most of us here had good ways to beat the system, but that's a small sample. Most people are reliant upon the major music resellers to buy a CD. And back in the 90s those stores went from selling new CDs at $10 - $12 each to $15 - $17 each towards the end of the decade (over 40% of those prices is labelled overhead, by the way). Walk into any major CD store in the late 90s and early 00s and you could find hundreds of dusty CDs marked $15.99 and up that would never sell at those prices but were required to be anyway.
No doubt there are many fixed costs that keep prices higher than they should be, but once again it is the major labels that fix most of those costs. As for smaller labels, most of them have higher production/manufacturing costs as they are significantly smaller.
In the digital realm many of the cheaper options simply haven't been able to compete because the major labels control so much of the music.
I still have no idea what anyone means when they use the word "should" about prices.
As for "mundane, legal, and accessible" ways to purchase music - by the end of the 90s less than 25% of households had any Internet access at all. Buying CDs that way was far from accessible for the majority of the US.
I am skeptical that these complaints were/are all that relevant to posters here, nor do I think that current street prices are at artificially high levels due to collusion. (I don't think "$1 pop tracks is too high!" comprises much of an argument for that claim.) I'm unaware of any historical recorded-music price baseline that would support that, either.
Cheers.
(channelling Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" and not being serious)