Saturday, August 09, 2008

Up on my soap box on file sharing.

It has been known for a very, very long time that it costs record companies no more than £1 to produce an album, that’s not just the cd, that’s everything, the cd, the artwork the jewel case, everything, and yet you will universally pay an average of £13 for that album. What does this mean? For a start it means that they are making an obscene profit of over 1000% and more disturbingly seeing as this price is near universal it must be assumed that they are grouped together in a cartel for the purpose of keeping the price of albums artificially high, correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this illegal! I’m certain there have been laws against it for a very, very long time, and yet, of course they get away with it. When you buy an album, record companies are by definition taking money out of your pocket, with your consent, I might add, I’m not saying they have someone stand next to you and pick your pocket while you look at the album, that would be absurdly costly and inefficient but joking aside if the price of the album is kept high via an illegal method, ie the cartel, then that money is being illegally charged and therefore it charging must be seen as an act of theft.
I believe that in light of this file sharing must be seen as a protection against this sort theft, this consumer abuse, but somewhat unsurprisingly the law seeks to protect the thief, not you.
The case with downloads is even worse. Each track costs something like a penny or perhaps even less to put online and to maintain, yet you are charged an average of 99p to download it, sometimes they feel a bit more generous and charge 89p or 79p, this means that at the very least they are making a profit of almost 8000% per track! How can this be seen as right, how can it be allowed?!? it means that a lot of the time you will be paying more to download an album than to buy it in the shops! the record companies save money, and you loose it! So lets here no more of the rights of musicians, copyright may have been made to protect them but right now it just protects the record companies, and allows them to continue their abusive and illegal practices!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

might cost under a pound to actually manufacture a CD, but it also costs the label to hire studios/producers to actually record the music, send the band out on tour, publicise them, pay for the artwork, the songwriting royalties and a hell of a lot more... costs a lot to run a label and support a band than just the manufacturing bill... not many people make money out of releasing records.