OT: Recording Industry Ripoff

[Xrati]

Caught a blurb this morning on TV. It mentioned that Apple was blasting the recording industry for being greedy. Something to the effect that they wanted to raise prices from .99 USD for "downloaded" music. Apple was stating that the recording industry was getting greedy and if they raised their prices that piracy would increase. Here we go again!

[El_Phil]

Well of course it could be Apple is increasing their cut (they do make cents per copy if that) and wants to blame someone else, and the record industry is a good target. Or not. :shrug:

As you can buy a CD delivered for £6/7 with no DRM rubbish why would you bother downloading anyway, unless you want just one track off an album or something?

[Atrocities]

Whats bad is that people are moving to moble music devices with huge storeage capacities and the Record Industry sales for cd's has fallen. They "SAY" that he sales are down do to piracy, but the truth is, they are down because people are sick and tired of the same old trash.

The same with hollywood. Movie ticket sales are down and they claim piracy is doing it when in fact people just don't want to spend $30.00 to $50.00 taking the family to crowded theater when they can stay home and pay $20.00 for the DVD. DUhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Also factor in that most of the movies being released these days are TRASH.

I hope Apple can bring a lot of anti-greed presure down upon the record industrie. But those greedy bastards will do what they want. And by doing it, they will have created the very thing they have been claiming has been going on for years. And you know what, they deserve a good spanking.

[El_Phil]

Atrocities said:
I hope Apple can bring a lot of anti-greed presure down upon the record industrie.

That would be funny. I mean really, really funny. Apple, the company famed for over priced, under speced hardware and forcing people to pay extra for almost any feature gets someone else to stop being greedy. Ohh the irony....

[Baron Munchausen]

Yeah, and what else is new? Corporations learned a long time ago that the best way to make profits is to make the product scarce and then extort the highest possible price from people. The 'Oil Industry' has been shutting down refineries for decades. They haven't built a new one since the 1970s as I recall? Every time some 'accident' closes one of the remaining refineries down for a while, they get to charge huge markups because of the 'tight supply'.

This is just the music industry trying to do the same old thing a bit prematurely. They must think that most people are 'intimidated' enough to have given up on piracy.

[Renegade 13]

Give up on piracy? When it's so easy? Why would people do that? Guess that's what you meant by "premature".

[El_Phil]

Baron Munchausen said:
Yeah, and what else is new? Corporations learned a long time ago that the best way to make profits is to make the product scarce and then extort the highest possible price from people. The 'Oil Industry' has been shutting down refineries for decades. They haven't built a new one since the 1970s as I recall? Every time some 'accident' closes one of the remaining refineries down for a while, they get to charge huge markups because of the 'tight supply'.

I'd like to think that the evil corporation that would actually deliberately kill lots of people for profit only exists in fiction. Given that quite a few of these refinery accidents do kill people (or get damn close and injure large numbers), I hope they are actually accidents.

[Fyron]

Any chance that BM gets to defame the name of corporations is a good day. What he says has absolutely nothing to do with corporations themselves, but rather with anyone trying to make money. Such artificial product scarcity occured eons before the first corporation was ever chartered.

The RIAA wants variable pricing on music tracks so that they can charge 1.50 or more for popular songs, and likely the same as now for less popular songs. Absolutely none of their actions in recent years have done anything to curb piracy, but instead to destroy the last vestiges of reputation that they had and to provoke further piracy. I seem to recall that in recent years, piracy (of all forms) has approached the levels of bandwidth usage of pornography on the Internet as a whole...

[Baron Munchausen]

Oh, it's not necessary for them to 'deliberately' arrange for accidents. They and the government knew quite well that a major hurricane like Katrina could shut down a major part of our national refinery capacity. But the corporate boards didn't want to cut into their profits by buying more refinery capacity than absolutely necessary to met demand and the government didn't want to violate the 'free market' by forcing them to. So now that the inevitable has happened, we all pay the price and the owners of Exxon, Shell, BP, etc. make even fatter profits off of a disaster. What do they care if ordinary working people who can barely afford to drive to work every day are being ruined by this huge price rise?

[El_Phil]

Nothing to stop other people opening refineries. Or just buy shares in an oil firm if your that convinced they actually make money from petrol. That would be a bad thing to do by the way, check the published accounts and it's all upstream and oil production that makes money. Fuels (and that includes aviation gas, ships fuel oil, etc.) aren't that much, not in the scheme of things.

Does remind me though, start of Bush's term in office the emergency planning chappies produced the list of three worst potential threats to the US
1. Cat 5 hurricane on the US Gulf coast
2. Terrorist attack on New York
3. Huge quake in San Fransisco.

Frankly as yet another cat5 hurricane prepares to hit the gulf coast I'd be moving out of Frisco right now.