reddred wrote:

If the cost of distribution is near zero, and in the case of electronic
distribution that's the case


Whoah, hold on there. People talk about the thieving record labels
greedily taking $16 for the sale of a CD and only giving $1 or whatever
to the artist, because they're failing to consider the $8 that goes to
the retail store (which in turm pays employees), the truck drivers and
warehouse workers, the manufacturing and printing and promoters etc. I
think you understand this. You don't seem to realize that the online
distribution scheme costs money too. A lot of money. All those
dot-coms wouldn't have gone belly-up if they didn't have any expenses.
Aside from the obvious things like hardware and administration and
networking, you've got the promotion costs. The cost of promoting a
band and a record and a company haven't gone away, and now they've got
the cost of promoting a brand-new distribution technology on top of
everything else. And what do you think it costs to build and run a
website capable of delivering a million or more secure, paid 3MB
downloads in a week? That's at least 15 terabytes monthly. That's an
insanely large bandwidth. You don't call up Roadrunner for a
connection like that. Remember they're doing the work that a worldwide
P2P network has been doing, not including the payment handling.

ulysses