"Justin Ulysses Morse" wrote in message
...
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

Maybe I wasn't concise. I understand all too well the costs involved, it's
just a question of who is paying those costs. If the media conglomerates
will no longer be vertically integrated with distribution, and don't foot
the bill for electronic distribution, this has implications for artist
contracts.

jb