FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for March 02, 2012

And some people have no smarts at all.

As the Napster T-shirt said, “Thank you for sharing”

Itunes: music for people too lazy to share.

Yes Jason you have no business sense.

Kids want the sun & the moon but they don’t want to pay for it.

Nice try, Peter, but it doesn’t work that way at all.

Since Peter expects other people to work for free, we now know what his labor is worth.

Hey, 2/3 of my music collection is legally free music. Of course, that 2/3 is all independent artists… and I didn’t get physical CDs. But I think free music sounds better (whether that makes me a hipster, a cheapskate, anti-establishment or broadminded, I haven’t decided yet.)

Actually, Peter’s not entirely wrong. Music distributors had a great thing going when CDs first came out – they could sell both tapes and CDs and charge a premium for the higher-quality CDs even though their production cost was lower. The market supported an absurdly high mark-up. However, as technology improvements made digital distribution and sharing a lot easier and thereby changed the market, the CD producers did not adapt and the industry has had its troubles since. Had they dropped CD prices and found ways to sell (and protect) MP3s instead of simply trying to go after all of the illegal distribution, they would be in a lot better shape.

Fast forward ten years, most places I go have been slashing prices on their CDs to compete with digital download services, or cutting their inventory of them altogether. And replace “Napster” with “BitTorrent” and you have a solid depiction of this whole situation.

LoL the sign on the register changed in panel 3

Actually, it does sometimes work that way to a point. And Peter has something of a point. Google and Facebook (to name a few) have offered plenty of free ‘intellectual property’ or services or media to the public and have done very well indeed. Ideas are infinitely reproducible. Didn’t the Grateful Dead allow all their concerts to be videotaped or recorded, even encouraged that? It paid off nicely for them in the extra exposure.

Actually – Jason and Peter shared the same punch line today. no wonder the confusion.

Holy sheep, that’s 17.70 per CD!Makes me feel better about getting full albums on Amazon for 6-9 bucks each :)

And, you can think Metallica for the DMCA hellscape we live in now here in 2021 since they were the ones that started that crap during the Napster days. Now we can’t even have background music on during a Twitch or youtube stream without someone trying to sue. And, the record industry wonders why everyone is stealing their stuff again.