Living a Digital Existence Week 2 – Part 2 So as promised, here’s part 2 of your 3 part Living a Digital Existence blog. Pirates of the Broadband, at bandwidth’s end! Just quickly, to add onto yesterday’s post, here’s an article that has appeared on BBC Technology news today that some of you may find very interesting. BBC NEWS | Technology | Broadband users reach their limit So, onto today’s topics. After our conversation on broadband suppliers, me and my friends got onto talking about downloading, both legal and illegal. The main topic of conversation was the price of downloading (both monetary and social) as well as how ISP’s and industries can stop illegal downloading. As many of you will know, downloading music and films can be a rather expensive hobby. I certainly do it through iTunes for music, and whilst it is still cheaper than buying CDs from a shop (£7.99 for most albums on iTunes, £0.79 for single songs) and you do occasionally find the odd bargain, it all adds up after a while. I must have spent at least £50 on music from iTunes in the past few months. I fully understand that artists have to be paid for their work, after all, you wouldn’t expect to walk into a doctors surgery and expect them to treat you for free! But what I object to, is the fact we have to pay over the odds for these CDs and downloads when it actually costs less than 50p to make the physical CD and then through the millions of sales they get, they make millions of pounds. Whilst I don’t blame them for this, I mean, who wouldn’t make millions of pounds if they could! But I just think we pay far too much for these CDs. Now, due to these high prices, people choose to illegally download for free. And obviously, you can’t blame people wanting to get this music for free when it costs so much to get it legally. Now, whilst I partly agree with the Artists in that they should be paid for their work, in my view, sharing music is no different to me sending my mate an album over msn. After all, he isn’t purchasing the music himself, I have purchased it and in effect it’s like lending the CD to him to copy. Is that illegal? In truth, I couldn’t give a toss because they’ll never find out. So whilst Mr. Bono and friends sit on their tour buses doing what they love, can they really complain that they are making £300 million from their music rather than the £400 million they would be making if everyone bought it? No. I don’t think he can, the greedy bastard. Why not give it all to the Africans instead of getting people to donate their own money you silly ponce, then people might give a crap. So moving on to the subject of how to stop people illegally downloading. Well to me it is clear and simple. I think one of my mates mentioned that Nokia (or one of the mobile companies, I can’t remember which) make you pay a one off monthly payment, and then you get unlimited music downloads for that month. HALLE-BLOODY-LUJAH! Somebody, somewhere, actually has a brain cell or two. God knows how long I’ve been saying this, but if you give people a one off payment a month, say £10, and then give them unlimited downloads for that month, people would be more than willing to use this kind of service. Now, maybe I’m wrong, so feel free to post your views on this! (Don’t be scared, I won’t bite ) But I know I would be willing to have this kind of deal. If they thought about it, they would make just as much money from it. You would have £120 a year from people, if you times that by the millions around the world that would use the service, you would make more than enough. Obviously, you would still have people who download illegally, but that I’m afraid, is always going to happen. So, in conclusion, we wanted either: Artists/ Producers etc. to stop charging us so much, or a one off payment every month to download as much as we want. I will only touch on my last subject, as I seem to have gone on a lot about the downloading, but basically, I was looking through eurogamer.net’s round-up of PAL releases this week, and saw a Jamie Oliver cooking game! For our American members, Jamie Oliver is a pretentious little twat who tries to make everyone eat grass and other rabbit food, in a vain attempt to make our lives f**king miserable. Now, who on Earth, would want to play a cooking game where he tells you what to do! The developers (I didn’t even bother to look who it was) should be strung up and shot in my humble opinion. I’ve heard InsaneNutter going on about Barbie’s Riding School or something along those lines before, and so I want you to post the most ridiculous games ever, you know, the ones that were so bad they never actually put on the shelves and are somewhere in GAME’s back room collecting dust. I really want to start getting people posting on these blogs, so please do post, as it will lead to better conversation and debate! And that Ladies & Gents, is what Grinds my gears! Check back tomorrow for your usual Living a Digital Existence blog! Until next time... David (MunkyMagikUK)
Ahh yes Barbie Horse Adventures, backwards compatible for use on the 360 from day one, where as games people actually want to play such as Midtown Madness 3 are still not compatible to this day. Worse Xbox game ever? Unless you’re a 4 year old girl or have a fetish for horses most likely. On the topic of Digital downloads I think the price can be way too high most of the time, the main things I’ve bought digitally are games on Steam, now I must admit Steam has had many awesome deals this year, some of which have been posted on Digiex. However some games cost more to download than they do to buy a retail box copy in the shop, so whats the point? I also don’t like how were charged in $ and the17.5% VAT is hidden on the price of games, just cut the crap and tell me the final price... Going back to the post you made yesterday many ISP’s traffic shape or have hidden limits of what you can download at certain times, this sort of runs the whole idea of fast legal downloads.
At first I thought Itunes was a great idea. Easy way to buy music from the store and then play it through Itunes or hook up your IPod and listen to it. Simple, painless and a joy for all. Well not quite. Today I had to download Itunes 3 times, each time 70mb, thanks very much Steve Jobs, because it would not download and install itself properly from the auto updater or even the download only option so I had to get it directly from the Apple website and reinstall Itunes! No explanation as to why it wouldn't install properly first time. Another thing I found out about Itunes was a news article describing music publishers (Sony, Warner etc) and how they want more money from sales through Itunes as apparently Apple make 50p from every song sold whilst the publishers only get 25p. Now I don't care what you say but Apple and the music publishers seem like money grabbing idiots. Know why? Because it seems like the artists get about 4p from every song sale. 4p! Crying out loud. If I put my heart and soul into a song, you know produced it, wrote it and sang it, I'd be wanting more than 4p per single. Shame on Apple and music publishers! I don't mind paying for singles from Itunes if I can't find it from somewhere else but if I knew more money went to the artists and not the publishers and Apple I'd be more inclined to buy more songs I liked. Sure artists get a recording deal but it seems risky if their songs don't sell and a publisher decides to drop them. The publisher gets most of the money and the artists fades into obscurity. Anway rant over for now!
Apple made a quarterly revenue of $7.9 BILLION, and profit of $1.14 BILLION last quarter. Yes, that is just one quarter of the financial year, and yet they want more. Enough said really.