Gus, Studios finance the creations. You are fooling yourself if you think they are not necessary. You are looking at this with some sort of bias I don't understand. Studios are like a bank. Not good and not bad. How do you buy a house or open a business without a loan? Studios provide a valuable, necessary and good service.

They make the magic possible.

ETA: Is Universal evil and wrong because they believed in Joss and will probably never make a dime off of Serenity? Bah!

Thought maybe you guys would like to listen to the Firefly filk project my friends and me are doing...

[link]

Hope a self link is okay here, if not I´m sorry...

The writer could charge me.

How many writers can afford to fund the ~10 million it cost to make the Firefly pilot in the first place?

Studios assume the risk that a show isn't going to make any money. Very few creators can afford to do so.

Gus, are you saying we should never purchase content except directly from the creators? Frankly, I'm not sure how to go about purchasing content directly from Joss or Tim or whoever. And I don't think that their content, without the additional value from all the other artists brought together by the studio, would be quite what I was looking for.

I bought my Firefly DVDs from a store. I hope that they made money from the sale. They should. They bought the DVDs, housed them, and made them available to me. And you'll have to pry those DVDs from my cold, dead hands to get them away from me (or ask nicely and I'll lend one DVD at a time from my loaner set).

I have all sorts of problems with existing and proposed DRM systems, but the iPod thing seems like a straight purchase to me. Even if individual artists don't make money from each sale, if their product sells well you can bet that their asking price for their next project will increase!

Assuming that Apple's fixed costs for the web interface (such as bandwidth and tech maintenance) are close to negligable, its only other costs have to be licensing and royalties costs, right? If that's true (and I'm not sure if it is), then the record companies and tv studios are the limiting factor stifling iTunes's viability. I'm more likely to assume that the big conglomerates are overcharging iTunes (even given their considerable costs - at least on the tv studio side, because major record labels inflate their costs to the public) than I am to write off downloaded media as a potential entertainment market.

Hell Gus. You are making me look like a moderate by comparison. You want to eliminate middlemen/middlepersons?

So you want to buy your food directly from farmers? No supermarkets, not even a little country store? Buy nails from the nail factors, lightbulbs from the lightbulb factory?

Hell itunes let you cut out most middle people if you choose. As an artist you can place your stuff directly on itunes and let people buy it directly, and end up with a whole lot higher percent of the growth than if you went through a label. Of course you have to do your own marketing, your own publicity, your own a million things. And lots of luck with trying most of those without the economies of scale a label has when doing marketing, publicity and such. But some people have managed; I seem to remember having heard indendent porn producers were having the most luck with making money from direct-to-ipod sales.

I think Gus make mean something more sensible than we are assuming. It is just that he needs to sit down a type a reasonably long screed outlinging his premises and how the alternative he envisions would work. I suspect he is trying to convey in sound bites something that does not lend itself well to sound bites.

Okay. I cop to the sound-bite thing.

Studios. They finance stuff. Distributors do not. iPod is a distributor.

iPod is a machine.

iPod is people!

People!

There's a point at which one stop shopping is a detriment to the creators and consumers. But since iTunes can make my friend's album almost as accessible as the latest Madonna--and I don't see that as bad. If I had to find his studio, if the responsibility to provide a stable, etc platform for sales instead of being able to leverage iTunes or Amazon, they'd sell fewer copies.

How does that help the band?