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.
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?
Frankly, I had a small problem parsing that.
Heh. iTunes makes it easy for me to buy my friend's small label album. Just as easy as if I were buying the new Madonna. Without iTunes or Amazon, they'd be much harder to find.
If iTunes makes reaching an audience easier for the little guy, on what do you base your disapproval?
If iTunes makes reaching an audience easier for the little guy...
Do they? It would be important, if they did. Find your small-label friend, using terms particular to the content.
I base my disapproval on this: iPod does not give a
frack
about the content.
Where did you buy your DVDs, Gus? Did you call up Universal/Fox direct and say "Hey guys, I'd like some Firefly DVDs, I'll send you a check, you send 'em to me, kay?" Or did you go through Amazon.com / deepdiscountdvd.com / Best Buy / Tower Records / Barnes and Noble / Borders / whatever?
Those people are distributers. So is Apple. Hell, Apple isn't even overcharging: $1.99 * 14 = $27.86 if you buy one ep at a time, or you can even buy the entire season at once for $25.99. That's $9 less than Amazon.com's price for the DVD set, and $24 dollars less than retail. DVDs are better for us big fans, sure, but most people don't care about commentaries and such, so the Apple thing gives them an easy entry point, cheaper than a week of Starbucks. Of the Apple price, Fox gets a decent cut of that money - more than half, if it's like the music sales - which is reinvested in other Fox products, including other genre/clever TV shows that they'd be less likely to risk without the proven revenue stream of Firefly etc.
Joss and Tim are doing fine, trust me. Nathan et al won't get money from ANY Firefly sales, DVD, Apple, or otherwise - it was never part of their contract, and they don't expect it. If you want to send them money, go for it, but I doubt they'll take it. Doesn't matter anyway - whether we like it or not, the television industry does not currently lend itself to a big independent market, and so the studios are who we need to pay off if we want to get fresh content. And the studios make money from the Apple revenue stream.
On a somewhat unrelated note, if an independent market for television (video podcasts, perhaps) ever does emerge, it will be because of venues like iTunes, that allow basically direct-to-customer sales, or at least a much closer facsimile, just like ita's indie music friend is more likely to be able to make some revenue in the modern, iTMS world. A good band (or even a fairly bad one) can promote themselves with MySpace (see: Mute Math, whom I don't like much myself but are really quite popular considering they've only had one EP released by a major label) and Livejournal, sell their songs direct on iTMS, and never have to give a cent to Warner/Sony/Whoever. That hasn't happened yet with TV, but it COULD, as video processing becomes cheaper and cheaper. And episodic, wide-content distribution channels like iTMS are the only way it will ever happen.
So, basically, step off.
