Correct me if I'm wrong, but songs are 99c on iTunes? Is it reasonable to expect a 20 year old intern to drop almost $11,000 on songs? It would seem being a music lover is an expensive hobby.
Is it reasonable to expect a 20 year old intern to have these 11000 songs? Does her life depend on it? What about other things which are unreasonable expensive for a 20 year old intern? The laptop to store the music on, external hard drive, smartphone with data plan to download and so on ... ?
I don't want it to look like I'm defending her position, because I'm not. I think artists need to be paid.
But I can't let that letter's maths go unscrutinised.
He starts off by saying "I’m gonna give you a break" and then ignores the record company's cut, which is about 80%. And then proceeds to use this drastically reduced value to lay a guilt trip.
It doesn't work that way, the record company isn't going to cut her a break, it's going to charge her the full 99c.
Which means instead of $17.82 a month, she would need to pay $89.10 a month, for 10 years between the ages of 10 and 20.
I've been taking a simpler approach. I buy about 3 albums a week off Amazon or iTunes, which adds up to 150 albums or 1500 songs a year. By the time that 20 year old is 25, s/he'll easily have 7500 songs paid for over 5 years, instead of one gigantic lump sum. I think it's certainly reasonable when you're getting discounts for buying full albums and doing it over an extended period. Keep in mind, if Amazon has an album for $9, and iTunes has one for $10, that's roughly a "free" album every 10, just for using Amazon.
Is it reasonable that she has actually listened to all of those songs? That's about 733 hours of music. Assuming she listened 2 hours a day and never repeated a song, she'd be listening for over a year before she heard all of those songs. And you know she has Modest Mouse and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on repeat.
This girl is a thief, plain and simple. It's like walking into a Starbucks and just stealing coffee. The marginal cost of a cup of coffee is just pennies, however there are fixed costs involved. If you don't like Starbucks or think they're corrupt or whatever, no one is forcing you to consume their product. If you don't like Universal Records, then don't support their product.
Musicians must buy equipment and play, usually for years making next to nothing, playing in ratty bars for shitty owners and when they finally do get an album released, they certainly deserve to get paid -- the record companies deserve to get paid as well. For every hit song, they've blown countless dollars supporting musicians that never accomplish anything.
This anti-corporate argument is the argument of a cheapskate thief. There are plenty of Indie labels on iTunes that operate on shoestrings, yet people steal their music too.
Whoa calm your jimmies, I'm not saying she's not a thief. I'm just saying that in order to get that many songs you'd have to pay a shitload of money.
And it's very likely that she doesn't listen to all those songs. She does want to work in the music industry though, so I can kinda see how she might want to sample a wide variety of songs. She should probably have used streaming services instead I guess.
Is it reasonable to expect a 20 year old intern to have these 11000 songs? Does her life depend on it? What about other things which are unreasonable expensive for a 20 year old intern? The laptop to store the music on, external hard drive, smartphone with data plan to download and so on ... ?
This one has some background on numbers. And myths about royalties: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emi...