Beatport pricing

[Era 7]

WTF you guys are waiting for? The prices on Lossless to go down? Vinyl to make this big comeback?

if you had read OP you'd know what this thread was about. it doesn't even matter now since my question was answered on page 1.

[M!TCH]

Stop crying about the cost of lossless. 40 tracks used to cost you $400 dollars AT LEAST. Some of you guys sound like whiny bitches.

I'm not crying about shit. Feel free to neg me all you want and call me a "fucking pussy" it will get you far. I love comparative analysis that does not compare similar things. Tracks used to cost a shit ton (I'm talking directly about Vinyl) because of the costs associated with producing them physically and distributing them. The economies of scale were not as readily as accessible as they are nowadays.

[Sigma]

When DJF is handing out their 2012 awards, mrkleen should win the "most humourless miserable bastard" category and it should be backdated to include every year since he joined.

[mrkleen]

When DJF is handing out their 2012 awards, mrkleen should win the "most humourless miserable bastard" category and it should be backdated to include every year since he joined.

And Sigma should win the "I gave up DJing in clubs because it is too hard to get gigs, but I still talk like I know WTF I am talking about" award. Would be a landslide.

[Sigma]

And Sigma should win the "I gave up DJing in clubs because it is too hard to get gigs, but I still talk like I know WTF I am talking about" award. Would be a landslide.

That isn't why I gave up gigging.

You are one humourless miserable shit though!

[propertrax]

The vinyl market is not shrinking. It is growing in both gross revenue and units sold. Although if you compare it to the overall music market, maybe it's portion of the whole pie is getting smaller.

Sigma's point is quite clear and correct. People put more value on a record than on a collection of MP3s or WAVs, otherwise I couldn't have sold over 1000 units in the last 14 months at $10-15 a pop. And you are less likely to find digital copies of vinyl-oriented music available online for free download, because those who buy it value it enough to not just hand it out for free, even when there are perfect digital copies available (Proper Trax, for example, provides direct download of MP3/WAV files of every 12" release, and despite moving as many or more units than many of our peers doing the digital thing, the rate of sharing has been low to non-existent. The same goes for many others involved in the contemporary dance music vinyl market, that are moving 500-1000+ units of each release. It can be really hard to find this stuff available to download for free, because the buyers value it more).

You can make money on digital distribution, but it often takes as much or more investment in promo and marketing as it costs to press 300 records that require very little marketing. I send a handful of digital promos to close, trusted DJs, and 10 or less white label promos to others. I do not pay for promo services like FATdrop, nor do I pay for digital distribution. About the only promo cost I have is shipping, and since most of my vinyl DJs are based domestically, that's a drop in the bucket.

As far as the value of digital goes, I see the high prices more as value added by the service providing the convenience rather than any sort of intrinsic value for the content. In that regard, it is quite overpriced, and worse, the labels/artists are lucky to see half of the revenue. Proper Trax offers digital-only as well, but with Bandcamp as the "distributor." The music is priced similarly to Beatport, meaning $13.37 for a digital EP with the option of lossless built-in. That's more than we sell the record for. But people pay us $13.37 at a steady clip for the digital-only, because they value the convenience. It's kind of weird to me, but I feel the music is best represented by the vinyl medium, so that's what I encourage (and if you spend the $10-11 for the record, you still get access to the lossless and mp3 downloads, too).

I strongly feel the most cutting-edge DJs are actively embracing all the formats, and do not turn their noses down at any particular medium. If you're digital-only, you're missing out on A LOT of excellent music that's only hitting vinyl. And if you're vinyl-only, you're missing out on quality music that didn't get any sort of physical release (although, to be fair, at this point the signal-to-noise ratio for digital is quite low, so you're probably not missing much...not to mention the exclusivity factory, which like it or not, is important to DJs...is non-existent in the digital market...that's why you see these limited releases of 500 records, if the music is any good, go for $50-100 on discogs a few months after the release...the DJs value the fact that every sync-jock in the world doesn't have access to the music).

It's really quite interesting to me, to see the self-policing aspect of the vinyl market, which is just another perk for the artists and labels. The biggest records are pirated, but usually from some knob that can't be bothered to properly rip the record in the first place, which just makes the pirates more likely to come to the "dark side" and fork over the phat loot on the mint wax they slept on.

With that said, the digital market is important in its own way, but the pricing factor is still in limbo. I look at it this way though, if you're a DJ and you're making some money off your craft, what is a one-time fee of $1.50 to help keep the artist employed? Personally, I'd rather pay for the record, because I see more value in it, but it doesn't make me feel justified in downloading the MP3s for free. Even if you make all MP3s 10 cents, is it going to stop the freeloaders from freeloading? I'd wager it just makes the situation worse by encouraging mass consumption, rather than focused selection. I know too many people that spend $50-100 per week on Beatport, only to admit that they play most of those tracks once or twice and never again. I don't feel my music is that disposable, and I price accordingly.

[Will MaXimal]

Beatport is a rip off!

I have tip for beatport - Charge the lowest amount for the track and how about a nominal fee each year to be a member. You collect a little money on the side for having the lossless stuff on file and dont break peoples banks every time they buy 10 - 20 tracks.

[Connor]

more reason to move to Audiojelly

Barely any hardcore on there, no thank you.

Don't think I'm being pompous at all, just going to clarify. I drive a 2010 Scion TC that was fully paid off in 2011, I can afford high end computer hardware at almost any time and have never really gone without anything in my life yet I find MP3 prices to be a bit ridiculous. I understand that the value of the USD is dropping and that some artists put effort into their work and deserve to be compensated if they decide to sell their music yet on TID paying $3.50 for an MP3 (more for the WAV) is absolutely absurd. What happened to $.99 tracks? Tracks seem to be getting more and more expensive every week. If it's a digital format it's effectively worth $0 as I can share a file on my computer to a hundred people instantly if I wish, can't quite do that with a vinyl record so why am I having to pay nearly $4 for a single song? To Sigma's "the CD costs less," not all CDs have free shipping so you might have had to pay $5-7 shipping on that CD although that's not always the case. It's a digital format, the only software I pay for are video games and music if you count music as software so why can I buy a CD which will sound better yet some 320 kbps MP3s will cost even more than that CD? Is it an instant download luxury tax or something?

[propertrax]

Is it an instant download luxury tax or something?

Why yes, yes it is.

What, do you really expect to get convenience, quality, and a low, low price?

No one seems to appreciate how easy it is to obtain music now. You could search high and low for those tracks on torrent sites, zero day blogs, or soulseek, only to end up with flaky quality at times. or you could just cough up the $1.50-2 and get it instantly.

Trackitdown sucks. $3.50, lol. Yeah, now that's a horrible deal. But if it's your only option...and the track is good enough...then I guess you're SOL. You're not entitled to free/cheap/easily available music. If the artist/label decides to take an approach you don't like, then don't buy it. I'm sure they weighed that possibility, but ultimately chose their path.