Would people here be as enthusiastic if the only way to get paid for writing an app was to sit down and type it out in front of each customer?
I am not arguing that musicians should not make money, far from it. I am merely saying that any business model that relies on "pretending Internet/Technology cannot do this" is flawed, no matter how many laws and regulations you throw at it.
Technology can be very disruptive for some businesses. The 'backspace' button on your keyboard cost a lot of typists their jobs. Machines are driving cinema clerks out of jobs and fridges make ice-hunting obsolete (there was an article featured here on HN about a guy whose job is to get ice off the mountain and distribute it to villages).
To answer your question: I don't know about people here, but if it were up to me, programmers should be held to similar standards I suggest for musicians.
Or figure out another way to make money aside from working for a company and selling products. Since you don't like the app store, you should exclude that from your possible sources of income as well.
I've lost track of the music business, but have they even moved past the "making it difficult for people to buy music digitally and randomly suing young music fans while cheating the musicians" stage yet? Maybe they should try just selling music online directly from artist to fan for a while (and sack anyone who's no longer contributing materially to that goal) before moving on to the giving it away for free stage.
An app store for musicians I think is a fantastic idea and I don't understand the babarock's distaste for that. It seems some people are just opposed to any way of profiting from digital creative work whatsoever (although conveniently their personal source of income always seems to be ok). I find it hypocritical. It is very, very difficult to be a musician for all but the hugely successful.
I read something about the RIAA having stopped their lawsuit strategy http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/riaa-bump/. I don't know if that's actually true or not.
If you are into mainstream music perhaps, but if you are in the United States and like music from a Dutch group you won't find it on iTunes in the US music store, it will be in the Dutch iTunes store. But you can't purchase the music from the Dutch iTunes store because it requires a Dutch iTunes account.
There are so many times now that I have looked for legal ways to purchase music, particularly music from Europe (where I am from) where the techno/trance/electronic scene is so much bigger and I just can't get it legally. I start searching for various different websites that might sell it to me and there are restrictions because I am in the US. Then I try to find it on Amazon or other sites and get physical copies and I end up on shady looking websites where I am not even sure I want to enter my credit card credentials.
I feel much more secure grabbing a .magnet link from The Pirate Bay than I feel inputting my personal information on various different websites while hunting for the music I want. The worst is when you follow a "Download here" or "Purchase here" link and you end up on yet another website that sends you to yet another website and so on and so forth.
These days pirating simply isn't an option for me due to my job, and I don't like to do it, so I find the music on Grooveshark, or Spotify or hope that it comes by on Pandora again, until the next time when I am in The Netherlands and I can walk into a record store and purchase the stuff on a CD.
I apologize if I'm projecting an attitude into your comments that's not there, I may be reacting to a general trend and not your comment specifically.
People implicitly (or explicitly) believe that changing this behavior will cause them to fail, but the main point isn't about their failing. In fact, the best outcome would be the label's succeeding despite giving up on the current business model.
How are they trying to create this artificial scarcity? Many if not all the major labels have a lot of their artists music available via digital formats like iTunes and Amazon, etc. They just have the crazy idea that if you want to listen to their artists music whether it be via a CD, 12" or MP3 that you should pay them for it.
Secondly, it's artificial because they're leveraging the government to enforce it. If they took no action, there would be no scarcity. Therefore it is artificial.
Contrast this with, say, physical goods: even if the manufacturer does nothing about limiting the distribution of whatever you purchased, it would still be scarce because making copies requires significant resources.
Fundamentally, economics is about managing scarcity. The main reason you pay for some resource is because it is scarce. So their "crazy idea" is exactly that: creating scarcity.
Without these restrictions you would be able to make an effective unbounded number of copies because each copy has a resource cost of basically zero--there would be no scarcity. With these restrictions, you can only make as many copies as the labels allow you to, which means the number of copies is bounded.
I should note that this is orthogonal to whether you think they are justified in seeking to be paid for their songs: in either case, they ensure being paid by making the songs more scarce using copyright.
A. High demand, low supply raises prices. If I reduce the supply, I can increase the price (up to a certain limit).
B. Music has high demand. Music labels have controlled supply for years, giving us the "normal" pricing for CDs.
C. With the Internet, the incremental supply costs go to zero. Supply is also infinite (anybody can create a copy), so the price drops to zero.
D. The only way to keep the price above zero is to create a scarcity that doesn't actually exist. The labels have done this by fighting putting anything online, suing people who copy files, getting the government to criminally try a class of people who copy and using DRM to prevent copying. The whole goal of all of this is to introduce a scarcity into the product so people will pay.
tikhonj then attempted to clarify what she or he meant, but rather than explaining that your interpretation, while reasonable, was different from what was meant, just went ahead and explained the economics definition of "scarcity". Based on this later reply, you appear to have read that as tikhonj disagreeing with you on what scarcity is, rather than clarifying what she or he meant. Your reply at the time "I still don't see how", however, doesn't make this clear at all.
Now, SoftwareMaven and tikhonj both interpret your reply as you not seeing how the music industry has, in fact, created "scarcity", in the technical sense, and proceed to reason through exactly how the actions of the music labels resulted in a phenomenon that satisfies the technical definition of "scarcity".
Isn't it amusing when humans try to communicate?
This is not hard to understand. You may choose not to understand it, but you're playing a game with yourself that the rest of us are not obligated to accept.
If I build an app and sell it for a $1 and someone purchases it for that amount and then makes a copy for his friend I have simply missed out on revenue, but my time wasn't stolen nor was my app.
You are arguing that nothing digital should ever be sold.
I disagree, and would assert that information does not magically lose its value because of the support medium being easy to copy. Just because you can copy information easily, has no bearing on whether you should. Society has rules to enforce not copying the intellectual labour of others, and has done since ideas could be copied easily on bits of paper.
Nowdays, it's even easier for software guys to say that MP3s and so on should be free when the dominant modes of end-user software delivery are restricted somehow (with the exception of business software, but businesses are easy to sue). It's not their information that wants to be free, just someone else's.
All the best developer tools (Linux, Emacs, compilers...) are entirely free. They even go beyond simply being free to access--you are free to do whatever you want with them, and, moreover, there are guarantees for a lot that nobody can take that freedom away.
It is completely reasonable to basically only use free software. The only non-free software I have at the moment is probably Flash, and that's becoming increasingly less needed every day. Additionally, a lot of programmers get paid to work on open source already--even my current internship involves writing open source software. Additionally, a lot of developers work on software that does not get distributed as a product--they're being paid to solve a problem for some business rather than being paid for a copy of some software they wrote.
So really, the reason it's easy for developers to ask this is because it works for us already.
There's nothing wrong with paying for stuff that you want. There is something wrong in stealing (okay, pirating) stuff you want for free. I don't understand why this is controversial, and I do not believe in a fantasy world where everything is free. Ever since there was civilization, there's been no free lunch.
(My comment made more sense before the parent was edited)
ummm, here maybe? - http://www.arcemu.org/about.php
If you want to know how much money an artist makes from selling a CD in a supermarket, you can find a large number of handwavy blog posts, but the conclusion is consistently "probably not a lot, but depends on what they could negotiate".
If you want to know what an app developer makes from selling a $0.99 app? The answer is $0.70.
I think that makes a lot of difference in trust in the channel from both sides of the table.
Independent music on Itunes, for example, has a fixed royalty. From what I gather, a 0.99 song has the same 0.70 royalty you're talking about for apps.
The CD example you're talking about is more like boxed software, which suffers from the same transparency issues.
The big difference between the two are that store shelf music is basically the same product as downloaded music. Unlike apps, which are on different devices, serve different purposes, and have a very different price point than boxed software.
While music is routinely pirated (and this action sanctioned in many communities), apps aren't (and it's not because of jailing - this is also true for Android apps). While I'm sure pirated apps are available, I've just never come across them, it's nowhere nearly as conspicuous as pirated music.
The consulting model works for some software, but not all. (obviously, there are people who disagree and think it can.) it seems like a mistake to take a model that works for some software and decide it will work for all music.
Sounds like the music business does have a lot in common with app stores.
I left it out because I'm not 100% confident that there's solid economic theory to back it up, but it's strange that my gut instinct is 180 degrees from yours, where you welcome the lottery aspect of the market.
You have music pouring out of every speaker on earth. Its kind of hard to ask for money for that. Its like selling sand in Sahara.
I can honestly tell you that if all the record companies would die over night, I wouldnt even care one bit. The artists would find other ways to get together and put out their music, and without getting screwed.
EDIT: my point is don't complain that people aren't buying your product if you're charging them a price that's waaay above market value
25 cents, really? That's what a second rate pickle costs. A lifetime of enjoyment is only worth a bite of a pickle? I happen to think music is way undervalued, because people just aren't very good at evaluating the long term value of it.
Now wait a minute there. What about an eBook? What about a movie or TV episode?
If Angry Birds for $1.99 is the price standard for everything, you're setting up a trap that most everything is going to fall into.
I've tried Angry Birds on demo tablets in stores -- and countless YouTube videos demoing tablets -- and I don't see the appeal. Even free, I wouldn't want it. Most games simply don't appeal to me. I'd rather read or listen to music or watch video.
Angry Birds might be worth $1.99 to you, but to me it has negative value.
And added what to human productivity and betterment? Never use money as a measure for anything except money.