Beck and James Lidell are skipping the District. Not that I mind too much, given that Lidell is not so great and tickets are sure to be hefty. Oh, plus I would have to deal with the city’s surplus of young professionals. To swipe from the ever observant Soviets, our corporate and federal comrades have exceeded their young professional quotas around here.
Also missing out on the stand-and-talk crowds of DC is Radiohead.
Okay, so we do not know when a tipping point will happen until after the fact, but I have seen a couple of stories recently of bands uniting to counter the RIAA’s handling of downloadable music.
A more informative post about the packaging costs lawsuit can be found in a subsequent post on the same site (Digital Music News). Here are the main issues, as copied and pasted from part of the post:
1) Sony pays royalties on only 85% of total sales of “phonorecords”. The 15% fee is for “breakage”. I.e. Sony and the artist have agreed to assume that 15% of the produced product will be unsaleable for damage during shipping, packing, and display. There is no shipping, packing or display in the conventional sense for digital downloads.
2) Sony deducts a 20% fee for “container/packaging charges”. Container and packaging charges aren’t associated with digital downloads.
3) [ Sony reduces ] “its payments by a further 50% “audiofile” deduction”. I’ve not been able to find any explanation of what this “audiofile” charge is.
I have a couple of RIAA posts in the hopper (as the bl-ids say).
I decided to subscribe to The Week* so I went online to place my order. I went with the 50 issues subscription but chose bill me later. The next page to display offered to give me eight bonus issues (making my subscription 58) for the same price if I would pay now with my credit card.
Should I always first choose the “Bill Me” option when ordering online? What have you experienced?
* The Week is great; it’s like The Economist’s smaller, poppier brother. They make excellent companions, well, at least before The Economist’s slide into not-so-hotness.