Subject URL: Thwart the System

Recently a bunch of System Of A Down demos were leaked to the internet. They're pretty much everywhere now... (from SilentUproar)

Well, in an effort to thwart bootleggers (and, no doubt, to give those System fans without high-speed internet access, filesharing know-how and CD burners -- yes, these people do exist -- access to the material), they're putting the tracks out on Steal This Album, to be released later this year...the CD will be packaged to look like a burned CD-R with no liner notes.

So... it'll look like a CDr and have no liner notes. So will it cost 50 cents then? Doubt it... but they're good for doing it anyway, much like the Pearl Jam bootleg series from last year (year before). Sure, it makes money, but at least they're making this stuff available.

SOAD could just put these MP3s on their website though now couldn't they?

Hmmmm :

• Price of a blank CD... $0.5
• Price of downloading ~50 Meg of MP3s and overhead file-sharing bandwidth ($60 a month for ADSL 1000Mb plan, $23 a month for phoneline)... (60+23*50/1000)... $4.15
• Time spent? A few minutes to set up downloads on file-sharing, half an hour to download, 10 minutes to set up and burn CD.

So for $5 you have pretty much the same thing (ignoring the extra demos they're putting on it).

The CD will most likely be $20. That's my guess.

And the equation above really does spit in the eye of record companies that want to charge >$1 a song for digital downloads. You get a whole album and you're looking at about $12 for the songs + about $5 for the CD you have to burn and the bandwidth costs. Why wouldn't you just go to JB and buy it for $20 and get liner notes and something you can actually use (or sell when you're done with it)?