Indeed, if the world were actually fair, the difference would be more extreme Stephen King could charge 5 cents per copy and he'd be fine ($1.05 for the physical book, to recoup printing costs) Most indie artists could only be making a living wage if they charged $100+ per copy
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But the world, as I repeatedly get reminded, is not fair The price ceiling and floor here make it MASSIVELY unfair
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Bestsellers can keep on raking in "excess profit" at $9.99 a copy forever and become idle millionaires Indie creators can be massively in debt and still get someone who "loved" their movie and "wants them to succeed" be like "I'll pay full price for the DVD, that's $15 right"
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I think about this especially as a live theatre fan (and, formerly, performer) who is familiar with the sticker shock pretty much everyone gets when you try to get them to come to a show and they don't typically go to live theatre
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"$20 a ticket?! For a tiny independent community theatre production? That's as much as seeing Avengers Endgame on opening night! How much are your actors getting paid?!" They're getting paid nothing dude
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That's the price *floor* for live theatre, that's what you pay for a show that's only trying to recoup its expenses for rent and materials and a couple of full-time office employees, with all the talent being volunteers
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Live theatre that's actually run like a business where the actors are being paid something approximating a decent wage for their labor starts in the $50-100 range and goes up rapidly from there I'm sorry, but that's how much it actually costs
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The price can go down if you go to a very popular show in a big auditorium But since live theatre is not a movie and the labor cost of actually doing the show cannot be infinitely reproduced over thousands of screening rooms it cannot go below that $20 floor
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For most people who are used to watching movies this is just emotional sticker shock and they get over it For some people this really bothers them on a fundamental level Being upset that there are prices you can't drive toward zero is what they call "Baumol's cost disease"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I know people are cheap and like free stuff, but I place a lot of blame on the tech guys of the late ‘90s who argued all industries should be disrupted and stuff should be cheaper.
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Yes This is absolutely and totally Big Tech's fault The whole promise of businesses like Amazon is to try to create the Econ 101 abstraction of "perfect competition"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @pjrodriguez
Whatever price you charge, that piece of shit Jeff Bezos pops up a little recommendation "We found 22 sellers with a lower price in other states" in the corner The Wal-Mart philosophy juiced up with the full power of global search
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Replying to @arthur_affect @pjrodriguez
The word you really need to watch out for is "scalability" They love that word "How can we turn twenty people's job into one person's job for no additional money How can we generate tons of new value for free"
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