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Money, though, is at the heart of this story. When the Columbia recording company released its first batch of LPs in 1948, they cost $4.85 each. These were what marketing men would now call ‘premium products’. By comparison, when Decca started manufacturing record players for the new format in the UK a couple of years later, the cheapest one cost £9. Maybe it was a similar business model to Gillette’s: charge bugger-all for the razor, but make them pay through the nose for the blades. By the time I started buying albums in 1977, they were still relatively expensive: £3.99 was the going rate for a chart album in Our Price, which rose apparently arbitrarily overnight to £4.31 when the government of the day slapped VAT all over them. In the same year my Penguin paperback of P.G. Wodehouse’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen cost me 65p. A fiver for an album was normal in 1980, with cassettes about 50p cheaper. (And blank cassettes were much, much cheaper than that. I suspect that in every household where fortysomethings lurk, there is a cardboard box full of tapes of other people’s albums which you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away, even though you no longer have anything to play them on.)
Prices then leapt in the mid-1980s when CDs came in. The average CD cost £12 — roughly equivalent to £30 today. Once again the album had been repositioned as a premium product, even though CDs cost less than vinyl LPs to produce. My god, they made a lot of money. I have a friend who has been going to the same therapist for 15 years, and when she sits in her house for her weekly session she looks around and thinks, ‘I’ve paid for about a quarter of this.’ I feel the same towards record companies. How much cocaine have I inadvertently bought for their rising young executives? How many taxi journeys to gigs by awful up-and-coming bands for their half-witted A&R men?
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Andreas
August 5th, 2008 2:26pmWhy send some feinschmecker zombie to review a "sci-fi" movie when she obviously has decided beforehand?
Articles, even movie reviews, should be written for the readers not the critics.
laurie macdonell-sanchez
August 6th, 2008 4:16pmI HAVE TO BELIEVE that this movie was an embarrassing & implausible patchwork of a plot punctuated by moments of gratuitous grisliness & relentlessly stone-faced acting. In true Hollywood tradition, the Catholic Church acted as scapegoat with the meany-baddie being the "normal" hospital-administrator priest & the anti-hero being the semi-stigmatic but wholly stigmatized gay priest (actually not a garden variety pedophile based on his "history" as spat out by Scully). As for plopping Russians into the plot, I'm still trying to figure out to which segment of the viewing masses the screenwriters/ producers thought they were pandering. However, many of the former denizens of the Soviet Union who've made it in droves to Western shores haven't endeared themselves by turning their new-found "opportunity" into white slavery rings to supply strip clubs & brothels; hacking/ID theft; commercial fraud & vulgar shakedowns; plus a thriving world market in human organs. And yes, those grungy teeth were unfair. Soviet dentistry USED to mean steel teeth, front & back, for the unwashed masses, IF they were lucky. However, the highly mobile new "Russian" gazillionaires have been sporting pricey veneers for a couple of decades now.