Slashdot Mirror

Disclaimer: I'm currently finalizing a book for the Amazon store. Shameless linkwhore here.

This guy hit the nail right on the head. The reason the publishers are pushing for DRM is fear of piracy, but...

Bleck. First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.

Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.

DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.

Sounds like you haven't seen sales figures in the last 7 years. The record industry has set itself back more than 30 years by attacking its customers and anyone who tries to put their music into the public's ears.

http://www.azoz.com/topics/riaastats/index.html

Here you go, dipshit. for the record (no pun intended) I'm not the parent poster.

http://www.azoz.com/topics/labels/sony.html

That's exactly what's going on. By limiting the data to the SoundScan years (beginning in 1991), you're basically just looking at the end of the long tail. Add another decade and you can see how insignificant this is.

http://www.azoz.com/topics/riaastats/vinyl.html

Early 2000 I did a bit of research on the topic and found somewhere a document [...] that showed the RIAA's claim of loss of income to be fewer records released, not because people were downloading music for free

Is this what you're referring to?

If the defendant were not clearly guilty, the ruling might simply be overturned. In this case, with it pretty darned likely that she did do what did, the real case here is what kinds of limits should be set for recovering legal damages.

Agreed. If law said the sentence for drunk driving were 20 years, and you wanted to challenge the constitutionality of the long sentence, by definition the defendant would have to have driven drunk. That said, it would be possible to get a more sympathetic defendant in this case - maybe someone who unwittingly fileshared songs. e.g. They installed Kazaa, tried it briefly, and stopped using it not realizing it stayed active in the background sharing their legit MP3 collection (ripped from CDs they owned).

If they can't prove the actual losses, they should get 3x the value (or 5x or 10x, not 100000x).

Yeah, I can understand being awarded multiple times the value of the song. If she were penalized just 1x the cost of buying the songs (as some here have proposed), then you'd have nothing to lose by downloading. If you're caught, you only pay as much as if you'd bought it. If you're not caught, you get it for free. So clearly the penalty has to be more than the cost of just buying the songs.

But the award in this case works out to $1.9 mil / 24 songs = $79k per song. If you look at the RIAA's 2001 marketing stats, they made about $500,000 per new CD release. If you figure a CD averages 8 songs, that's only $60,000 in annual worldwide revenue per song in the first year as a new release. i.e. The award has her paying more per song than the average revenue the RIAA gets per new song in its first year. You don't even need to check if the award is "cruel or unusual punishment." You can tell it's way too high because it makes it a better business model to sue filesharers than to actually sell the songs on the market. The initial $220k award was possibly unconstitutional. The current $1.9 million award is insanity and would destroy capitalism if it stands.

Well, it's $80,000, not $18,000. However, I cannot possibly see even $100 per song as justified.

To put $80,000 per song in perspective, look at the RIAA's 2001 marketing stats (last year I could find figures for new releases). On average each new CD title brought in about $500,000 in revenue. If you figure conservatively 8 songs per CD, that works out to $62,500 per song.

In other words, the jury awarded more averages damages per song than if she'd prevented all copies of the song from ever being sold.

"people don't want CDs anymore, that's why the sales are declining"

This is incorrect.

It's actually "we release less new music, which is why sales are declining"

I'm begining to think that RIAA labels are releasing fewer and fewer albums because they've realized they can make more money with less effort through their litigation strategy.

The thing is reason #1 is already a very small percentage of musicians. 10% of CD's are profitable:

Another factor commonly overlooked in assessing CD prices is to assume that all CDs are equally profitable. In fact, the vast majority is never profitable. Each year, of the approximately 27,000 new releases that hit the market, the major labels release about 7,000 new CD titles and after production, recording, promotion and distribution costs, most never sell enough to recover these costs, let alone make a profit. In the end, less than 10% are profitable, and in effect, it's these recordings that finance all the rest.

On top of that, the percentage of musicians making much of a profit on music sales at all is so low that this hardly matters.

Further reading:
http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20030313214407/http://www.riaa.org/PR_STORY.CFM?ID=491

The whole concept of DRM is a joke, invented b/c lawmakers were unwilling or unable to draft legislation that properly dealt with online filesharing and piracy.

I vote unable - because enforcement is impossible. Even the RIAA's highly publicized campaign of sueage currently near the 40,000 suit market is just a drop in the bucket of well over 10million simultaneous users -- only 0.4% at best.

Of course I don't believe it is the politicians fault, its really the fault of the entertainment business for (a) being run by lawyers (the old every problem looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer situation) and (b) not accepting the obvious and ignoring new business models.

I would like to go beyond morely pointing out how bad this is and offer a more rational alternative.

http://www.azoz.com/newsarchive/2008dash03/RealPlan.html

Follow the "Discussion" link at the bottom of the page for a lengthy debate about the details.

http://www.azoz.com/music

If you create music, each one of the "boring minor skirmishes" is an important reminder that you should never let ownership of your songs fall into the hands of these vultures, lest they use it to sue children.

Better to give it away for free. http://www.azoz.com/music

it's about who has to pay SoundExchange either way, which is everyone unless they have a written contract from some entity granting them music.

No I'm not confusing the act of duplication with original creation. My point was that there did use to be value in the media itself, now there is not.

A fair point about the inflation but my original point still stands. The Music industry chose the path of digitization because it offered a premium over vinyl. In fact initial CD prices were closer to $20! (See http://www.azoz.com/riaa/pr/CDValueStudy2002.pdf ) when Vinyl was about $8. I'm not sure I would call the CD in "freefall" but you are right that it has decreased in real terms. Probably to the point of what Vinyl would be today which at the time of CD release was around the $8 mark. In real terms that would be close to $13 by now.

The thing is the price of creating digital music has been in freefall too. In 1983 virtually no one could digitally create a professional album in their home. Now almost anyone can create a DDD master with a PC or Mac!

No, these guys saw a chance to charge more for digital format and they took it. They let the genie out of the bottle and now want the law to protect them from this shortsightedness. It would be like displaying your content in the sky and expecting people not to look up unless they had paid. It's digital, it's virtually in the air.

Yes, thank goodness for Apple who has shown them that there is a better way, notice that the geniuses at the record companies want to change the pricing model for greater profits now.

This

message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creat

This

message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creat

This

message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creat

"Napster Helps RIAA Again; RIAA Still Ungrateful (Updated)"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/26/181221 3

"Napster Spurs CD Sales; Gets Sued Again Anyway"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/31/163720 2

"RIAA Almost Down To Pre-Napster Revenues"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/27/021325 2

"RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy"
http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html

"The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales, An Empirical Analysis"
http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf
which found:
"We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average
album in our sample. Moreover, the estimates are of rather modest size when compared
to the drastic reduction in sales in the music industry. At most, file sharing can explain a
tiny fraction of this decline. This result is plausible given that movies, software, and
video games are actively downloaded, and yet these industries have continued to grow
since the advent of file sharing."

So, yes, let's be real for more than a second.

Karma whore huh? I think that means my honor is at stake or something.

In any case, that was a while ago but I think the study is http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html and here is a more recent study http://www.nber.org/~confer/2004/URCs04/felix.pdf

The failed business model in question is the record companies' stranglehold on the music industry.

Few people seem to realize the hypocrisy of their sudden rush to "protect the rights of artists." (When did an "artist" become someone who makes music, not someone who paints? When did "musician" become a dirty word?) The biggest threat to those rights is, and always has been, the record companies themselves.

"The artist formerly known as Prince" didn't change his name to a weird symbol on a whim; he did it because before he was famous, a record company had gotten him to sign a contract so one-sided that they even owned his real-life name. (yes, it's Prince ... talk about child abuse) Going back a few years, the singers and songwriters of some of the real classics of modern music, especially (though far from exclusively) those who were not white males, were paid a pittance for their work that record companies made a fortune from. In court, the record companies have insisted time and again that $100 was more than fair compensation for all rights to a song that they made tens of millions of dollars off of.

Even today, most musicians see only a tiny fraction, if any, of the money from the sales of their CDs. They earn their money primarily from concerts. The money from that overpriced CD -- the one that sells for twice what a DVD of a movie that cost a hundred million dollars to film -- goes straight to the record company, and stays there.

The record companies have a lock on the distribution of music. Anyone can rent a studio and make a CD ... even me (William Hung move over!) ... but if they want to get it in the record stores and on the radio, they have to sell their soul to a record company.

That's why P2P scares the living shit out of the record companies. They know what the real numbers are, not the doctored ones they show Congress. They know that their serfs are deserting them for independant labels and self-distribution. They know that the massive consolidation of radio station ownership since Orrin Hatch and his buddies threw out rules that had preserved competition for decades and handed the market over to their supporter and propaganda wing Clear Channel is costing them a fortune in payola. And I'm sure they know that they're turning out endless streams of overpriced music that, fundamentally, sucks.

But they can't do anything about that. (except maybe the sucky music) They know they're dinosaurs. The know the industry has changed, and their chosen business model -- total control of production, distribution, and sales of music -- is going the way of a business model based on total control of buggy whips. So they're getting people like Orrin Hatch to pass laws to force the market to continue to support that model.

It isn't fans sharing music by the record companies' serfs that the companies fear ... they know, their public statements to the contrary, it isn't hurting their sales, and quite possibly either increasing them or offsetting what would be a greater decline. What leaves them terrified is the existance of a distribution channel that they don't and can't control which will free musicians from being serfs of the record companies in the first place. They fear a system that will allow musicans to keep on doing what they already do -- making their money off of concerts and other sources of revenue -- and not have to sign their lives and their rights over to any record company. They know a system which connects the producer and the consumer directly will have no place for parasites that have gotten fat from feeding off both ends of the line.

This is the sa

CD Sales were still rising in 1999 and 2000. IIRC, 2000 is their 'record year' for sales and profit which coincides nicely with the height of the Napster phenomenon. 2001 was the first year their sales dropped, and they then reported it as 'due to piracy'. 2001 interestingly saw only a 4.1% drop in sales revenue despite a 10.3% drop in units sold.

That's right, thanks to their price fixing they not only didn't drop prices to compete, they raised prices in a recession and then blamed piracy for their losses.

File-sharers after all, were a convenient boogeyman to keep investors from pushing for actual competition.

One wonders if they'll be pressured to keep up the attack on their scapegoat while their numbers continue to rise.

Here is the site I was looking at. Like I said, it was a quick search, so the source might be completely wrong. I'm at work, so I can't delve into it for a few hours.

Oops, wrong link - instead see RIAA statistics. Fact or fiction? and here.

CDs sell in vastly higher quantity than DVDs. See this article - in the second table it shows that in 2001, 906 million CDs shipped, compared with 7.9 million DVDs.

As for per-work shipments (how many copies of a given CD vs. how many copies of a given DVD), that's harder to find. Anybody got a good source of data on this?

Bullshit. CD sales drop do appear to match the economy, the correlation isn't right to blame sharing, their own numbers suggest the drop in CD sales is better attributed to CD prices, reduced production (and here), organized crime, and a bunch of other reasons. All of these analyses suggest CD sales losses are not due to filesharing.

So, I'm not sure where you're coming from with your "apparently quite rare" statment. The evidence shows otherwise.

Well, despite you anecdotal evidence, better evidence suggest that downloaders do indeed increase sales. So in short, you're just wrong.

This is also a straw man for a couple of reasons: first, CD sales are hurting, so any "benefit" to the industry or artists is being swallowed up

Wrong. You are assuming loss of CD sales is due to filesharing. As the above linked evidence shows, that's not true. In fact, following this one (and there are others), CD sales might be even worse without the gain from the "try before you buy" effect of filesharing.

Additionally, almost any illegal act, civil or criminal, has a "well, it COULD have a beneficial side effect" argument.

Except that this illegal act is illegal for the reason that it is assumed to harm sales, which the evidence above doesn't support. If it's not harmful, there's no need for it to be illegal. (I'm not advocating making it legal, but a different model is at least necessary.) Whatever other acts you are referring to are illegal for the harm the do cause. (If they don't, then perhaps they shouldn't be illegal either.) Also, the point is that the industry seems to be missing the concept (and evidence), that filesharing can be (or perhaps is) >helpful to them.

... if the goal is to feel better about what you're doing

You are making yet another assumption, that I am illegally downloading songs. In fact, I have never illegally downloaded a single song. I have nothing personal to rationalize. I am simply someone cursed with a love for logic and reason, not blind reactionism.

RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes

Sorry the link didn't come through, here it is. Note that there are several follow-up articles to this December 2002 piece.

A quick attempt to dig up RIAA sales figures, of course, came up with a whole lot of contradictory information. So like any good researcher, I picked the one that best supported my argument. :D According to this article the total dollar value of CDs sold (or maybe just CDs shipped, not sure) is somewhere in the area of $14 billion.

Now then there are, according to reports, 57 million people using file-sharing services. Let's create a compulsary licensing scheme, wherein everyone who uses file-sharing services ponies up $20 for unlimited downloads.

Yes, only $20. The approximate price of ONE CD. Seems unreasonably low, no? And let's just take the unreasonable assumption that every one of those 57 million agrees to pay the fee. (but then again, it's so low a large number of them will, AND it will likely attract users who avoided P2P because of the notoriety and\or piracy issues)

So then... $20x12 months is $240. And $240 x 57 million is... $13.6 Billion Dollars.

So by going to a licensing scheme that is ONLY $20 a month per user, the industry can make nearly as much money as it did before. And that's not to say that file sharing will 100% replace physical albums - I expect they will continue to do brisk sales in those as well, since people will still want a professionally pressed hard copy, liner notes, CD-ROM extras, whatever. And I personally find it unimaginable that, in the short term, the value of CDs sold would drop 93% to under $1 billion dollars. In other words, they would quite probably make MORE money doing this.

Just something to think about.

It's also not true that you can copy a DVD without decrypting it first. DVDs contain data in special regions of the disc that are placed there at manufacture time. DVD burners generally cannot alter what is put there.

But there's no possibility that the MPAA could be double-dealing pirate product to boost their income, right? Right??

The usually quoted article about the record industry's stats show they've reduced the number of new releases substantially, and only suffered slightly on revenues in the process. Add the sagging economy and the shifting tastes of their primary market (more interest in gaming, CD cost vs. DVD), and their apparent problems are almost entirely of their own making. The industry's focus on heavy marketing of a handful of artists causes problems when the teens lose interest, i.e. boy bands and This Month's Cute Chick (Brittany/Christina/Avril/???). Blaming the resounding thud of their marketing failures on Those Meddlesome Kids and their file-sharing absolves them of blame. Their promotion tactics are failing in the face of media consolidation; the radio conglomerates are happy to take their dough, then tell THEM what sort of music they want to play. The fact the recording companies are pushing for a cut of concert revenues shows they're aware their business model is breaking and they need to look elsewhere for their ongoing bloated paychecks.

take the percentage loss of sales in the past two years and compare it to the loss of sales for movie tickets, vacations, amusement parks, and other recreational spending

It's even more simple than that - take a look at this article, where the RIAA's numbers get

Basically, in 2001 they released 20% fewer CD titles than in 2000, and sales dropped 20%. Go figure.

Piracy hurting sales in the magnitude that it's claimed to be is a myth.

Look around here and try to find the charts that George Ziemann has made. The RIAA doesn't know all of the numbers.

Besides, when you put out less product to sell, and redundantly play the same stuff on radio, while having a bad economy, all the while the consumer has the choice to more accurately decide on what they want to purchase (previewing before buying), yes, sales are going to be down.

Before the whole napster incident, CD sales were on the rise. Then napster was attacked. Every day more and more people are brought to awareness that the RIAA is full of fucktards. People who are informed on the topic just probably don't feel like supporting the RIAA. Instead of not buying their favorite bands CD's, they probably figure they'll better support the band by going to a concert.

Chew on that for a bit. While the RIAA scapegoats just one specific area, they ignore all the others that would help to cause a decline.

Concert revenues are up because that's one of the few ways left to support your favorite artists without the RIAA getting any money.

Make sense?

No, its not obvious. If you run the numbers, you could make a case that major record labels are selling more... they are putting out less albums, and their sales declined at a slower rate than the number of products (See here).

The flip side of the everybody "stealing" music coin, is that people are waaay more into music. So maybe the average person used to buy 5 CDs a year and copy 5 from their friends. Now, they may copy 50 off the internet and buy 10. While this is a drop from buying 50% of their albums to 15%, their actual purchases doubled. To demand that they actually buy the other 50 will NOT result in 50 more sales; it will result in a drop of 5.

Think about it... if all you heard was the music on the radio would you buy ANY cds?

The combined companies that make up the RIAA have released fewer new tiles. See the BusinessWeek article and this article by George Ziemann of MacWizards Music

If I understand basic accounting correctly, then releasing 20% fewer new titles should reduce expenses somwhat (admittedly not by quite 20%), so suffering only a 7% drop in sales should look like an increase in profits, unless you are expiriencing losses other than in sales.

I have learned of much of the new music I listen to through CDBaby.com and I'm sure that the RIAA companies are not very happy about losing customers to artists that don't care much for the typical record company contract.

It seems the companies are once again not being quite honest about thier losses, the causes, and, it seems, thier motives.

The combined companies that make up the RIAA have released fewer new tiles. See the BusinessWeek article and this article by George Ziemann of MacWizards Music

If I understand basic accounting correctly, then releasing 20% fewer new titles should reduce expenses somwhat (admittedly not by quite 20%), so suffering only a 7% drop in sales should look like an increase in profits, unless you are expiriencing losses other than in sales.

I have learned of much of the new music I listen to through CDBaby.com and I'm sure that the RIAA companies are not very happy about losing customers to artists that don't care much for the typical record company contract.

It seems the companies are once again not being quite honest about thier losses, the causes, and, it seems, thier motives.

The combined companies that make up the RIAA have released fewer new tiles. See the BusinessWeek article and this article by George Ziemann of MacWizards Music

If I understand basic accounting correctly, then releasing 20% fewer new titles should reduce expenses somwhat (admittedly not by quite 20%), so suffering only a 7% drop in sales should look like an increase in profits, unless you are expiriencing losses other than in sales.

I have learned of much of the new music I listen to through CDBaby.com and I'm sure that the RIAA companies are not very happy about losing customers to artists that don't care much for the typical record company contract.

It seems the companies are once again not being quite honest about thier losses, the causes, and, it seems, thier motives.

They don't need to prove their losses compared to an alternative scenario. There's a fundamental misconception there.

1) You think this is a victimless crime. That by stealing this song, and claiming that you would never have downloaded it had you had to pay for it, nobody has lost any money, and therefore that makes it Ok for you to download this song, listen to it and share it with anyone else who wants to download it.

Well you know what, I'd use Linux if I had to pay for Windows, and since that's true I can go download Windows and use that instead, because since I'm not willing to pay for Windows, I can have it for free.

If you want something someone else has produced, and the benefits that go along with possession of that item/good/service, you pay for it. If you don't pay, you don't get those benefits, because you don't get to own it.

2. Of course there are losses. Every time a song is downloaded, they are owed money, and if that money is not paid, that's a loss.

I don't like the way the music industry is set up these days - it doesn't give me the breadth of music I want and it doesn't support the types of artist that I like. I don't have anything against filesharing networks per se either, they're a cool innovative technology. But people obtaining copyrighted works without paying for them undermines some of the most basic principles the economy is based on: principles that promote development, innovation, creativity and design, and that encourage people to create valuable intellectual property in the first place.

It's criminal and I think the people that do it should be sued.

Filesharing of copyrighted digital property puts the choice of what to pay entirely in the consumers hands, and when you do that, people will pay nothing.

Is not! Is so! IS NOT! IS SO!

If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.

My numbers:
In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright

The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keeping in print, or the rights owner has died and no one knows who has the power to grant permission, or a thousand different reasons, all of which keep the work "frozen", even if someone wants to do something with it as a labor of love, or perhaps in a niche market that doesn't interest the rights holder.

Keep in mind that, for the vast majority of works, the slope of the sales curve is initially very steep; 80% of a typical paperback title's copies are sold in the first 3 months (source). Or consider music; for the last few years there have been about 25,000 to 35,000 new titles released each year, of these about 7,000 are released on major labels, and of those only about 10% are profitable (source). We can safely assume that the unprofitable titles go out of print. A small percentage are re-issued by indie labels, but again, the majority of titles end up in the vault, waiting for copyright to expire, useful to no one.

Royalties are not paid to the artist. The artist pays for airplay. At least that's the way this reads: Don Henley's Testominial.

Ciao!

At the same time, I believe that it's precisely the fact that record companies are releasing fewer new albums that leads me to other means to acquire new music.

The article is a good read, though, at least because he uses lots of expletives in an attempt to justify his conclusions.

-c

There is a convincing piece by Damien Cave on Salon.com titled "File Sharing: Innocent Until Proven Guilty" which argues that there is no proven correlation between downloaded music and the decline in CD sales. He continues to argue in "File Sharing: Guilty As Charged?" that a good deal of the 'sky is falling' rhetoric created by the record companies and the RIAA is based on supposition and self-interest. In addition, the article "RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up To Piracy" analyzes the RIAA's own statistics and argues that they do not support the RIAA's conclusion that downloaded music is the cause for the decline in CD sales. In this detailed analysis, George Ziemann argues that the record industry released 11,900 fewer titles in 2000 than it released in 1999, a 25% decrease, yet the total number of units shipped decreased only 10.3% and the dollar value of these units fell by only 4.1%. It seems that the RIAA is misinterpreting its own statistics.

Also, the record companies just settled a price fixing suit in which they admitted they were overcharging consumers. This point seems to be overlooked by the RIAA in its attempt to place all blame for the woes of the music business at the feet of mp3's. Is it possible that the decrease in CD sales is related to the conspiracy by the major record labels to inflate prices?

You must be new here.

The submitter just assumed you've kept up with the recent revelations that sales PER ALBUM increased. The losses are a direct result of the companies releasing less albums.

If such a low percentage or their roster have a tough time selling one million copies, this should be a clue to put more effort into finding better talent.

The RIAA's bottleneck with respect to talent is called "Sturgeon's Law", which states that "ninety percent of everything is crud." I'd go further and apply Sturgeon's Law twice to performing musicians seeking a recording contract: fewer than 10 percent of artists are not-crud enough to land a record deal, and fewer than 10 percent of those are not-crud enough to move enough units to recoup costs.

Not every record published will sell a million copies. Labels published about 27,000 new recordings in 2001. Compare with 906.6 million CDs shipped, and the mean album in 2001 sold only about 33,600 units.

Though not all americans have musical talent, there are still 250 million americans and only 100 slots on the Billboard pop chart. What are your odds of making it big?

And once again it's time to trot out last month's exciting story in The Register, Missing RIAA figures shoot down "piracy" canard, which was based on RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy by George Ziemann

Karma whoring or redundantly informative? You decide!

Actually according to this article on The Register; the decrease in CD sales are due in part to a drop in the number of released albums. From 38.900 in '99 to 27.000 in '01. Interestingly if the Record Companies had released these 12.000 extra albums then each of these would only have needed to sell 3.000 copies for the growth in sales to have continued.

The orginal article can be found here If you want to analyse the figures yourself.

Here you go: Missing RIAA figures shoot down "piracy" canard, which is based in turn on RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy by George Ziemann

I submitted this very interesting piece yesterday but it was rejected.

• That photo on the main page this article links to is the same one that George Ziemann has on his site from the Ebay Vs. Musician article earlier.
  
  I don't see any indication that this is supposed to be his server room. So who's lying?

is going on here. That photo on the main page this article links to is the same one that George Ziemann has on his site from the Ebay Vs. Musician article earlier.

I don't see any indication that this is supposed to be his server room. So who's lying?

I didn't see auctions for Eminem, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Doors, and Queen. I followed this link from his page.