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One year ago, we ran a story about the effects of Napster on the RIAA's 1999 profits, which Michael gave the great title: "Pirates Steal Negative $1,400,000,000 from Music Industry." It's a year later, the new numbers are out, and the RIAA is lying through their pointy little teeth about them. The AP wire story's second paragraph says "Sales of music compact discs fell by 39% last year," which they would have quickly seen was a blatant lie if they'd bothered to look at the numbers. Fortunately, Slashdot is here to bust up the spin. Keep reading, if you aren't afraid of numbers.

(Update one hour later by J : The story was on the AP wire, e.g. here, so it's not the BBC's fault. It was unfair of me to single out the Beeb when they just happened to be the source the submittor submitted this morning.)

The RIAA's figures were released last week, but the AP story was delayed until Monday, when the story would get the most exposure.

CD sales plummeted last year in the U.S. and record industry officials say the figures prove that Napster, the Internet music-sharing service, has harmed their business.

Sales of music compact discs fell by 39% last year according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

"Napster hurt record sales," said RIAA president Hilary Rosen.

This article reads like it might have been ghost-written by someone from the record industry. It isn't until paragraph ten that journalistic integrity kicks in enough for the AP to quietly mention what they're actually talking about:

Some experts say [sic] the drop of CD singles as being part of an industry-wide slump, due to economic factors and a weak year musically. (Emphasis mine.)

That's right, CD singles. Unit sales for the singles were down 39%, revenue down 36% (they raised prices, of course).

And CD singles account for how much of the RIAA's profits?

Not quite one percent.

Yes, that's right: they lost 36% of 1% of their profits.

And the news media is reporting it as a 39% loss.

The facts are that their "CD sales" are up this year, even over last year's stunning performance. The RIAA increased the average price of a full-length CD from $13.65 to $14.02, and still managed to sell 3,600,000 more of them.

Total profit increase on this, the core of their business, was 3.1%, or just shy of an extra $400,000,000.

But full-length CDs only account for 92% of the RIAA's revenue. They did have weak performance in the other 8%. CD singles, as already noted, dropped revenue by 36%. But the real casualty percentage-wise was cassingles, which lost over 90% of its revenue from last year.

Gee, why could that be? Maybe because nobody wants them?

In fact, the RIAA's only real money-losing format of any significance was cassettes, which, along with music videos, were the only format actually cut in price. Cassette revenue dropped $436 million.

Wait a minute, what am I saying? "Money-losing"? They aren't losing money on cassettes -- they're just not raking it in this year as fast as last year. And gee, why might that be? Again, because nobody wants them?

And it's not like the RIAA is struggling to get by on slim profits. The big picture is that, in the last nine years, they have tripled their annual income.

But they are desperate to spin this as a loss. The actual fact is that their total revenue is down 1.8% from 1999. Last year, they made $14,584,500,000. This year, they made $14,323,000,000.

But how could they blame Napster if they told the truth? What would they say? "Napster is killing us! Our income is down almost two whole percent! We are only pulling in $14,323,000,000 this year!"

That probably wouldn't fly.

Especially because in the three categories which Napster has precisely zero effect on -- cassettes, vinyl, and music videos -- their combined year-to-year loss was $579.5 million.

That's right. In the digital formats which Napster can trade, they are making more money: $318,500,000 more revenue. In the analog and video formats where Napster is irrelevant, they are making less money: $579,500,000 less revenue.

That's the real story here.

But don't trust the press to report this one fairly. Don't trust the RIAA's press release. Go read the RIAA's numbers yourself.

(Hell, don't even trust those numbers -- they don't add up. I was silly enough to type them into a spreadsheet, and someone over there has some problems doing simple arithmetic. Their 1998 total revenue includes the DVDs twice.)

The RIAA is desperately trying to spin this so that they won't look like greedy bastards for turning down Napster's offer of a billion dollars over the next five years.

If they just took that generous offer, then -- in a year that the AP wire suggests might be an "industry-wide slump, due to economic factors and a weak year musically," and in a year for which Bertlesmann admits "we didn't put that much good stuff out" -- their revenue would only be down $111,000,000 from last year. And that would have been $750,000,000 more than they made in 1998.

But that isn't enough for them.

Why would anyone think the RIAA is greedy? They just want what's coming to them.

(Update one hour later by J : Mea culpa. Three paragraphs up, I originally calculated the numbers as if the billion dollars was all applied in one year; that isn't so. The billion would have been applied equally over the next five years. Actually it probably wouldn't have been applied to year-2000 revenue at all, so it's more of a rhetorical point than anything. Thanks to dachshund for pointing out that it wasn't a lump-sum payment.)

(Update four hours later by J : The AP wire seems to have updated its story, now stating explicitly that it's CD singles, not "CDs," which dropped 39%. I see factually correct versions now at CNN, Salon, Yahoo, and wire.ap.org (search on Napster). The BBC version is still incorrect. In my opinion, the new versions are still misleading. Focusing on a large percentage drop within a subcategory which is a tiny percentage of the whole is a classic example of how to lie with statistics. But compare this to the RIAA's press release, claiming that CD singles had "flat growth in '98 and '99," though 1998 revenue actually dropped 22% -- that's just plain lying.)

More information below -- for your edification and amusement -- on black holes (if they exist), Napster (a happy outcome for once), comparitive computer languages (after Chris Rijk's Java / C comparison) and more. Even a (gasp) positive statement about Microsoft. Hope you enjoy it.

What goes up must go SPLOOSH. Detritus writes: "The BBC is reporting that GRO has reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific ocean, as predicted." So just what is the space equivalent of Davy Jones' Locker?

Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, Esperanto. After many spirited comments regarding Chris Rijk's Java / C shootout, Nilsson writes: "John Pierce has done some interesting language performance tests. Instead of benchmarking how a problem can be solved in the fastest possible way he tries to benchmark how an average programmer would have solved the problem in various languages. C, Awk, Java, Perl, Pike and Tcl are tested. You can probably start religious wars with this document." Tools for the job, tools for the job ...

Just like an after-school special. Landaras writes "NYC pointed out in a thread that The Offspring and Napster have reached a very amicable settlement over the whole t-shirt issue link Since you clarified that Napster wasn't suing (it was a cease and decist) you might want to again clarify that the cease and decist has been dropped. In fact, Napster is now helping The Offspring create new products." Writing in with more detail, mishaco pointed out this link to an NME story noting that " Napster have now backed down, allowing the band to sell the material, but only if the proceeds are donated to charity."

If it exists, it blows. Which doesn't suck, necessarily. dthor writes: "The Hubble Space Telescope finds more freaks of space: a black hole that's been switched from suck to blow. Apparently, a black hole in the Virgo cluster has begun to emit largish bubbles of colourful nebula gas (or rather...began to emit hundreds of years ago, but CNN is just now catching up). Read the article, complete with an "interactive" Anatomy of a Black Hole (the regular sucking kind). Neato." [Updated 8 June 12:05GMT by timothy] Note that, as readers like daVinci1980 point out below, this is entirely consistent with current black hole theory and observations. There's not really a "suck / blow" switch on black holes' control panels. That we know of.

How the suits saw it. Duncan Lawie penned -- err, "tapped" -- his account of the UK Linux Expo 2000 in London, and it was at least partly about code, distributions and drinking beer. On the other side of the aisle, meanwhile ... Xolution writes "There's a small article on CNN.com about Linux starting to come into the mainstream."

Out of the goodness of their 8-chambered hearts? Kaufmann writes: "Bruce reports: they've received email from a MS product manager, promising to fix the Interix GPL violation (recently reported on Slashdot as well). That's a relief." Nice to hear; thanks for Bruce and company for the sharp eye and persistence.

richj writes "It looks like MTV's dropping 6 of their minions into a bunker in case the human race is wiped out on New Year's. Imagine having MTV's "chosen" as the group to keep the human race alive? Shudder... Story here."

Christopher Sypal writes "I just found out that MTV is going to have a special this Wednesday (10pm eastern) called 'True Life: I'm a Hacker'. Looks exactly like what you would expect from an MTV show with 'hacker' in the title." If MTV wants to put *real* (and funny) hackers on the air, they ought to send a camera crew to the (highly photogenic) Geek Compound and do a show on Cmdr Taco and Hemos. Perhaps we should all write to mtvdart@aol.com and tell them so, eh?

Monday we got lots of questions (and rude comments) for Abe Ingersoll, the self-described "punk hacker kid" who was on MTV's Road Rules last year. Today, well after the agreed-upon (Thursday evening) deadline, we got his answers, which he apparently ran by "his editor" before he finally sent them to us - in Word .doc format. Mmmm. The full Q&A session appears below.

Bucko asks:
I read the Salon article, and it wasn't exactly kind to you. Do you think it was fair or a hatchet job?

Abe answers:
Hatchet job, no. Contorted, yes.

The article was written about four months ago and was passed around between a couple different media outlets before it was finally published on Salon. When I consider how many editors it went through, I can't be too disappointed with the final product.

The hatchet job was the "hacker" verbiage! EVERY single chance I got during the interviews I would correct the writer's inclination to use misuse of the term. "It's cracker. CRACKER! CRACKED! CRACKER! Please don't use 'hacker' or I'll look like an idiot." Back when I filled out "punk hacker kid" on my written Road Rules application I had wanted to sound cool to the technology illiterate casting team. My bad. I've since learned that 'dropping the term', even off-handedly, is painfully equivalent to 'dropping the soap' in flame hell.

GuySmiley asks:
Why does MTV suck so hard?

Abe answers:
I plead the 5th.

antizeus asks:
Do you see fragmentation in the Linux distribution market to be a good, bad, or neutral thing? Do you think that the"media frenzy" over Linux tends to harm other worthy OS projects like the BSDs and BeOS? Do you think that big business's entry into the Linux market will change the gift-culture aspects of Linux, or will the businesses in question adapt to Linux? Or both? What do you think is in store for humanity in terms of relations between governments, businesses, and individuals? Do you think that we should actively pursue colonization of other planets in our star system at this time, and if not, then when?

Abe answers:
You'll feel better if you take the long view.

Your questions all tie together and fit the theme of "ask Abe" well. One part traveling with peers in Mexico plus two parts juvenile conflict and one part media distortion equals "The Bad Guy"? I digress, yet according to MTV it does. But the media is like a big baby with an infant's attention deficit disorder - it focuses and probably tries to destroy one thing at a time; soon enough it moves on. The role of "big business" is less predictable but I think in the end likely to prove less damaging. For one thing, "big business" isn't as big as it once was; there's lots of money to throw around, sure, but success (a la Silicon Valley housing prices) ultimately leads to failure. Yin to yang.

So right now, maybe the earliest contributors to Linux are thinking about cashing inwives and kids and mortgages can do that to you. But behind them are more young coders who will keep the phenomenon of widely-shared free OS alive. That old joke about Microsoft and the Catholic church isn't really all that funny, but Martin Luther came along. And then when the Lutheran church got fat and dull with official state sponsorship, new generations advocating a kinder, simpler (and less expensive) church came along. Same with operating software, only in a time frame of months, not centuries. The process of creative destruction is inevitable.

True also for our human self-organization. After a few hundred years, we're in a period of decline for the nation-state. Borders are permeable (or fundamentally useless) in the "computer age." I don't know if your question comes from Peoria or Paris and it doesn't matter. There's still fear and a great respect for unimportant divisions among humanity, but there are many hopeful signs that that is changing. Even in a forum like this we tend to challenge each other's ideas without reference to gender, race or religion. That's nice; that's a good model for the development of the world.

Eventually government, business and the individual will not be seen as antagonistic elements but as cooperative strings on the violin of human culture. And when we have progressed as musicians, then we will be free, ready and eager to explore and colonize space.

brianvan asks:
(He had many questions; this is just one of them) ...you're a person who had a rough childhood who happens to be good at computers. What are your thoughts on making computers and the Internet accessible to the "financially challenged?" What can people do to make sure that no one misses out on the computer age, including those who are poor and/or homeless?

Abe answers:
Your overall question is a larger issue that deserves more time than I've been given here. I feel strongly about making computers and the Internet a force for promoting greater income equality and educating everybody to their greatest potential, but strategies for doing that are complex.

One important thing is to make a difference in your own communities, and right now I'm a college student. The Associated Students of Cuesta College (ASCC) have an annual budget of approx $100,000. Through involvement with the student senate, I've learned that 4000 of those precious dollars had been partitioned off for upgrades of M$ office for the free ASCC computer lab. I'm going to have to volunteer my own time for setup, and I will likely need to 'convert' an IS administrator or two in the process, but I can guarantee you that while I'm at student at Cuesta, not a dime is going to be spent on M$ products. At least not any student body funds. I'm angling to get the money reallocated to hardware upgrades or making Linux CD's freely available.

This summer BMP brought all of the recent Real World and Road Rules cast members back to LA for a professional three-day public speaking seminar. (BMP's in bed with varsitybooks.com - "For the low, low price of $750 apiece, you can get MTV's backwash live and in person at your local campus! Call BMP's Joffe Agency now at 818-756-5244 and you too can meet the 'punk hacker kid' in person!")

Joking aside, on the onset of this training all eighteen of us were given different topics we could speak on for our final-night presentation. A few hypocritically choose to speak about std/aids awareness or alcoholism. I choose the topic closest to my life, volunteerism. Having had little first hand knowledge practicing the topic, I ended up relating my personal experience from being on the receiving side. You know - planned on exemplifying how important volunteer work really is by telling my welfare and YMCA camp stories. I ended up giving a 1200 person crowd a short introduction to Open Source Software ideology and using OSS as an example of unconventional yet dramatic ways of giving back.

So, save participating in local LUG's and extolling the virtues of OSS to unsuspecting BMP lecture audiences, I'm in no position to make sure the computer age reaches all. At least not yet

asad asks:
Do you feel that having a Slashdot interview about an 18 year old who got to be on MTV is sad evidence of Slashdot's decline into media-whoring pablum? I mean, sure there are countless programmers, writers, artists, thinkers, or developers with something intelligent to say, but dude, have any of THEM been on MTV?

Abe answers:
Mr. Robin Miller came to me back in July. I sat on his request until August, replying that a position paper on how the Open Source movement is enabling a whole generation of otherwise misguided teenagers would probably be much more interesting. ("Ask who?! You're kidding me!")

I apologize to those who truly deserve the exposure.

When you're on this end of things, Slashdot's so-called "decline into media-whoring pablum" seems more a product of its tough crowd quotient rather than any particular interview or story.

DonkPunch asks:
Explain the universe. Give three examples. :)

Abe answers:
Our planetary system is a spit-drop on a cosmic string which has been growing and unraveling for roughly 18 billion years. In another two billion years, we're going to ratchet back up like a yo-yo. The earth is a cosmic egg waiting for the right moment to hatch. The chick's going to be a hungry 4-trillion-ton pecker and we're all just feed. It turns out that hiccups are attempted transmissions from God. When we try to stop, we are actually inhibiting the evolution of the universe.

Python asks:
(Two questions selected from a long list he submitted)What line of work do you plan to persue after your 15 minutes of fame with MTV?

Would you recommend that others use your tactics of cracking boxes and breaking into future employers boxes and so on to get a job with them?

Abe answers:
I would recommend using all legal means available to unstack the deck. Contrary to many folks interpretation of the Salon story, I did not investigate Bunim-Murray Productions Windows/SMB network until the casting process was in it's final leg. I had seen enough of BMP to make a judgment call that they'd probably more impressed than pissed. By that time I'd also returned all four signed copies of the 30-page contract they require of semi-finalists. Perhaps it could be argued in court that by being under contract, and under so much scrutiny from them, my explorations constituted an acceptable behavior.

In the end, I've never used or had any inclination to use ill-begotten information for a malicious purposes. That won't protect my bare ass should MTV come calling with a legality spanking, but at least I maintained some dignity by not publicly airing their dirty laundry.

As for future plans - Every time I walk out of a class, I want to major in that subject. Perhaps Cuesta's better than most community colleges, or I'm just passing through a standard deer-in-the-headlights freshman syndrome. In the long run, computer science and business would be an obvious choice, but communication, psychology and journalism better fits my personality. I want to do it all.

rcade asks:
I'm one of the people who suggested Abe Ingersoll as an interview subject on Slashdot. The guy snuck into the unsecured network of the Road Rules producers and used the information he gained to (a) improve his odds of getting on the show, (b) play head games with people on the show, and (c) improve his odds of getting laid while on the show. Millions of TV viewers know the guy as a "computer hacker" or "computer cracker."

Add all of this up, and I think it's worthwhile to see what's rattling around in the guy's head. Besides, he's not much more of an MTV fan than people making comments here, comparing Road Rules to "looking up someone's asshole" in the Salon article.

Some questions:

• If you are on probation for the credit card scam, snooping through Bunim-Murray's network could have sent you to jail. Did Bunim-Murray or anyone else make noise about pursuing legal action against you?
• What bug reports were you reading when you got the idea to employ Back Orifice on the Bunim-Murray network?
• By all appearances, you haven't suffered much in the way of negative consequences for cracking and other misdeeds. Now that you're on the MTV-celebrity lecture tour, are you doing anything to teach the teeming millions that cracking is a bad idea?

Abe answers:
The only comment I got back from Bunim-Murray regarding the Salon article was a smile. I think they may have expected that I'd do much worse, and are just hoping I don't get in bed with a lawyer who's seen "The Fight" before a statute of limitations runs out.

As for bug reports, that's essentially a misquote. I was asked to paraphrase statements about keeping abreast of computer world news in general into something more quotable.

If anyone needs to an example of how cracking is a bad idea and will eventually just cause you to hurt yourself, follow this link [no link was provided -ed.]and set your threshold low.

Next week's interview: Alan Cox

When the producers of the MTV show Road Rules asked 18-year-old Abe Ingersoll to describe his job, he wrote, "Im a full time systems analyst (a.k.a. "punk hacker kid") for an Internet connectivity company thats run by a bunch of old Berkley hippies." Last month Salon did a feature story about how Abe's hacking (and cracking) skills helped him get on the show and later helped him get close to one of the female cast members. Want to be a TV star? Ask Abe how he did it. Or ask him anything else. Post your questions below. Slashdot Moderators (you know who you are) will choose the most interesting ones. Abe's answers will appear Friday.

When the producers of the MTV show Road Rules asked 18-year-old Abe Ingersoll to describe his job, he wrote, "Im a full time systems analyst (a.k.a. "punk hacker kid") for an Internet connectivity company thats run by a bunch of old Berkley hippies." Last month Salon did a feature story about how Abe's hacking (and cracking) skills helped him get on the show and later helped him get close to one of the female cast members. Want to be a TV star? Ask Abe how he did it. Or ask him anything else. Post your questions below. Slashdot Moderators (you know who you are) will choose the most interesting ones. Abe's answers will appear Friday.

BOredAtWork writes "Tom Petty has been forced to remove an mp3 of "Free Girl Now" from his web site. Looks like record labels are getting ever more anxious over digital music via the internet... "

Sick of hearing about the trailer yet? Too bad, here's more information. For those of you who want to see it at more than 320x240 and don't feel like forking out money for a movie, it will be on regular TV tonight. I've been told that it will be on Entertainment Tonight tonight and will be on MTV at 5:50 EST. Thanks to Keith Schueler for the information on MTV.