Slashdot Mirror
Napster Hurts Album Sales?
Sax Maniac writes "There is a story on Yahoo! that reports on a new study that says Napster cuts into record sales.
" It'd be a more informative study if the study also included the fact that a huge number of college students buy their music online now, which would also drive down sales in the local area - looks like a piece of FUD in MP3 War.
Update: 05/25 12:08 by michael : I can't help but jump in with a link: Pirates Steal Negative $1,400,000,000 from Music Industry.
Is your average 13 year old with a cable modem going to download the new xxxxxxxxx cd in 10 minutes or spend $15 and buy it?
Perhaps if some 13 year old has a cablemodem and a CD Burner and a bunch of blank media, then all this spoiled brat has to do is ask mommy and daddy for the damn CD and they will surely buy it for their precious little darling.
How has the recording industry been doing lately anyway? According to the RIAA, the year end market reports were $12.3 billion USD in 1995, $12.5 billion in 1996, $12.2 billion in 1997, $13.7 billion in 1998, and a healthy $14.6 billion in 1999.
Now, I am not too good at stats, but it looks like the numbers are on a steady incline. If MP3's are hurting CD sales, then why does it say on the MPAA's 1999 market report say "Despite the maturity of this format, in 1999 full-length CD shipments grew nearly 11% over the previous year"?
Looks to me like everything is ok. I think that the burden of proof is still on the RIAA.
You are mis-informed. The "big 5" companies sell 80% of the records, not 99%. Major difference. Additionally, even if one company had 80% that would not be considered a monopoly, but the fact that there are five companies shows that there is nothing close to a monopoly. At least when monopoly used to mean "only seller in market" instead of its present day definition of "corporation whose business practices I do not agree with".
How has the recording industry been doing lately anyway? According to the RIAA, the year end market reports were $12.3 billion USD in 1995, $12.5 billion in 1996, $12.2 billion in 1997, $13.7 billion in 1998, and a healthy $14.6 billion in 1999.
Now, I am not too good at stats, but it looks like the numbers are on a steady incline. If MP3's are hurting CD sales, then why does it say on the MPAA's 1999 market report say "Despite the maturity of this format, in 1999 full-length CD shipments grew nearly 11% over the previous year"?
Looks to me like everything is ok. I think that the burden of proof is still on the RIAA.
Judging from my own CD buying habits over the years I wonder how this alleged trend compares to normal cyclic trends in the entire music industry. Country music has been waning for the last six years, heavy metal is all but extinct, etc. the industry in general seems to be in search of the new "trendy thing". Its also important to note that viewership in MTV and other music channels has gone down. My guess is that in the competition for Advertising dollars the stations had to provide content that would attact viewers/listeners. Non-music content and repeating the top 20 to death. This is also detrimental to sales. Not to mention the music industry's illegal price fixing on CDs. Maybe sales will increase now that CD companies can't force online retailers and Wal-Mart to charge $13-$18 per CD.
http://64.224.123.49/c artoons/napsterbad/napsterbad_56k.html
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Also, any even remotely 'controversial' bands or not-big-sellers were given the boot over the last 10 years due to Merger-Mania. Anytime 2 big labels or Studios merge, the bottom 50% of the artists, sales-wise, are immediately dropped to cut costs. They can't guarantee big sales, so fuck 'em.
It's the same problem with Hollywood: after merger-mania, the big Studios are constantly spending dollars to make pennies, hoping bigger-budget flicks turn into blockbusters, instead of producing more smaller-budget flicks and spreading the profits over a greater area.
Then again, I find fault in almost all so-called 'common practices' within the business world. That's just me.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Courtney Love, of the band "Hole", railed against the RIAA and record industry at a New York conference on Digital Music Tuesday.
And I quote:
"It's become quite fashionable lately for artists to express outrage at music piracy, and I'm a fashionable gal. Stealing artists' music without paying for it is absolutely piracy -- and I'm talking about major labels, not Napster," she remarked, citing major record labels as the single greatest threat to artist subsistence.
She is desperately trying to break off from Geffen to go "DIY".
Here are the links:
news page on the hole site
and the rolling stone article
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
However...
The actual Yahoo! article does a very good job itself of making the study sound stupid. I particularly enjoyed listening to their interviews with record stores near universities, where the owners and employees said that the combination of online sales and exhorbitant prices by the record producers were responsible for any decline they had suffered. Additionally, the article went on to state that the larger decline in the last 2 years occurred in 1998, BEFORE NAPSTER WAS AROUND.
Don't take my word for it; go back and read the article for yourselves. It was well-written and does a better job putting the study in the right perspective than many of the Slashdot posts have.
Apalogies in advance for some of the rhetoric, but I am so tired of RIAA apalogist posts, and your post is the lucky winner...
You're also screwing the bands whose cds you are not paying for. How nice to show your support.
First, let me say that I do not make illegal copies of music - I own all of the mp3s I possess either through authorized downloads (e.g. mp3.com), or in CD, tape, or vinyl format. It is entirely possible that the post to which you reply was posted by someone similar (many more people than the anti-mp3 propoganda would suggest do in fact only have legitimate mp3s).
And yes, I have used napster to download songs I own on vinyl or tape, but don't wish to go through the hassle of digitizing into mp3 format myself. If the new, draconian copyright laws (Sony Bono Act, DMCA) make this an illegal act, I suppose I'll borrow a friend's turntable and convert the music myself.
I can guarantee you, however, that I am actively screwing the RIAA affiliated bands, as I am no longer listening to their music on the radio or buying any new CD's from them. I am not, however, pirating their music either. I have simply removed them, and all their new material, from my life altogether. Though I am only one person, this is costing them significant revinues (I used to buy allot of CDs - a bad habit exceeded only by my laserdisk and DVD habit, also now broken).
Finally, though the legality is certainly in question, I would find it socially and ethicaly preferable if the original poster would send a few dollars to the band directly for the CD whos contents he or she downloaded in mp3 format, than to purchase the CD legally and put money on the pockets of a cartel which pays artists pennies and seeks to crush or forcibly coopt any new distribution paradigm that comes along and threatens their illegal monopoly.
The only difference between the Mafia and its relationship to the Chicago city government in the 1930s and the RIAA (and MPAA) and Washington is that bribery has in the interim been formally legalized in the form of soft-money and campaign contributions.
Don't expect to see any significant difference in the quality of government, the fairness of legislation being passed, or the appropriateness of law enforcement actions taken. The government has whored itself to the media cartels, and stands over the rest of us with a big, thick broomhandle in hand.
I suppose in parting I should thank the RIAA and MPAA for going through so much trouble and expense to drive me away as a customer. My boycott of their products has already saved me thousands of dollars this year alone, which was very nice of them, as I can now afford to feed my aviation habit instead.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I like the idea of using the Onion as a "news" source lol!
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
I'd like to see the orginal source to this study.
There are potentially a number of other factors to consider when asking why college student CD purchases have declined. Perhaps the article should be more appoproately named "Why are college student record store CD purchases declining?"
Beign a recently graduated university student, I was subject to tuition increases of 7%/year -- at least twice the rate of inflation. Thus, each year, I had less and less money for luxury items such as CDs. Perhaps on a larger scale this has been denting CD purchases.
Another important point is where college students are buying their CDs? Why tromp over to the CD store when you can order it online and have it delivered to you. Does SoundScan count those statistics? Demographically, the college bunch would be the group most likely to take their music-purchasing trasnactions online. This too would show up as fewer record store CD sales.
Of course, there are more points such as music is becoming worse and worse (so why buy it?), perhaps the students are preferring a different class of music altogether like one might find on the trendy MP3.com-type sites.
I think studies such as this are probably at least indirectly motivated by the RIAA to provide negative press for Napster. Well, their negative press won't work on me. what might work would be some positive press for the RIAA. But the best RIAA news I got lately was the FTC stopping their stranglehold on CD prices!
Nobody who has access to broadband internet access buys CD's anymore.I>
I do.
The cake is a pie
But I suppose that college kids don't really like Britney or Eminem, and you can't find anything from either of those artists on Napster. (giggle. snort. guffaw.)
--
Haven't seen this posted yet. Saw it on a mailing list:
t ist=23:
from http://rollin gstone.lycos.com/news/newsarticle.asp?ID=10847&Ar
"It's become quite fashionable lately for artists to express outrage at music piracy, and I'm a fashionable gal," [Courtney] Love began. "Stealing artists' music without paying for it fairly is absolutely piracy, and I'm talking about major-label recording contracts, not Napster."
*sigh*
You've missed the point. I'm not saying that less college students buying CDs will bankrupt the record industry nor am I saying that college students wouldn't bootleg music if not for Napster. I'm saying that the RIAA getting into a tizzy because a few more college students are not buying CDs is stupid because these same students will eventually make money and are potentil lifelong fans. After all, the Grateful Dead let all sorts (including college students) bootleg their work and in return they had constantly sold out concerts and masive merchandising. Groups like Metallica may live to regret their actions...
I don't think that anyone is reasonably trying to argue that MP3's in and of themselves are bad... For personal use, they're wonderous. I've got several days worth of music (all from my own CD's, thank you very much) stored on my hard drive at work. MP3's as a promotional tool is also a great thing. I know several artists who release *some* of their songs as MP3's to spur interest in their eventual CD.
If an artist decides that they want to release their music in the MP3 format, they would most likely choose to put it on their own website in order to gauge interest, spur communication with their fans, and receive any revenues (from ads, links to purchase their CD's, T-shirts, etc...) associated with the distributiuon of their music.
Napster does nothing to steer listeners towards buying the actual CD, is unable to produce any data to show interest or number of downloads, and (worst of all, IMHO) is, or will be soon, profitting from it's activities. In essense, they'll be earning money distributng music that the artists themselves will have no way of ever profiting from. The pickings from the labels might be slim, but Napster is effectively zeroing them out.
It's one thing (not that I'm condoning it) to email an MP3 to your friend orrun an anonymous ftp server with mp3's on it. It's another thing to attempt to earn a profit by making that music EASILY available to anyone for the asking, but not return any of those profits to the artists. Napster really should figure out a way log transfers and cut artists checks for 50-75% of their (Napsters) projected take (once they've figured a way to make money... ads, anyone?)
End of rant, for now.
As a student here at FSU we have 3 local shops that deal in USED CDs. Students sell back used CDs (after they've snorted/eaten their financial aid) and then sell some of the 200 CD's they bought in High School. The music is still being sold, but it's just usually as a USED cd that was listened to for about a week until the original buyer needs some dough to eat (no pun intended). CB
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Napster is now a rich company. It's not a homebrew project by a bunch of hackers anymore. In its current form it has a conflict of interests with the industry, but ultimately they will find common ground and go secure. The real threat to the record companies comes from networks like Gnutella, Freenet and dnet. The latter will be a version of Gnutella which uses point-to-point encryption to make the whole process anonymous. And there is nothing RIAA or anyone else can do about that.
Truth --> Raw Data --> Study Findings--> Yahoo Article--> Slashdot --> Slashdot postings
Or even better yet, just read the postings on /. as truth... :)
- passion
Reminds me of the time the SPA said the software industry loses several billion dollars per year in China due to piracy.
It's so painfully obvious that if pirating were impossible (hypothetically here), there is no way they would actually sell as much software as people today pirate. Most of the pirates would simply be shit out of luck.
Liberty is not impunity.
Obviously, so if some software house releases a bit of software, I must do it for the public good and should not expect to be rewarded from it. Not even from those who make millions. I should have none, because it's the public good right?
Likewise, if I make some music, it is now a public good. I should not be allowed to make money. After all, I like doing it right?
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Thank goodness I d/l all my music from USENET, where there is apparently no correlation to lost sales. Man, my conscious is clear now!
Anyway, I bought 4 CDs last week because I heard a couple tracks I d/l, so there goes that theory.
Then again, I have always bought lots of records on a regular basis, even during University, so don't give me that "poor college student" crapola!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Listening to you people drone on about how Napster does not affect cd sales is sickening!
I said it before, I meant it, and I'll now say it again: Napster does not affect CD Sales, nor will it destroy the music industry. This is the same piracy FUD they spread with the advent of casette tapes, and VHS, and both ended up being a benefit for their respective industries rather than the bane they attempted to paint them as.
One need only look at the fact that CD sales have skyrocketed over the last few years. The article itself says CD sales are up 20%. Are you aware of how significant a chunk of change that 20% constitutes? Hell, if we want to be as statistically and scientifically shoddy as the people who conducted the study, we can correlate those two facts and discern that Napster is responsible for a 20% rise in CD sales...
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Have to agree on the singles. I used to buy cassette singles back before CDs, but they were usually priced at only a buck or two. As soon as I switched to CDs, I quit buying singles simply because it's ridiculous to spend $5 or more just to get one song.
Most of my CD collection now consists of CDR media burnt from downloaded MP3s. Yes, it's true. And since most of my music listening is done on my boat, in my car, or in other noisy environments, I find that the sound quality of an MP3 is definitely "good enough"
So, in my case anyway, the music industry is, in fact, losing a few sales.
Is that illegal? Yes.
Is it wrong? Probably.
Do I feel bad about it? Hell no.
The way I see it, it boils down to simple economics. Any piracy that is currently going on is very likely due, in large part, to the ludicrous pricing of new CDs. In a capitalist economy, any time there is demand for a product or service, someone will provide that product or service. If that someone doesn't provide the product at a price people are willing to pay, someone will step in and provide it at a lower price. In this case, that price happens to be free.
Rather than screw around with lawsuits (justifiable or not) the simplest, most straight-forward way for the recording industry to combat piracy, online and otherwise, is to bring the price of their product back into a reasonable range. Any time the price of a product soars too high, consumers will rebel. The monopoly control the music industry has has shielded it from this rebellion for awhile, but I think they're now approaching the price range where even good, honest people are willing to take illegal means to obtain the product at a reasonable price. I mean, good, honest people have been recording songs from the radio onto cassette for years. The only difference now is that they get a little better sound quality (and no DJ talking during the first few bars of the song).
I know these arguments don't really have a leg to stand on morally or legally. I do think they still reflect reality fairly accurately.
Why not eliminate exclusive contracts, and allow artists to sign with two, maybe three, record labels. This way there would be more than one source for the same album, which would introduce true price competition into the industry. (Yes, this suggestion has some problems, but it's the best I can come up with until I've had a little more coffee.)
QED!!!
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It doesn't matter what's in the fine print. Yes I read it, BUT it doesn't matter.
Web surfers are fickle, ADD type people. They only read headlines. If the headlines say MP3's are making one ka-zillion poor people in Gondwonaland die every day, then people will automatically hate mp3's and those "evil", nasty, bad young people that distribute them.
Telling the truth is pointless unless you do it aloud. If I mutter an apology under my breath, then it is absolutely meaningless to the person who needed to hear it.
This is a fact.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
Excuse me? did your generation invent music copying? I remember back in 1988-89 when I was in college inventing everything you use.. we as "poor" college students (Read : too cheap to buy a cd but I'll buy 2 cases of beer!) copied the ever living life out of every CD we could get. Sure they were tapes then, but who cared? we got our music. College students have been pirating music as fast as you, and as much! (Hell I had 200-500 casettes each one had 2 albums on it) you bought a CD and then at least 40 copies to casette were made.
.there were NO sales there to begin with!
This aint new, dont even think that napster use in college is hurting sales...
As for me? Yes I have started to buy MORE cd's because of napster. but then, I have stopped buying mainstream crap. I've been buying non-label artists' CD.
Why? because non-label artists are cooler, actually have better music, and act like people.
I have purchased over 25 CD's because of napster over the past 11 months. and every CD you cant get in a record store.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Managers from other independent stores around the country said their businesses have been affected far more by the growth of big chain stores or by online retailers, such as CDNow and Amazon.com, than by online music-swapping software.
Looks like they're noting that one cannot attribute the entire drop to Napster, or any of its kin.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
My son has had roughly half of the
new Perfect Circle album for about
a month now, as MP3's. He bought the CD
Tuesday, it day it was released.
I don't know if this was just a clever
marketing trick or what. But, I think
it was brilliant to release part of the
CD as MP3's to build interest!
Actually, college tuition costs have increased all over the US. I know I for one have had to really pull in the reigns of my spending over the years to deal with this, and buying fewer CDs is just one simple solution.
I mean, cut back on the CDs or cut back on food..... hmmmm....
~Chris
One would think that the 12-16 year-olds that are the target market for this band would be wired and using napster... savvy enough to get the title on MP3. How does this fit into the equation?
The 12-16-year-olds that are the target market for this band use AOL, for the same reason they listen to 'NSync. (Everybody else does it, so it must be cool.) Over AOL, to download the entire 'NSync album would take untold hours, and the kids know that they can get it much more easily by begging their parents to drive them to the mall.
Most of the kids who are downloading lots of music are on fast and/or reliable connections, so they can rest assured that the songs they want will be downloaded promptly. Nevertheless, a quick search on Napster or Gnutella still reveals a LOT of 'NSync and Britney Spears songs being traded.
For more information, click here.
Actually the price of cd's deters me more than anything from buying new cd's. Depending on where
you live it can cost anywhere from $11 to $20. Where I'm at now they cost like $18.99. I haven't bought new cd's for several years. I like to load up on used CD's. So I think you could replace the word napster with used cd's. In fact that was, I believe, a past battle of the RIAA.
I love music, and actually had my own band for awhile, but still the expense of owning all of the cd's I like at new prices would drive me to the poor house real fast. If I like an artists music do I really need to pay the executive salary of some fat cat Looney Toons inc. executive who has to have a nice boat, a nice car and blah blah blah as well as the artist who needs a nicer car and a nice boat and babes'a'hoy. I'd rather just pay for the artist's decadence. Don't expect to see many layoffs of upper management at a Media Company any time soon.
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
Well, if they presume that Napster use was heaviest at the Universities where it was banned, and if the study as done soon enough after the banning, then sales might not yet have recovered. That's pretty weak though.
I'd like to see a 100-level university stats class study the same thing and do it right >:)
The study can be found here
Okay: you don't understand what I'm saying at all. You suspect that the decline in album sales is due to Napster. You have your common-sense reasoning about why that might be true. You have what people who think about things for a living call "a hypothesis."
You have not proven it. It has not been proven. There is, at this point, no proof.
So, at this point, saying "See? Napster hurts album sales!" is a lie. If you want it not to be a lie, you must prove it.
-jacob
- One of the record stores featured in the article, Amoeba, - sells records primarily from small companies.
Yeah, but, as the article mentions: The nearby Amoeba Records, a warehouse-sized new- and used-record store that has long served as a mecca for Bay Area music enthusiasts, says it hasn't seen any noticeable effect.
The fact that Amoeba (which is a great store, btw) deals so heavily in non-RIAA titles only lends more support to the theory that this is more a result of price fixing than of Napster.Here's a link to coverage of the study at reciprocal.com, the company that funded it.
Here's a link to the the actual study in pdf form by a consulting firm called "Entertainment Marketing Solutions"
And here, finally, is the Mission Statement for reciprocal.com:
Reciprocal provides comprehensive business-to-business secure e-commerce
services for digital content distribution over the Internet. Our services
include Digital Rights Management (DRM) applications and clearinghouse
solutions that enable e-commerce for all forms of digital content including
audio, text, graphics, software, images and video via the Internet or other
networks.
We protect your intellectual property on the Internet and make it easy for
you to securely and flexibly package, sell, and distribute digital content.
And we provide consumers with the ability to easily access, pay for, and
consume your protected digital content.
Hey, Slashdot Readers... how do YOU spell "Conflict of Interest" ?
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Huh???
What the study shows is that in areas where Napster is a major source of music procurement sales of albums have gone down.
Huh again???
The study found that sales droppen *most* near campuses where Napster has been banned. I doubt that the music industry people did an analysis of download frequencies before they issued their injunctions. Probably just looked for administrations that could be easily shoved around.
If you want to claim that Napster "caused" the sales to decline, you have to explain how sales declined most where it isn't being used.
Yeah, I know people dumb enough to risk getting kicked out of school for downloading a Metallica album. Not many, tho. Even fewer who also know how to bypass a firewall.
"Copyright pirates vs. copyright thugs."
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
This, in my experience, is a genuine trend, and is likely one of the unspoken reasons the RIAA folks have their knickers in a twist. Even if piracy ultimately promotes sales, it screws up the big label's marketing machines since it lets people expose themselves to a wider variety of music. Think about it: the fewer titles a label needs to produce and market to sell a given volume of CDs, the lower its costs for studio, production setup, unsold units, and so on. But if people buy a greater variety of music (because they are exposed to that variety on-line, legally or illegally), their costs go up, and thus their profits go down.
This is, I think, a major reason why the recording industry appears so clueless in dealing with the on-line world. The natural progression would be in the direction of greater choice--and they don't want you to have any more choices than they want you to. Of course, the major labels' practices also mean that most artists wind up on the sidelines, except for their chosen few. They want their audiences to fall in large, well-defined (and well-controlled) groups.
The original message in this thread included the key word "cartel". As you seem so informed about these things, I am sure you are also informed what a cartel is, and what cartel pricing is.
Approximately three CDs per year.
Number of CDs I've bought since I started sharing MP3s:
one. (Radiohead's The Bends, best $15 I've spent in a while)
Assuming that I buy another CD by the time a year is up, (I consider this highly likely) then my CD consumption will have fallen by one. I can attribute this drop pretty directly to MP3s, so I'd say this pernicious act of file sharing by me has cost the music industry roughly fifteen bucks.
Of course, the benefit to me, in terms of being able to listen to more music, better music, and a wider variety of music, exceeds fifteen dollars by at least an order of magnitude, so I'm having a hard time crying my eyes out for the poor record executives.
as always, your mileage may vary.
--
share and enjoy
True, "proof" in a social sciences context is different from "proof" in a mathematical context- you can't prove that Napster hurts album sales in the same way you can prove that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 on a right triangle. As you say, one must draw inferences that are much more sweeping. However, that does not mean that all forms of inference are equally valid. For example, "I believe statement X because of a long list of facts and observed phenomena that directly pertain to statement A (not statement B which is an awful lot like statement A)" is generally considered "proof" by social scientists, in that in the absence of somebody else explaining your data a different way (say, with statement C) or showing that some of your facts weren't actually true, we can consider statement A to be true. "I believe statement D because it seems on the face of it to be true" is not held in the same regard. Social scientists (and rational people, hopefully) will not consider statement D to be true, because there is no good reason to believe it.
To bring that back to the discussion of Napster, the study gives me good reason to believe that album sales are going down around universities and that this is counter to the trend of album sales going up. It makes me suspect that maybe online piracy is to blame, but it doesn't give me any facts that speak directly to that, demonstrating that online piracy is to blame rather than, say, students buying music online or being poorer or having less access to music stores than before or just not listening to music as much for whatever reason. So it gives me the first kind of inference for statement one, but only the second kind of inference for statement two. As such, we the study give us reason to believe that statement one is true, but doesn't give us reason to believe that statement two is true.
-jacob
So what kind of a study would you suggest to determine one way or another whether a free way to get music will adversely effect a non-free competitor?
You could perhaps track MP3 trading on a large scale, track down every person who traded MP3s (like Metallica did) and find out somehow how many CDs they bought per week or something. There are numerous problems with this though, chiefly stemming from not knowing how many CDs per week they bought before they had Napster. It's possible (likely) that the people using Napster were already disinclined to purchase CDs.
The logical solution, then, seems to be to find someone who can tell you not only how many CDs Napster users are purchasing today but also how many they were purchasing last year. Luckily, most retailers keep complete records. The only problem left, then, is that retailers don't know who uses Napster and who doesn't! The logical solution: Find retailers that cater to groups of people prone to using Napster. Granted, a large error will tend to result, but a genuine trend still shows up.
Godwin's Law is thusly invoked. You lose.
This should be moderated up.
My point is that it's fine for the RIAA to target college students for pirating--I just wish it would quit blowing smoke about profits it would never have had.
Yep, this is the very same point with other software also. Some (some? umm... almost all) l33t w4r3zd00dz just won't ever buy anything, even if they could. Let's just call it a statistical profit. ;-)
> Nice theory, but that doesn't explain why the most frequently pirated artists on Napster are Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Britney Spears. If people think that the music is crap and won't buy it, then why are they still listening to it and illegally stealing it?
:P I can't stand pop music, I prefer electronic stuff like drum 'n bass and goa
I don't listen to that music, and I'm not pirating it
Get it out of your head - encryption doesn't prevent piracy. I can copy and encrypted file just as easily as I can copy an unencrypted one.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
One has to wonder how up-to-date the data used in the study was. Napster has only (really) become a big enough thing to show up on their radar or make any kind of an impact in the last 6 months or so.
Soundscan (who provide data to Billboard) have almost instant access to this information from the point of sales terminals at the major outlets (and probably some of the minor as well.) This is how Billboard can do it's weekly Top 40 list. There's enough other vagueries in their study to invalidate their claims anyway.
numb
If you check my post, I didn't propose that MP3's are helping sales - in fact I specifically said I didn't believe that. I just think that they're doing far less damage than the recording industry would like the world to believe.
I'm not saying I'm right. Just don't criticize what I didn't say.
over her e
Steve
Screwing the Record Company's Bloated Distribution Channel: $8.50 per CD.
I'd say that the band is lucky that he's going so easy on them. Coulda been the other way around.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
- college enrollment
- how long napster has been running, how much data, etc.
- if its curve of growth matches the decline of sales
- if other stores opened in the area (best buy, etc)
- whether sales still dropped near universities that banned napster traffic, etc.
The story and the study are bunk. The moral issue is something else entirely, of course. But I think on some level that widespread piracy is a valid form of discourse in an oligarchical system like the record industry. Would people be doing it anywhere near as much if cd's were fairly priced? fcI personally would almost love to see the RIAA win, totally and absolutely. No MP3s, no SDMI, nothing. Then watch the college kids not buy any CDs because of the high prices (which would continue to go up), ignore music in their lives, and not buy any for the rest of their life. Watch the music industry go through the tubes as more people ignore music. Watch RIAA go bankrupt. :)
Though there were no MP3s floating around when I was in collage I was a rampid pirater too. I would use tapes to record off of collage radio and record from friend's albums. I would also record my albums for friends. I had about 20 actual cds and about 20 actual tapes that I bought and most of them were from used record stores. Now that I am out of school making money I collect mp3s but I also go on cd binges where I drop $500 at a time on cds (mostly used, some new). Music and CD buying is an addiction for me now. I never would have been this crazy over music had it not been for my earlier days of listening to mostly pirated music as a collage student. Also I now own on CD almost every album I ever dubbed. Because I had listened to that tape so often it died I had to get the album, plus I wanted the actual cd w/ linear notes and cover art.
Bands don't make money from albums, they make their money from playing music. When a band's music gets heard, be it vinyl, cd, minidisc, or mp3, their concert revenues go up and they make money. That's why bands sign with the recording labels. They know they're not going to make much (if any) money through the sale of their CD, but if their music is out there, some people will become fans, and then pay money to see their shows. Or the band can use the sales numbers to help get them gigs at bars, get sponsors for tours, etc. In other words, how the music gets heard makes little difference to the artist, as long as it gets heard.
Do the Evolution
Do the Evolution
... that in the ratings, which tracked music sellers near college campuses, the decline of music sales near campuses that did not ban napster was 4%. The decline of music sales near campuses that did ban napster was 7%!
..
What does this say? Napster helped preserve 3% of those lost record sales!!!!
So, the napster straw man is officially dead. The true cause of the decline among (financially challenged) college students is plain to see: price gouging by record companies
My take on Metallica, Dre, etc.: They have every right to pursue the individual copyright infringers. However, the fans are being gouged on pricing, and these artists are legitimately losing fan support because they are not standing up for the fans regarding CD prices. They seem to fail to see that, and are not seen as fighting the labels pricing structure (as Tom Petty did) for the sake of their fans. The suits are not wrong on legal or even moral grounds IMHO. I just think they're missing the point, and doing so with great acrimony.
A band that is silent on this issue (as well as the issue of label exploitation of artists, internal bloated middlemanism, etc) is part of the problem, and this problem's been around for decades, it's only now with napster that this issue is cast in sharp relief.
Your Working Boy,
Next, the studies uses three years of past data, along with data from the population in general as a control - this is not entirely valid. For a true internal control, they would have had to compare the college growth rate with the general growth rate in the past (for more than three years). Maybe the numbers that we are seeing reflect an already existing trend - the report sure doesn't talk about this. The numbers there look convincing but what are the standard deviations of the measurements - are these differences even meaningful?
One of the last problems is mentioned in the article - on-lines sales. The report shows no information about this point-of-sale, which is almost certainly taking a bit out of the brick-and-mortar market.
I hope that they do present this report for 'evidence' of bad-napsterism - any monkey with more than three minutes of stats or experimental design would tear it apart into confetti.
Kids are not know for their money-managements skills.
A simple word problem: Breanna has a $30 allowance for the month. Sally has a $30 allowance for the month. Each of them buy 2 Brittany Spears albums at the mall, but Sally also uses Napster to download albums from Ricky Martin, N'Sync, and Brandy (none of which she likes enough to buy, but she thinks it is fun to have a lot of music to choose from). The next month, they both blow their allowance on CD's at the mall again (Christina Aguilera and Jewel), and Sally downloads a few more albums that she sort-of likes. How much money has the record company lost because of Sally's piracy?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Of course you are comparing 1985 money to 2000 money. In the US, in 1985, records cost $10. Now in the US in 2000, CD's cost $15. Inflation in the past 15 years has been about 50%. Which makes the cost exactly on target.
This is not to mention that CD's hold substantially more music. A record could only handle 40 minutes, and a CD can handle 80 minutes. Most new albums take advantage of this, and most old albums include extra bonus tracks. So you could even argue that on a dollar/music basis, CD's are twice as cheap as records.
The price of recorded music has dropped significantly since its introduction a century ago. At the turn of the century an edison cylinder of Enrico Caruso cost a significant portion of a working man's one-week income. When 78's were introduced, only the rich could aford the 20-volume set which made up Beethoven's Ninth. When Hi-Fi records became available in the 50's, high quality music became available to the masses for dirt cheap. And the CD even more so. Nobody has a problem paying $10 for a movie (which is temporary pleasure), but whine about paying $15 for a CD (a lifetime of listening pleasure).
Currently I find it hard to beleive Napster eats into profit mainly because its just a search engine, it's not a media format or a playback device. It's just not all that interesting a tool.
:/
Napsters got a little crappy mp3 player in the program itself. I think it relies on MS Mediaplayer but im not sure. I know alot of people who only use napster for mp3s. They dont even know what winamp is. For these people to be able to listen to their music they think they have to log onto napster, killing my bandwidth and generally frustrating me.
no
And the artists? And the artists formerly known as children? And the children who claim that their parents are actually famous artists and not the boring people who people think they are? And poor kid rock!!
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1945948.html
It states
As reported earlier, SoundScan division VNU Marketing tested the theory by looking specifically at
sales in stores near universities, where online music has been more widely adopted than in the general
public. In those stores, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually dropped 4 percent in their internal networks, sales have dropped 7 percent in two years.
Doesn't that indicate that Napster helps sales, since in the locations near Universities that didn't ban
Napster, the sales didn't go down as much as at the stores near Universities where Napster had been banned.
cthread. cthread_fork(). Fork, thread, fork!
So, to have a smaller decrease of sales of CD's near universities, you should ALLOW ACCESS TO NAPSTER!
Once the inference is made it is up to people like you to offer conjecture to refute the statement (to condense Popper). Something which AFAIR you haven't done.
Working for the (other) man
I don't know that it proves that Napster hurts sales, but it certainly shows that the study is inconclusive...
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Another data point: I am 21, by a window, but in the basement...
Let's draw some more useless correlations from this. Maybe we'll get an article about it.
-- Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
A site some data?
really this sounds interesting, but I don't believe it until I see it.
What is power if not for the furtherance of power. Power is a gift in it's own right and a means unto itself.
However, as a stuanch anti-pirate (anti-thief), who happens to really hate RIAA and really like mp3s (and who has no illegal mp3s, or copies of anyone elses CDs, and collection of over 200 LPs and over 200 CDs), my objections are with the justifications.
Did you ever stop to think, for example, that a CD, or music, is not a necessity? So what possible justification can one give for stealing it? Because the people selling it make too much money? That's bullshit. If you don't want to support them, don't. Doesn't give you justification to steal. Just don't buy it. Or do what a lot of people here claim to do: support independents.
Same thing goes for software: RMS's opinions not withstanding, just because I don't agree with a company's licensing policy doesn't give me the right to steal their software.
So what do you do to show a company you disagree with it's policy? Don't buy the freaking product. There is no justification for stealing music (or software, or just about anything).
I think the RIAA are a bunch of lying assholes. I don't like them. I don't like the fake statistics, and the false "lost sales" figures. Anybody with an IQ of plant life or above knows that the sales of legal CDs, and Videos, and DVDs - all the things that the industries kept saying would kill them, have gone up EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE THEIR INTRODUCTION.
Why they can't just keep raking in the billions of dollars and be happy is beyond me. I certainly think they are wasting more money on lawsuits then they can possibly get back, especially with all the bad publicity. Yes, I am one of those people who, last fall, was about to buy a DVD player, and now hasn't because of all the publicity. I know I am not alone.
However, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I've never met a pirate who didn't turn out to be just a cheap bastard making excuses. I know, I used to be one. I don't do it now, and I don't make it a point to condemn people who do - unless they insist on making themselves feel better about stealing because of assinine justifications. I may be an idealist, now, and not a realist, but I do know right from wrong. Existentialism, baby!
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
ok, actually its Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
Ham on rye, hold the mayo please.
thelocust[dot]org
Okay, give a few details before I go off on my little exposition here --
The people I'll be referring to all have some degree of computer knowledge -- from "User" to "Programmer" to "Network Admin' level - it varies from person to person.
Their musical tastes also wildly vary. From country to pop to rock, to metal, to classical.
--
Just about everyone I know, uses Napster/Gnutella/whatever. Both my roommates, most of my friends, my boyfriend, and a handful of relatives and myself. We've all got oodles and oodles of mp3's. Lots of 'em.
We also have an immense amount of CD's. Not burnt copies, but the normal kind. The kind you go buy in the store. With the liner notes and the lyrics and all that.
Some of the Mp3's and CD's overlap.
Why, you ask, do we buy CD's we have on mp3?
Because, frankly, it's a pain in the ass to burn a CD when you're the average computer owner. Oh, its possible, and we all do it, but, its annoying and ties up the computer. When you don't have a truly sick amount of Ram, when you don't have a massivly fast CPU, when you're the average Joe, who uses his computer for the 'net, for games, and for balancing his checkbook, you don't waste time/speed/performance by burning music CD's.
It takes a lot more effort to burn a CD than it does to buy one. Even at 18.99, 19.99, 23.99, its much faster to pop off into the music store, pick up a CD, and go home.
Espically when you have a car CD player. We generally have mp3's for home, and CD's for the car. They live in the car. Some of them have never seen the inside of our homes.
Its all about convieniace. We hear a song on the radio a few times, we think "Gee, that's a band I like... hey, the *insert store name here* is on the way home, I'll stop by" -- We hit the ATM, we hit the store. 15 minutes later, We have music.
Also, as a side note -- very often, the mp3's we have are obscure, hard to find, or older music. Stuff that would be difficult to find at the local music store.
In my, and apparantly the opinions of my friends and people I know, mp3's aren't stopping us from buying music, they're just another way of having it. Cd's are still easy to get, easy to use. Burnt copies are a pain. They require *GASP!* effort. Effort better used on playing Quake, Rainbow 6, Roller Coaster Tycoon or SMAC. Effort better spent on chatting, writing, working. Effort better spent on doing stuff, instead of sitting around waiting for a CD to finish burning, hoping it won't be a botched burn.
Just my 14 and a half cents.
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
I actually downloaded more MP3s before Napster was around than after. I find Napster to be woefully inadequate for obtaining whole CDs, hard-to-find tracks, pre-released material, and anything that hasn't seen the light of the Top 40, basically. Since my musical tastes run anywhere from the sublime to the ridiculous with little to no "popular" (read: crap) music thrown into the mix, my MP3 searching ventures have taken me elsewhere of late (oth.net, IRC, mainly...)
I think I had 30 MP3 CDs before I started using Napster, and I have about 35 now.
(Oh, and for everyone that's gonna bitch about what an "asshole" I am for not buying music, I've spent a few hundred dollars this year on records. So, for lack of anything blunter, blow it out your ass, especially if you're posting as AC. It's pretty hard to DJ with MP3s.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I recently used Napster to download all of the songs from Smashing Pumpkins' new CD entitled Machina. Once I had listened to the songs and liked them, I decided to buy the CD the day it was released -- which I did.
I have also discovered bands after downloading an MP3 of their songs. One fine example is Save Ferris. I downloaded their cover of Eileen from a Web site many months back and consequently purchased their CD titled It Means Everything (which contains said cover).
I began listening to Ben Folds Five after listening to their song Brick on the radio. After hearing Brick on the radio I bought their CD Whatever and Ever, Amen. I then began looking for other songs of their's on the Internet in MP3 format. I found copies of their songs Emaline and Alice Childress which prompted me to by their CD Naked Baby Photos (which contains said songs). When The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner came out on CD I bought it as well. Had it not been for MP3's my last Ben Folds Five CD would have probably been Whatever and Ever, Amen because it is the only one that got airplay around here. I'll probably buy the only remaining Ben Folds Five CD that I don't have, Ben Folds Five, once I see it for a reasonable price (less than $12).
I have over 300 CD's. (1.95GB worth of CD's) I have about 700MB of MP3's on my computer. Assuming that all of those MP3's are pirated (which is a big assumption, because I couldn't think of a single one that I don't own the CD for, downloaded from the band's Web site (Beastie Boys, Soul Coughing), or downloaded from MP3.com legally (Billy Idol, Peter Cetera, and many unknowns)), the percentage of pirated music in my household would be 0.35%.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I seem to recall most being around $10 - $12, with vinyl at $6.50 to $7.50. Shortly thereafter (very shortly), the record industry claimed that CD prices would come down (because it's an easier format to duplicate) when there were more facilities. So instead of lower CD prices, vinyl prices went up...I think Michael Jacksons Thriller (no, I didn't buy it) was the first to hit the stores at over $9.00 for a single, new album. Cries were heard of price fixing in the industry.
As far as I can see, while CDs themselves (not the content) have become commodities, and can be found for $12 or less, there are many specific instances, especially with new and very hyped CDs, where it just can't be found for less than $15.00. Popular new releases at Tower (just look at www.towerrecords.com) are $13.99.
Vinyl prices? I don't know...I don't really look at them anymore.
Inflation hasn't really been very high the past few years....certainly minimum wage has outpaced it by a long shot. Back then, in '86, I used half months minimum wage salary to buy a CD player. Now you get a 5 disc changer for $89.95.
Anyhow, the point is that prices of new CDs have gone up, as well as vinyl. It may not be the exagerated "$20.00!!" in the article, but then both sides are exagerating a great deal anyway.
The fact is that production of CDs has increased so much, and the cost to manufacture has gone down so much, that the profits really have skyrocketed. That's mostly where the complaints lie.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
As I mentioned in a previous article, anybody who needs evidence that most people who download MP3's do not buy the CD need only look at the 300,000 people who illegally downloaded Metallica songs in the course of two days.
Agreed, most people who download a given MP3 don't buy the CD; but that's irrelevant. What truly matters is how many of them would have bought the CD in the absence of Napster, et al, and how many actually did buy the CD anyway. The evidence we have doesn't indicate a huge loss from Napster. Given that, it should be hard to argue that draconian changes to copyright law, encryption et al are necessary or cost-effective measures for reducing illegal distribution, and easy to argue that such measures will significantly inconvenience consumers.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Gnutella, et al, notwithstanding, this isn't worth getting worked up over. Napster's recent VC rather convicingly points to their becoming a music delivery service. Napster users are already registering and logging in to access (listen, ultimately) to music, so all that's left is to charge people to connect to Napster servers. Once they completely firewall fans from the major labels they'll be able to control access to the major label content on a subscription basis.
They only care about their stuff, not MP3's in general. Heck, pirating MP3's of independent labels reinforces the Majors' position since they're in a better position to absorb any ill financial effects from loss of sales until they figure out a distribution model. Then all they have to do is raise the price of admission by non-Big5 labels to institute the same distribution model that is used for brick and mortar retail.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
I can name 1000 different record labels off of the top of my head
Go for it, dude! Show 'em you know your stuff!
I don't know about Napster, but when I was in college most of the mp3 trading was of top 40 crap, not the sort of thing an independant label would produce. Besides, if those responsible for 99% of CD sales collude in pricing, it is a monopoly. It makes no difference how many independant labels there are, because music is not a commodity, where one artist can be substituted by any another.
One possible explanation of this odd statistic could be that since these college students no longer have access to Napster to preview RIAA-produced music, they are buying less of it. Without Napster, the major labels have fallen off their radar.
Most college students I know seem to be listening to bands from on-line distributors like mp3.com, instead of wasting their money on overpriced RIAA albums that are loaded with filler anyway.
If you buy the CD, then you can rip your own MP3, I think everybody thinks this is legal. However, can you legally download an MP3 and skip the trouble of making it yourself, assuming the site you downloaded from had specific knowledge you purchased the CD? Then, suppose you scratch your CD such that it no longer plays. Are you now entitled to download the MP3? Or are you forced to buy a new CD? Then, to the ultimate question. Are you allowed to legally upgrade to a better format, from an album purchased on an older format? Or must you re-purchse?
make world, not war
What is the difference between the (RIAA and MPAA) monopolistic practices and those of (Microsoft and AOL/TimeWarner)?
If we set aside the specifics of the Microsoft case - namely the leveraging of the OS/App empire against Netscape, the case is about the use of unfair monopoly power to excert unfair pressures on the market place.
If we set aside the vacuuous notion of Intellectual Property, and factor in the FACT that copying of music PROMOTES sales in the long run (witness cassette tape consequences), then the RIAA is trying to use of unfair monopoly power to excert unfair pressures on the market place.
Add to the pot the idea of regionalization and licensing USAGE rights for DVD's rather than the ownership of the content - as is key in the DeCSS vs MPAA conflict, and you have the same issue again. The use of unfair monopoly power to excert unfair pressures on the market place.
Consider AOL's latest tactic of excluding other ISP's as a 'side-effect' of installing the latest AOL software. Couple with this the FACT that AOL is now in virutal control of not only means of distribution of their service (Cable networks) but also of the message that is delivered to the general public by a significant segment of broadcast media. Again you have the use of unfair monopoly power to excert unfair pressures on the market place.
What gives?
M$ is getting drawn and quartered (not that I'm against this or anything), the MPAA and RIAA are getting laws passed in their favor. The AOL/TW thing is still to shake out - but they did have their hand slapped by the FCC over excluding Disney from their data stream.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Like vitually everyone I know, I have a certain fuzzy budget for CD's. I buy about 3 or 4 a week. I've got a CD library of almost 2 thousand CDs, of all genres, tending to the outre. Because of mp3s, my CD collecting habits can now be much riskier. I don't need to buy CDs of commonly available bands, of top hits or such. I can buy obscurities, rarities, and things that Just Might Be Cool. Artists that aren't even available on Napster yet because they're too new or obscure or unusual.
This shift in buying freedom scares the RIAA and the corporate-pop musicians (like Metallica) as much as anything. Consumers can be less predictable when their budgets are freed to follow whims. The net effect is to flatten the pyramid: fewer sales, quite possibly, of Top 40 pap^H^H^H music, more sales of alternative and unusual musics.
The problem with this whole Napster thing is that
there are definitely ethical issues involved.
Personally, I do think that artists are losing
income from this and other forms of digital
'piracy'. That should be obvious to anyone
with half a brain. But, as far as bands/artists
like Metallica, Dr. Dre, et. al are concerned,
no one is really going to care. These acts pull
in milllions year after year and it's hard to
feel their pain even if you believe in principle that they are being done wrong.
The protestations by the industry suits are
equally absurd in light of recent releases
like Britney Spears, 'Nsync, Eminen, et cetera
over the past year or so. These are the kind
of acts that are the bread and butter of the
majors, and they're pulling in absolutely
fucking huge piles of cash. The lost sales
for these guys is a barely measurable quantity
compared to things like studio bills, promotion,
and various and sundry perquisites. At best,
it might add up to the budgets for a couple
videos. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned
out to be significantly less than all the
litigation costs when everything is said and
done.
Quite understandably, all this crap is just
serving to piss people off, who see it as
more recording industry greed masquerading
as concern for the artists' livelihood. Lost
under all that is the real concern. Namely,
those artists outside or on the fringes of
Top 40-Land, artists who really do count on
album sales to keep food on the table. If they
can't 'move enough product', they stand a real
risk of becoming uninteresting to the droids
in accounting. No profit, no contract, no
career. Indie labels are especially vulnerable
as well. If they can't sell enough to make
ends meet, they're going down and taking everyone
they've signed with them, which could turn out
to be a fatal blow for as yet nascent scenes.
Instead we get the majors and chains crying
crocodile tears over the sales they've lost,
even though album sales have pretty much
never been better. Eventually, people are
going to get tired of hearing about it and
slip into cynically ignoring the whole thing,
wishing everyone would just shut the fuck up.
This is great for the recording industry,
because they can then go into full ruthless
mode in order to strengthen their grip on
the reins (and the lash).
Thomas S. Howard
I purchased my first CD player in 1987. At that time I bought some stupid CD like Top Gun soundtrack or something... but it was $15.99. That was pretty typical at the time, some were upwards of $20.
During the same time period I did buy several vinyl albums like Tears for Fears, etc. and they were around $9.
Ahh, but that was 13 years ago...
I go out to cdnow.com and look at the latest Pearl Jam album Binaural.
CD = $12.58
vinyl = $15.49
This was the situation for every new release I went and looked at. Now older releases like Vitalogy do have lower prices for vinyl:
CD = $12.49
vinyl = $8.99
There's a lot of other factors that go into pricing older releases, such as how much stock is on hand and how well it still sells versus how fast they want to get rid of it.
Anyway, so not only have CD prices come down since 1987 in terms of the dollar figure, they have not been impacted by inflation at all.
Take for example in 1987 as a college student I made $3.50/hour, today they make $6-8/hour if not more.
So who really is the lying bastard here? I don't agree that it is the record company.
I see at least 2 conflicts of intrest: 1) percieved image of studies as objective vs. real interest of PR pseudo-science 2) percieved image of news sources as providers of quality information vs. real interest of printing press releases verbatim so they can all get back to playing minesweeper.
There is no pervasive, official, enforced licencing, certification or standards for scientists, researchers or staticians (unlike dr's and lawers), but people tend to believe that "studies" and "research" are supposed to find the "truth" using sound scientific and statistical methods. So there is a conflict between the percieved intent (truth) and the the interest (PR). For the definiton of conflict of interest, the actual intent of the actor is irrelevent (although in this case I'm sure they are quite pleased with the image of objectivity).
But what really burns me up is that this "marketing research" is being reported in the news! Why is this press release (of thousands each day) news worthy? The only fact it contains is that sales have dropped 4% near colleges. Was it the increase in overall record sales noteworthy? What about the sales of shoes? Or red herrings? The only thing that makes this story interesting is the totally speculative napster angle.
Headlines like "Is Napster taking a toll on CD sales?" gives attention to a random speculation to the benefit of a few private corporate interests. There is absolutely no evidence presented that the drop in sales has anything to do with napster, yet the question is posed as if it is currently a debateable issue*.
A more appropriate headline might be "Are College Students Buying Fewer Records?" since the "study" doesn't even prove that students are actually buying fewer records. Indepenednt stores selling small and super-tiny labels, on-line stores, bands selling direct at shows and used CD's weren't accounted for.
Even if they had gotten that far, there are so many likely suspects that singleing out napter is biased, at best. Poorer students (reduced student loan money, increase in drug prices, increase in concert ticket prices, less free booze) crappy major label offerings, poularity of underground [rap, metal, techno] and bootlegs (phish, gdead), are some of many reasons there might be decrease in college student record purchases.
It's this kind of crappy reporting that turns non-issues into something suddenly deemed worthy of congressional investigation. FUD is too good a term for it.
* this is exactly like when they talk about the "global warming debate" as if the scientific community is still trying to decide if global woarming exists! the only atmosheric scientists still questioning global warming are the ones that happen to work for petroleum companies
- bridgette
I estimate that since the 'tallica and RIAA lawsuits, my personal boycott of CD purchases amounts to 30 sales.
Mostly, I just listen to my older CDs, borrow from the library, borrow from friends/relatives, or listen to the radio.
When I see a way to pipe cash back to my favorite musicians, without supporting the RIAA, NetPD, 'tallica and others (who I beleive made illegal intrusions into millions of people's privacy) then I'll start spending on my favorite bands.
The RIAA and music companies are screwing the public and the musicians -- stop buying CDs til they stop the theft of our privacy.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
pronoblem
"Napster hurts sales" != "People are engaging in wholesale piracy"
Let's assume for the moment that the stated conclusion is correct: People who use Napster (and similar programs) are less likely to buy CDs. Let's further assume this is causation, not correlation. It still doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Example 1: I download 1 track from Aerosmith's new album. It sucks. So I delete the track and don't buy the album. This is a lost sale, but only temporary (and very slight) piracy. Of course the RIAA hates this because they'd rather you buy a pig in a poke with a no-return policy. But I'd argue that this is no different than in-store, pre-sales listening and should be protected by law.
Example 2: I download some music by a "free musician". I like that musician so much, I stop buying albums from some other band. Here there is no illegal Napster/MP3 use AT ALL, but it STILL affects CD sales. Clearly the RIAA hates this as well.
I know for a fact that both of these are operating since I've experienced them both. For instance, I heard some good things about "Fountains of Wayne" so I dl'd some songs. Some of the songs were awesome but some were duds. I listed these by album and found that I probably wanted to buy album A but not album B. Without the "fair use" information I got from Napster I would have artificially inflated the sales figures with a purchase I didn't want.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
You need to be beaten with a cluestick if you think Napster is the only significant way of pirating MP3's. I knew people who stopped buying CD's in 1997, and there used to be all sorts of web sites with MP3 wares, and they have always been transferred over chat rooms and the like. Not to mention CD copying (which became a mass-mainstream activity around that time also)
The most compelling statistic in the article was the fact that in the highest bandwidth areas, sales were down over double what they were down in the lowest bandwidth areas. This sounds like a smoking gun to me. You can't use the on-line sales argument because it doesn't take significant bandwidth to access CDNOW and the like.
What about people like me who years ago fell out of the habit of buying music, long before MP3's came along?
Before I started downloading MP3's, I'd bought very few CD's in the previous few years. Throughout the 1970's, 80's, and early 90's, I'd bought music (less each year), but now I've got several kids and don't have the time or inclination. My life is too hectic.
But I _do_ have broadband access, and I can easily download music. I've downloaded thousands of MP3's in the past two years (I queue up the next day's downloads before I go to bed). I never listen to most of them, and I find myself coming back to (downloaded) MP3's of albums I already own, from years ago. But I also get to hear some new music this way. (I don't listen to the radio at all.) I really only play music when I'm working at the computer, sort of like having a radio on in the background.
I've bought a few cd's in the past two years, since I started downloading MP3's, but not very many. BUT: That's still _more_ than I bought in the couple of years before I started with MP3's. I believe that, without MP3's, I wouldn't have bought any cd's at all in the past two years.
Does that make me a net loss or a net gain for the music industry? Or too insignificant to matter?
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Whatever the interpretations of the sales figures, the study is likely to show up in court and in Congress, as judges and lawmakers puzzle over how to treat software like Napster in the future.
;)
If you control the stimulus you control the response.
"The findings come as no surprise and confirm our worst fears," said Amy Weiss, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is suing Napster. "This demonstrates the importance of protecting artists' rights on the Internet."
How about protecting artist's rights in the real world? (cached for your protection
This article is horrible, mainly because if you just glance at it (like our politicians will do) it would seem to support the RIAA, when in fact, it says nothing at all.
--
+&x
Nobody who has access to broadband internet access buys CD's anymore.
I have a cablemodem...yet I buy a couple CDs a month. Except for the Body Count mp3s I ripped off a friend's CD (who lives one floor above me), every mp3 I have comes from my own collection of CDs and legally-downloaded mp3s from bands offering them.
The reason why RIAA is going apeshit over Napster and similar services is that they are losing a fortune
Yeah, they lost a huge -$1.4 billion last year.
Wait...according to you, the industry is losing a fortune. The RIAA's claiming that too...and yet reports numbers like the above.
Every time I go to HMV, the aisles are full...of people buying CDs. I'm sure more than a few have decent broadband connections.
Well, I guess that argument is toast, non?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
"That story is really misleading - and an attempt, accurate or not, to focus on technologies such as Napster for the loss of sales. It reeks of being a 'study' set up for Exhibit A in a lawsuit."
I doubt this thing would ever pop up in court as a piece of evidence. It would be torn apart pretty quickly (just look at how little time it took Slashdot users!).
While it is a hideous study unfit for any trial, it is unfortunately an effective piece of propaganda for the RIAA and Napster foes. That's why it out there - no other reason.
If I was Napster, I'd quickly put out a detailed refutation of the study's "findings". They need to get something out in today's or tomorrow's news cycle to combat the negative effects.
I think the study is a lot worse. The Napster people can't back up what they said either, but they didn't say it in the context of a scientific study. Everybody knows that if I just make a statement ("Napster rescues babies from fires!") it isn't to be taken seriously unless I can back it up, even if sometimes people believe things a little more quickly than they ought. This study, on the other hand, misleads people into thinking that what they're claiming has, in fact, been backed up, when it actually hasn't. Much worse, I think, though propagating the argument that Napster helps CD sales is also irresponsible if you don't have anything to back you up.
-jacob
Yes, they make BILLIONS but stealing from the rich is still stealing. You're not supposed to not steal in order to prevent people from starving. You're supposed to not steal because it is WRONG to steal.
The purpose of paying for stuff is not in order to support the maker. You pay for stuff you get because that's what the seller wants in return for letting you have it. You decide whether or not it is worth it. Right now you're taking the goods without paying for them. Regardless of how much FUD you spread to hide this fact, it's still stealing.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I keep hearing people talking about Napster as a way to find music that you would "never be played on the radio." That would be great, but my experience was quite different.
I downloaded Napster, and the first thing I did was check to see what I could find from bands I like. I was especially looking for bootlegs and b-sides. Searches for more well-known bands (The Smiths, Nick Cave, etc. types) turned up a couple albums. Searches for more obscure (but not exactly rare) bands (Slowdive, The Cranes, Love Spirals Downwards) turned up zilch. My question is this: where is all of this music that never gets played on the radio?
This was a couple months ago, so maybe things have changed, but I found Napster to be most useful to find songs that get overplayed on the radio.
If you're faced with such a decision, buy an $18 cd or download it, of course you'll download it. of course, a person on this kind of budget wouldn't be buying many CDs anyway. The question is really -- does mp3s being available to me cause me to buy fewer CDs? No. I truly don't believe mp3 makes a serious impact here. And I _WOULD_ say that it increases concert sales and many records are bought based on a person hearing the mp3 before hearing the music anywhere else.
According to current law, sorry - you have to repurchase in ALL those cases. Isn't it nice how legislation works when industries get to write their own regulations? :(
The OLGA (On Line Guitartab Archive) was taken down because the HFA (Harry Fox Agency) sent a cease and desist letter. The HFA is an agency that "helps" published music writers collect royalties.
HFA says that since the OLGA contained Tabulature (a different method for reading guitar music) for free, that netizens would be going there instead of buying music. HFA was indifferent to the facts that
1. That transcriptions were created by non-published non-professional musicians.
2. Every transcription at OLGA had a little disclaimer that said basically "I do not guarantee that this transcription is correct since I am not the artist, I have not published any music and I'm doing this for free, so if it's wrong call someone who cares."
I think that this was done by HFA to head off the possibility of losing income. As usual the big guy has more money to oppress the little guy.
Until netizens unite and use only predetermined methods on the net, big business will still have a say.
I am a musician. I used to go to OLGA to learn. I suppose I could go to the library, but what are the chances that they will have a transcription of Metallica's latest recording?
I follow the music business because I have to . Sony shoves garbage down my throat. So do a lot of the other big music people. It bombards me.
When I want something new and different, I go to IUMA or some other type of out outlet.
If you would like to discuss the music business, call someone with an MBA, NOT a musician.
But you know what? Having that cassette turned me into a fan I subsequently purchased the following LP and even went back and bought the one I'd taped previously. So that band (Love Tractor in case you're curious) benefitted from my "illegal taping", despite their plea that I refrain.
Is this anecdote illustrative of anything? Personally, I think so. Music is a great promotional tool. The motivation should be on expanding distribution, not restricting it. If I were a recording industry executive, I'd be looking at shooting ahead of the rabbit rather than trying to create obstacles. I'd be embracing the technology as the viral marketing tool than it is. In the short term, I wouldn't be worried about eroding profits, taking solace in the fact that people with -56K connections aren't too enamored with spending 15-30 minutes downloading a track...assuming they know how to access it in the first place. I'd be a fool to characterize college campuses as dens of rampant MP3 trading rather than viewing them as fertile ground for cultivating future fan bases. Even so, there's a much larger population out there that is still uninitiated or unaffected by the lure of "free music online". In the meantime, I'd start building a strategy to embrace and exploit this coming wave. I'd strive to make my retail product better than the freely exchanged product; adding multimedia content, including extended liner notes, enclose coupons or promotional giveaways...the creative possibilities are numerous. Make the retail product something worth spending money on. Use the free MP3 (or whatever digital format you like) to promote the product. It's like a huge listening station where you are trying to hook listeners into wanting more and better. If the music is disposable, then it won't stand up to this model, but then that's a good example of natural selection isn't it? Might cut down on the ephemeral successes of future Milli Vanillis and Spice Girls. If the music is in demand, then you have more sales and more profit.
Oh yeah, and I wouldn't gouge my customers with unsupportable product pricing and then blame things like My.MP3.Com and Napster for flat sales.
For a change of pace, scrounge through the heaps of amateurs at MP3.Com and see what gems you can find. Building fans. Here's a small "station" of World Beat music I've created -- Outside the Box. Make your own; share with friends. MPPP may be in the tank but I think they're doing a lot of things right.
Mambo dogface in the banana patch
...it has been discovered, after many intensive studies, that the new "Casette Tape" technology has had a negative impact upon Vinyl record sales. Industry representatives are blaming the ability to record albums onto blank casettes and distribute them illegally for the drop in sales.
New technology wipes out the old. This is Darwinism at its best: the record companies are being told "Evolve or die!"
What you are looking at here is the difference between correlation and causation.
It's like the cave man who beat his hammer on a rock the same time that lightning struck. Just because he beat his hammer, and lightning struck, doesn't mean that beating the hammer causes lightning.
Correlation does not imply causation. If you choose the causation in advance, and then check for correlation, you can "prove" almost anything.
The study did nothing to investigate the factors involved. You can't just assume that they are one thing or another, because if you are going to assume, there is no reason to do a study in the first place.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
You want to know why the RIAA is scared of Napster? Because consumers have more power. I can listen to ALL of the tracks on a cd to figure out if it's worth buying. Not just the 1 hit on a $15 CD that the RIAA thinks will sell the CD to 90% of the target audience. It means they have less control over their consumers. It means they can't manipulate us as they have in the past.
You've never ever been to a CD store have you? They have had these things called listening booths there for ages now where you can listen to all the tracks as many times as you want to before choosing to buy. Admittedly, this is only available for new music, but that's what the RIAA makes most of their money off anyway.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I remember when cds first came out. The music industry said they had to charge higher prices for the cds to pay for development costs and that after time the prices would come down. Well, they lied... as if you didn't know.
So, I say pirate all the music you want. The musicians will still be overpaid and overrated. It's only a minor dent in the music industry's revenue (if that)... and most people decide to buy cds even if they have all the mp3s. I do, anyways... if it's a good cd.
MP3s allow me to sample an entire cd BEFORE I invest my hard earned money on a lame cd with one good song... something I've done MANY times in the past.
As far as I'm concerned, the music biz owes me big time. Screw them.
You may claim that there's multiple data points, spacially separated (ie, different colleges), but they're temporarily the same. (ie, it's the same Napster, in the same market conditions, etc), so you cannot conclude anything useful from this study (IMHO, of course).
Otherwise, they can point to any event in the news, and show a correlation just the same. For example, they could claim that since the MSFT trial started over a year ago, CD sales have been declining. Thus, they conclude, the chaos caused by the trial of the world's largest software house is significantly cutting into CD sales.
Come on! Note that I'm not saying Napster doesn't reduce CD sales, but that there isn't enough data available to implicitly show it (through this study, that is).
Just my twopence.
make world, not war
As for MP3 "piracy" itself, you're just gonna have to suck it up. Be a big boy.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Having free music - Priceless.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Perhaps Napster should work together with online CD sellers. But then I suppose everybody would bitch about 'advertising' in their software.
The way it could work is that Napster would detect the artist or song that is being played, and show a banner that says "Like this music? Buy their CD!" with a link to an appropriate CD sales site.
Someone does a study, people see what they want to see, and no one remebers correlation doesn't imply causation.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Napster probably does hurt record sales. I don't see any reason to think it shouldn't. I for one know that I don't buy as much music as I used to, and I have been using Napster quite a bit.
The question in my mind, isn't if it does, but why. Most people are quick to jump on Napster users and critisize them as greedy theives. Are they really? Maybe, but I like to think that if I had the opportunity to pay for the music I'm downloading, I would do it. This is more an evolution of medium I think. People want to be able to download music, and they are going to do so. If it's free, well fine, but if the record industry came up with a way to charge for it then people would still use it.
Personally I think this is just the kind of thing we need to shake up the industry. The industry has been increasing prices and falling into slothlike pattern. They are no longer worried about pleasing the consumer because they think they already have us pleased. They keep increasing prices and we keep paying them. Well no more. They will have to adapt to this new medium or die.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I'm thinking that maybe this whole Napster thing is Karma getting back at the record companies for overpricing CD's. I mean yes,downloading copyrighted material may be stealing,but you can understand people's motivations for doing it. Why drop $15-20 for something that only cost a couple bucks to make when you can get it for free? If CD's were cheaper,people would probably be less inclined to copy/download. It also doesn't help that most of the money is going to the companies and not the artists which makes people think that by doing this they're just 'getting even with the man'. I think the record companies are ultimately just being made to lie in the bed they made.
On a side note;I can't believe anyone even buys those high-priced CD's. I used to have a part-time job at a mall that had a Sam Goody and a Wall. Right across the street(there was even an underground tunnel that went under the street to make it easy to get there) was a Best Buy,which had the same CD's,and in fact a better selection, for several dollars cheaper than the mall stores. Yet people still packed into the mall stores. As Kelly Bundy said:"the mind wobbles".
==== Warning:this poster contains subject matter that may be offensive. Flaming discretion is advised.
It's very easy to bring up data like this, now that the RIAA has someone to point the finger at. Funny how noone really complained about anything when it was just Oth.net etc... ----------------- Trim the fat!!!
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Just replace "www." with "partners." and I think it should work (someone elses cookie is on my computer right now so it works either way).
:-)
And moderators, no, that's not informative
As reported earlier, SoundScan division VNU Marketing tested the theory by looking specifically at sales in stores near universities. In those stores, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually dropped 4 percent in the past two years. According to the RIAA, full-length CD dollar value grew 12.3 percent last year alone. "It looks like the RIAA clearly has an impact on sales in the U.S.," said Joe Blow, CEO of a now rich digital rights management firm.
Jack Kirk, who manages independent CD store Dr. Wax near Northwestern University, says the labels are reaping the rewards of their own pricing policies. Cash-strapped students have turned to online music swapping because the record companies have priced the CDs of many popular artists out of students' reach, he said.
"It costs major labels less than $1 to make a Pearl Jam album, but the list prices are nearly $20," Kirk said. "They've precipitated this themselves--it's ridiculous. The major label companies are (run by) extremely evil people; I'm sorry, but there's no other way to say it."
The RIAA had no comment.
What you (so convinently for RIAA/metallica schills) fail to mention is that colleges have been caveing in left to right to the RIAA's pressure to ban napster.
Or have you so convinently (for RIAA/metallica schills) forgotten that fact?
Or have you so convinently (for RIAA/metallica schills) missed the stories on slashdot the last few months about colleges caveing in to RIAA pressure to ban napster?
Or have you so convinently (for RIAA/metallica schills) forgotten that college students are among the highest target market for *USEDU CD sales?
A while back someone had posted a link to a list of colleges and universities that are supplicating themselves before the RIAA and banning napster on campus.
It'd be intresting to see if the study bothered to take into account the fact that the administration of these schools DID cave in to pressure and see if sales of CDs are HIGHER near colleges where MP3s are banned.
Or could it *POSSIBLY* be that college students are traditionally the most socially consious and actively progressive element of soceity; more apt to *PROTEST* injustice, and more apt to *BOYCOTT* RIAA albums and MPAA movies?
john
Imagine all the people...
(Everybody really knows that most money is made on tour!)
Everybody knows that the earth is flat, that marijuana cures cancer, and that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful god who cares about your sex life.
Sure, maybe there are artists who make most of their money on tour, but most musicians tour to get people to buy the album. You've heard the phrase "go on tour to support the album"? Have you ever heard "sell the album to support the tour"?
The idea that touring is where the money is, is wrong. It's a moral justification for downloading music, but it just doesn't hold water. Personally, I don't pretend that artists don't make any money off album sales; I justify stealing by "I wouldn't have bought it anyway".
But, I went to Linux a few weeks ago, and don't have sound set up yet. So I'm certainly glad I have my CDs to listen to.
--Kevin
So why do sales decline most next to universities? Because sales to buyers with the highest price elasticity of demand will suffer the most, and with fixed budgets, college students certainly are among the most elastic consumers.
The story could easily have been titled ("spun") as: study indicates cartel pricing behavior by record industry.
Maybe the RIAA can learn from them.
Listening to you people drone on about how Napster does not affect cd sales is sickening! Until they imposed a bandwidth cap, Napster was using 60% of my University's considerable bandwidth. That is equivilent to one hell of alot of CD's.
Nobody who has access to broadband internet access buys CD's anymore. Between Napster, Gnutella, and the Network Neighborhood on campus every piece of music you cold possibly listen to is available, FREE.
The reason why RIAA is going apeshit over Napster and similar services is that they are losing a fortune! You may agree or disagree with RIAA's position or the mafia-like way that they do business; to say that Napster and services like it do not affect CD sales is deluding yourself!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
People stop buying CDs when they become easy to pirate. As much as you hate to admit it, it's ILLEGAL. You are STEALING.
I'm no saint either. I stopped buying CDs as soon as I got a CD burner (don't have the bandwidth for Napster). But you won't find me trying to rationalize my theft...
"Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students."
How are these college students going to buy CDs if they are poor? Not having Napster does not alter their lack of funds. This fact seems to contradict your statement.
MoatBuilder
Even if Napster cuts into record sales, which I seriously doubt, there's not much that the RIAA could or should do about it. The internet makes it so much easier to pirate music and software, and if Napster gets shut down, there's still Gnutella and other such programs. I think CD Burners cut more into CD sales than Napster, and you can't go around making sure no one burns CD's. The music industry must find a new business model to complement their CD sales, such as ad-supported music sites on the internet.
"Control the media, control the mind."-Cabal
Nice theory, but that doesn't explain why the most frequently pirated artists on Napster are Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Britney Spears. If people think that the music is crap and won't buy it, then why are they still listening to it and illegally stealing it?
Wow! What an amazingly shody study. For one thing, according to VNU the greatest drop in sales was the year before napster even existed. What were their methods? What Universities did they select? How did they chose the Universites and stores they would select? Why did they only consider sales of brick and mortar retailers? Also, apparantly VNU doesn't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Even if there weren't so many holes in the rest of the study concluding from these numbers that, "It is now clear that the controversial practices of companies that provide directories and an easy interface to libraries of unlicensed music are in fact detrimental to the growth of the music business and those artists whom they claim to support." is completely unfounded. This is the sort of mistake that made 19th century scientists say, "Old meat rots and old meat has lots of maggots on it. Therefore rotting meat must synthesize maggots." This study is such pseudo-science that it wouldn't last five minutes under pier review.
"Stealing". Oy vey. Copyright is entirely arbitrary. Are you saying that if an author died in 1931 and I make a copy of his work, that is "stealing" and "wrong", but if he died in 1929 and I make a copy of his work, that is any different? If he died in 1929, that's "right", and you can tell the difference between 1929 (right) and 1931 (wrong). Wonderful. I certainly don't have that skill.
What about fair use? If using information that another person "owns" is "stealing", then why is fair use not stealing? Doesn't the other person really "own" the information?
What about the laws that allow anybody to cover anybody elses songs, and only pay a royalty specified by law (rather than make a deal with the original author)? Isn't that "stealing"? Doesn't the author (or his employer) really "own" the information?
What about expiration of copyright? No other property ownership expires. Isn't expiration "stealing", or at least gross over-taxation? Doesn't the author really "own" the information?
What about the use of information authored by persons before the advent of copyright. Isn't that also "stealing"?
What about information created by one person, and then created again independently by another person. Doesn't the original author "own" the information? How can another person own the exact same information?
> I've never met a pirate who didn't turn out to
> be just a cheap bastard making excuses.
That's absurd. There are plenty opponents of copyright who show no evidence of ulterior motive.
Ooooh, if this one's allowed, I've got a whole lotta tapes to trade in. :-)
There's also the argument that out-of-print media should be fair game for free distribution. Although I have yet to see a final conclusion to that debate (possibly because I'm not looking hard enough...).
Really, Napster (et al) is merely a tool. It happens to be very useful for the above reasons, as well as for piracy. It just searches for filenames which end in .mp3. Big deal.
So it turns out that this newfangled technology is a threat to the RIAA's money-making formula. I don't blame them for trying to fight it, even though they will inevitably lose. And then physical audio media will go the way of the Beta cassette.
Did VHS kill Beta sales? Yes. Will MP3 kill CD sales? Yes. Is this really all that bad? No.
So legal/ethical or not, the industry is gonna change. And it'll be that much easier for me to trade in my old cassettes. :-)
Definitely true. Perhaps if the labels made CD singles worth buying, they might alleviate some of the problem.
They could either make the prices extremely low or put extras on - Tori Amos, for instance, often includes videos and interesting B-sides on her singles that aren't available on albums. Consequently, I end up purchasing nearly all her singles, as well as the albums.
New bands who want to build a following (and not seem to be one-hit wonders) should probably find a really good album cut - it's not like most of 'em have to worry about cannibalizing future single sales - or put the video on the single.
Pricing is paramount - the labels need to find a price where conscience outweighs convienience. In other words, it needs to be cheap enough so the consumers would consider it as a reasonable throwaway purchase - if someone downloads an illegal copy, they should feel guilty about depriving the artist of a sale. The only way that'll happen is if they might actually be willing to buy the thing in the first place.
Bite the hand.
I'd say that MP3s are the most benificial to the consumer. There are WAY too many albums full of complete crap that have 1 good song. The record companies used to be able to employ clever marketing, releasing only the good songs to radio. when have you heard the crappy songs from albums being played on the radio. A consumer gets a whole album, and it's crap, so he doesn't buy it. I, myself, only buy chrisitian music, and because of copyright laws where I live, it's perfectly legal to download mp3s. The thing is that the mp3s I have downloaded with napster are songs I'd never buy because I could do without them. I have a few singles, the good stuff that I know, but I don't like buying albums, it's a large waste of money. If, and only if, the artists brought out a CD with plenty of good music, it would be worth these rediculous prices. MP3s hold truth, and that's what scares them.
IOW, the college music market is much more open to alternative forms of distribution and alternative bands in general. Thus, ANY thing that would tend to deflect marketshare away from major labels would tend to have a larger effect in the college market. Plus, college students have less money to blow to begin with.
So, it could be a resurgence of 'used' music, more piracy than their already was, or alternative distribution channels like mp3.com taking the bite out of RIAA (if it's anyone).
Funny how this didn't get posted... "Piracy is bad," says Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, when asked about the matter. "Of course you should be able to sue over copyrights. The one good lawsuit in the whole Napster case is the one by Metallica: a suit by the actual authors. While it's probably motivated mostly by money, I can still at least hope that there is a strong feeling of morals there, too."
---------
---------
I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
>In the US, in 1985, records cost $10. Now in the
.ASF or .MPG format a couple days after its release.
>US in 2000, CD's cost $15. Inflation in the past
>15 years has been about 50%. Which makes the
>cost exactly on target.
Correct. Albums were overpriced back then, and they still are today. It costs the record companies what, at most $2 to create a CD? Their proffit margin is rediculous.
>Nobody has a problem paying $10 for a movie
>(which is temporary pleasure), but whine about
>paying $15 for a CD (a lifetime of listening
>pleasure).
Funny you should mention that. I do have a problem with theater's rediculous prices. You know what I do? Instead of going to the theater, I dowload the movie in
Back when VHS first came out the MPAA was complaining that it would lead to movie piracy. Back then a single movie on VHS was upwards of $100, what did people do? One person would buy a tape, then hook their VCR into their friend's VCR and run off a few copies. Slowly VHS prices started coming down. Now that a VHS movie is $14.99 it's not worth people's time to make copies. The same goes for albums, when the prices become reasonable people (say... $4.99?) it won't be worth your time to download and burn a full album.
- WD_40
I recently held an animal rights barbecue
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
That story is really misleading - and an attempt, accurate or not, to focus on technologies such as Napster for the loss of sales. It reeks of being a 'study' set up for Exhibit A in a lawsuit. Other major technology factors such as BUYING A CD ONLINE were apparently ignored. Additionally, how does this fit in with the huge increase in sales/profit that the RIAA has reported for the past 2 years?
I tend to buy most of my CD's online these days, unless I am hunting through used cd stores. Its easier, faster, and less stressful. That, and the selection is infinitely better.
Check out Magic Firesheep!
That not-yet-released album has been floating on Nap. for several weeks now. I wonder what effect the 0dayMP3 release will have on the album sales.
The official release is june 13 (http://www.thehip.com/). Could we perhaps have a slashPoll like:
A) I've downloaded Music@work MP3s
B) I've downloaded Music@work MP3s and will buy the album
C) I've downloaded Music@work MP3s and bought the album
D) I bought the album, don't have the MP3s
E) Tragically WHO?
---
You make a good point... and yes I have seen the listening booths. But the few they have only contain "popular" music. (AKA: What the Music industry WANTS you to buy)
Try finding me a booth that for instance has the latest 808 State CD in it. With Napster I grabed it last night and ordered a legit copy today, all from the comfort of my chair. That's what I call convinient.
Ex-Nt-User
Imagine that I can download an entire album. Why would I buy it?
"But the CD sounds so much better" you say. "Surely if you like the songs, you'll buy the album".
Then the question should arise: Does Napster increase sales?
By the reasoning of most mp3 apologists, it should. It should also increase sales of concert tickets and t-shirts, which we are told (by those who are completely uninformed in the business) are the main sources of revenue for artists.
But does it? There is no evidence that Napster increases record sales. Prove it, and maybe I'll change my mind.
Now think of this. You're a kid, maybe 15 or so. You make a little bit of money every now and then. Maybe your parents even give you a few bucks as an allowance.
Do you:
A) Buy a $18 CD?
B) Download it for free?
And if you download it, would you go out and buy it afterwords? Sounds pretty unreasonable to me.
For all their whining about "helping artists", the mp3 crowd has a lot to answer for itself. And until they do, they're just spewing empty, greedy rhetoric.
I'm not arguing that napster and mp3 doesn't impact record sales... (and if it did, mp3 itself would impact far more than just napster... people share in many ways, especially when connected over high-speed)
The stats interpretation is screwed up.
They say 'record sales are down 4% over 2 years near this university' and 'this university has people using napster' and 'these other universities, that had real napster problems, have had 7% drops in the area near the university for record sales'.
Both of these facts simply show that two phenomenon are tied together geographically. Although it may seem logical that napster is the cause of the drop in record sales, it really isn't.
Perhaps students have better things to spend their money on now? Perhaps the record stores are not carrying the proper music anymore? Perhaps students just order shit online more?
At any rate.. if people aren't shopping at your store anymore, perhaps you don't have a product that interests them. If music can be had for free, because it costs *nothing* to distribute... then why do you think you can be in business?
Not only do you look like a fool for not getting it, but you also have no user name. Sorry, no offence intended. Just constructive critisism.
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Dude, you've basically chased your own tail. How can you say "support an artist by buying the cd" when the damn labels don't support them, by "allowing" them to make 3 cents per song per CD. The frickin labels do nothing but line their _own_ coffers with the rest of the money. They couldn't buy stamps unless they had artists contracts and they _STILL_ screw them. I don't agree with you in the "buy the CD" sense, but you have a great idea on the other side. Let's all send $2 - $5 bucks (or whatever) for songs you _do_ like DIRECTLY to the artists. They's love that if people honestly did that.
;-) in which case, duh! But for most artists they have only to look forward to touring. Just wanted to make a clarification.
Now your statement about the RIAA is a little bit incorrect. The RIAA, contrary to their title, are not looking out for the best interest of music "artists." They get paid by the record labels, thussly they look out for the interests of said labels. Now of course the Labels supposedly look out for their artists, but normally that is not the case. Big-name artists (Like Metallica or Madonna) get preferential treatment from their labels, unless they own them
Bob
Problem with your methodology: it is just as likely to prove that using Napster hurts CD sales as it is to prove that studying political science hurts CD sales, or that computer science hurts CD sales, or anything else you can correlate with being a college student hurts CD sales. Off the top of my head, I would certainly do surveys at colleges to determine where college students were getting their music and compare that with survey data from non-college-students, with an eye towards file ripping and online music shopping. First I'd need to establish that college students are actually buying fewer CD's, which may or may not be true. Then I'd have to establish that people who aren't buying the CD's are getting the music through other sources (piracy). A possible study that comes to mind would be taking universities that have Napster and comparing them to those that don't in terms of music purchasing rates, controlling for neighborhood type and student body characteristics. That's just off the top of my head, though- there may be holes in that, and there could be a better way to do it anyway.
The point is, it really isn't adequate to do what the people who conducted this study did. It honest-to-goodness does not and cannot establish rigorously what they want to establish. If it turns out that there isn't a good way to determine what they want to determine, that doesn't suddenly make bad ways to determine things valid science.
-jacob
While your anecdotal evidence is nice, here's a scientific study referenced by the RIAA that contradicts your conclusion.
Quote, "As reported earlier, SoundScan division VNU Marketing tested the theory by looking specifically at sales in stores near universities, where online music has been more widely adopted than in the general public. In those stores, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually dropped 4 percent in the past two years. In stores near the 67 colleges that have banned Napster, citing an overload on their internal networks, sales have dropped 7 percent in two years."
Record stores near colleges that have access to Napster do better than record stores near colleges that do not allow access to Napster.
automatically assuming this is FUD isn't that rational of a decision. Is it such a radical idea to think that kids who can easily get music for free aren't buying less CDs?
Don't be mean or my friend Oog will smash your head
Since Napster came along, I haven't sold a single copy of my album.
Oh, wait... I don't have an album...
College students spend a finite disposable income (basically their CC limits and bank overdraughts) on music and beer. As part of a Global Brewing Conspiracy, the brewers produced Napster. Make either one of these essential student needs free, and the students will spend exactly as much as before, but they'll spend it exclusively on the other instead.
That's free as in music, not free as in beer.
The report doesn't actually indicate anything beyond the raw stats - it's kind of pointless.
Currently I find it hard to beleive Napster eats into profit mainly because its just a search engine, it's not a media format or a playback device. It's just not all that interesting a tool.
When and if mp3 or its replacement reaches a better sound quality, and can be used portably and easily (Rio sucks) then it's a threat.
MPAA or whoever needs to pay more attention to someone like Sony releasing high quality digital hi-fi hardware and standard tools and protocols for moving digital music between the hi-fi, the personal player and the car. That will change the industry FAR more than a bunch of college kids wasting their college's bandwidth on tunes.
-----
It's people like you what cause unrest!
Seriously. You're playing right into their hands. All they have to do is release a convincing-enough-looking report full of charts and numbers and figures and utterly devoid of factual conclusions ("...and signifying nothing"), and people like you eat it right up. I bet 80% of the people who've read that article and have not also read all these comments here (and thus been made to slowly realize the truth) believe every word of it. That's the whole point of FUD: to make people believe lies by disguising them as truth well enough that they don't look like lies.
Here's what needs to happen. Yahoo! (tm) and any other organization that makes "news" reports needs to stop just belching out what someone else has told them is "truth." They have reporters, don't they? Do they report, or are they just mouthpieces for Big Busine$$? There is no opportunity to debate the issue. You get the "news" story, and that's it; "Well, it was on Yahoo!(tm), so it must be true!" People just don't do their own research anymore; they just believe everything they read from places like Yahoo!(tm), CNN(tm), ZD Net(tm), and C|Net(tm) because it would be too much effort to dig into, for example, that "study" and realize what a great steaming fly-infested pile of donkey dung it really is. Most people have never heard of causation, and thus something like "The sun rose today just as I was taking a dump... so the action of flushing the toilet must have made it come up!" still makes sense to them.
What it all comes down to is education. Yes, even septagenarians need to be educated at times. These widely-held beliefs like "Record companies have to pay the artists lots of money; that's why CDs still (STILL!) cost so much" have to be eradicated from the societal archetype, the racial memory that most everyone's belief structure comes from and which gets taught to the children, who teach it to their children, who... etc. You have to look at who benefits from a particular belief to know where to begin correcting it. Here are the facts:
And that's where we stand now. The battle lines have been drawn, the soldiers are preparing, the mud is being slung, the lies are being propagated and believed by the masses of uneducated people who can't be bother to do any original thinking or research of their own into a subject that, frankly, they could care less about. You think the average housewife cares about record companies or MP3s? It doesn't affect them. The tide of public sentiment will never change from the status quo if the majority of people don't care about it. Court judges will continue to back up Big Busine$$, juries will still rule against the Little Guys (utterly forgetting their right of Jury Nullification), and nothing will change because of the golden rule: "He who has the most gold makes the rules."
What a pitiable species humans are.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
The NYTimes has an article on it as well, here... I think you may have to register.
Ok, yes, of course we must consider that it's just FUD, and these people seem like flacks, but it doesn't necessarily mean that these aren't true statistics. I'm struck particularly by the refernece by the store owner that singles' sales are dropping most precipitously. That's where the RIAA and all really take a hit.... singles cost, what, $5(?) and have only one or two songs.... much better profitablity than LP discs. I think Napster does affect the sales of those things.
But I hate those things. If singles became primarily distributed over the Net, for $.50 a pop, that'd make me a happy happy camper. CD prices are ungodly, it's true, but why RIAA goons can't wake up and exploit the living hell out of the public's desire for instant downloads of the New Big Thing (tm) like Britney or who-the-tanj-ever for dirt cheap.... well, it sucks.
In conclusion... um... go Napster?
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
epitonic.com is an independent music advocate - reviewing only obscure songs and bands that they like. You can browse by genre and the editor who recommended the song. All the songs are full length - I've bought a few right off the site - bands I'd never heard of (or would have otherwise). It seems napster, et al, helps smaller bands and hurts(?) larger ones.
Or even better yet, just read the postings on
That has caused more troubles in this society then Napaster, Volient Video games, and guns combined.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
... And one could argue that everything in the universe is arbitrary. What's the point?
Copyright has a long lineage of fairly easy to understand history & logic on why it was created and what it implies. I suggest you read up some of it. The DMCA tries to change it a bit and the question now is whether these changes are for the better or not.
-Stu
I was only addressing your allegation that the RIAA doesn't want you to be able to sample music. The RIAA makes almost all of its money off of popular music. The rest is a smaller segment and the RIAA is not going to risk looking like a complete bunch of pricks in order to make a few extra dollars in that segment.
In summary, I think the RIAA are pricks but the not being able to sample music argument is not the reason.
Mmmm.. Donuts
These bands made a conscious choice to sign a contract with a record company, and should have been aware of the pricing policies before they did so.
So, after years of washing dishes for a living, when the record company shows up to offer the next Sarah McLachlan her recording deal, before she can decide, she has to go look up their pricing policies in 67 different countries?
OK, so let's fast forward, their pricing policies seem sound, so she accepts the deal. Two weeks later the company adds a Minidisc division, but prices them three times as much as CDs in Venezuela and Sri Lanka. Should she be a conscientious objector and quit, supposing her contract is even written in such a way that she can do so?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
nt
$.03 per song per CD sold currently under the collective bargaining agreement of the RIAA. Not much, but still.. How can you people say you're supporting the artist? I don't see you all rushing to send money in for the one or two songs that don't suck on the CD. You claim you'd pay $2 - $5 for a good song, so put your money where your mouth is. Shut up, and pay up. Because if you DON'T buy the CD, and just download it from Napster, talking about supporting the artist is crap. The RIAA supports the artists more than the common napster thief, even if it is around $.50 a CD sold. I'm sorry, but if you want to support your artist and ruin the RIAA, give the artists proof that this method will pay them better than the RIAA. Then you will see Napster flourish, and quite possibly LEGALLY too. magnwa
Let's leave the editorial bias aside for just a bit, shall we? It's obvious on the face of it that Napster / Gnutella / other pirating mechanisms are going to hurt album sales. Sure, there are people who use Napster to "try it out" and then buy the album (online or not), but for every one of those, anyone who's honest can name ten who just use Napster for, "Wow, I'll never have to pay for music again!"
I'm not arguing that the MP3 format should be suppressed or anything stupid like that; I have a Rio (as well as an MD recorder) and I really like having my music collection on my HD so I don't have to take CDs back and forth to work with me. But I think it's really disingenuous to pretend that napster doesn't encourage piracy because that's really what it's for. Notwithstanding napster.com's protests to the contrary, that's what it does.
Should it be legal anyway? Possibly. But if it should, it should be because Napster shouldn't be held responsible for what its users choose to share, not because we'd like to believe it doesn't really discourage music sales. Crying "FUD" doesn't win any points with intelligent people.
On a slight tangent, Moby made an interesting comment while doing a live webcast on checkout.com a couple weeks back. He said that (after disclaiming that it was not the opinion of his label or checkout.com) in his own experience with Napster was that users tended to get singles from it, and if they liked them it made them more likely to go out and buy the actual album. He believed that Napster was actually increasing record sales (or at least focusing them).
What does this say? Napster helped preserve 3% of those lost record sales!!!!
Or the other interpretation would be that the campuses with bandwidth problems bad enough to necessitate banning can be tied to revenue loss. You have to remember that the study is based on 2 years of revenue, while Napster (ab)use is a fairly recent phenomenon. It could just mean that these campuses are more likely to pirate, i.e. from word of mouth or "because they did it."
There's an interpretation for everything when you do these studies, especially when you neglect variables. That's why we have the "scientific method" requiring us to try to be impartial.
-- A.J.
"Um. Yeah."
This goes back to the same old argument of something that is lost vs. something you never had. Companies like Micro$oft claim LOST revenues due to piracy, in reality they never would have sold to the pirates because their prices are too high. The music industry is now claiming LOST CD sales due to napster, but most people will just do WITHOUT the CD due to the high price. There is a movement, I understand to lower CD sales and it will be interesting to see if the music industry claims GAINED sales due to that (if it ever happens). I doubt they will.
(somewhere during the making of the Black album)
s/Metallica RULES/Metallica SUCKS/g
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
I myself prefer CD or Vinyl to the MP3... I also like liner notes and album art.
I'd be willing to bet that used CD sales hurt the bottom line of the record companies more than MP3.
pronoblem
The RIAA can probably find any number of studies that support their arguments... while ignoring a similar or greater number of studies that refute them. The fact that their biggest clients -- the major labels -- have been found to be engaging in collusion to artificially boost CD prices and other recent news items about the increase in music sales/profits just goes to show how pointless this entire affair is. If they'd been shown to be actually losing money perhaps the lawsuit would make sense. The problem is that their profits didn't increase the way they always have in the past.
Personally, I don't know who buys a lot of music through the major retail outlets that this group's study polls anyway. Most of my friends either buy via mail order from places like http://cuneiformrecords/ , at small privately-owned stores (where the owner really knows the music), or I see bands live at small clubs and buy their CDs at the show. I buy at the large stores only when I see something in the bargain/cutout bin where the prices are closer to earth and even then, only when I'm running an errand at a nearby store or shopping for something else the big store carries. At a recent show, I paid only $12 for the band's latest CD which is far below what I would have paid at a major retailer (assuming that the CD would have even been available there) and is less than what CDs were selling for when they first came out in the early/mid-80s (Remember when they were going to be cheaper than LPs? Ha ha ha!). Plus I got to chat with band members while I was making the purchase. I've got to believe that's a better way support your favorite musicians than having them waiting for the miniscule royalty checks from the big recording companies. Maybe that's only true, though, for the bands that I'd go to see (who don't play the arenas anyway) -- Ricky Martin and Brittany Spears might not be able to survive very long playing small clubs.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Bite the hand.
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students. This is not FUD this is fact. I'm in college and I know several dozen people who have massive MP3 collections who have cut down on the amount of CDs they buy, myself included. For every person I have heard say, I buy more CDs because I find more groups (how does this happen? Napster is a search service or do people type random names in the search box?) there are five people who say I probably will never have to buy a CD again.
Personally, I like the argument put forth that even though college students pirate stuff now with MP3s that this will benefit record labels in the long run. The RIAA seems to forget that college students grow up and leave college to become adults with lots of disposable income. After all isn't it former bootlegging college students that pay an arm and a leg to see the Who, Rolling Stones and even Metallica in concert. The proliferation of music on college campuses will create life long fans who will eagerly start spending money on the artist once that disposable income comes around. After all that is the rational behind banks trying to attract college students with various student accounts even though it is a well known fact that college students a perenially broke. If the RIAA had any sense, they wouldn't be trying so desperately to alienate fans because this may come back and bite them on the ass.
Something to consider: I've been a Sarah McLachlan fan since 1989, I've bought all her albums (3 copies of her first, 2 copies of her third, 2 copies of Freedom Sessions), most of her singles, numerous shirts, tour books, souvenirs, and attended so many concerts I lost count (more than ten). How much of that money do you think she's seen? About $1 per album, probably less for the singles, maybe a dollar per shirt... under $20 not counting the concerts, and I doubt she gets the whole $35 from each concert ticket.
Which means in eleven years of being a fanboy, I've given her almost enough money that she could buy two of her own CDs at retail.
Oh it gets better. When you buy a CD from Columbia House, the artists often get NO royalties at all - it's considered an advertising expense! (How come Metallica isn't suing THEM?)
These companies pay their artists "starving wages" (and then MAYBE actually promote them so that they can at least make it up by getting $1 from each of a half million people). Then they say WE'RE the ripoff artists. I think that's just a little bit insulting.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
No, no, no- you're quite wrong. Just step through the logic:
1) College areas have reduced sales
2) Non-college areas have increased sales
3) Napster detracts from sales
4) Therefore, Napster detracts from sales.
Oh wait, that's bad logic. Nevermind.
"Man has always been his own most vexing problem." --Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Nature and Destiny of Man"
With that in mind, any time a record exec tells me Napster kills record sales (which they haven't yet done), I will laugh heartily.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
>You just don't get it, do you? Music is not
>"Open Source". [snip] You can't just take
>whatever you damn well please.
It's nice to hear a sane voice amongst all the wailing and foot stamping. <g>
I seem to recall that "she who writes the code gets to choose the licence." I thought that most Slashdotters were able to respect that when it's applied to software. Why should it be any less applicable to music? Could it be that you were only in it for the free beer after all?
Molly.
go here
<//-------------//> /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."
"I like
Couldn't seem to find that info anywhere..
And I dunno, the article seemed pretty fair, considering quotes like this:
Even today's data can be interpreted in several ways, and it's not clear that online piracy is the culprit.
The drop in college music store sales was more pronounced in 1998 than in 1999--a year before Napster was
written, released and began spreading quickly across college campuses.
In addition, students say other competition, such as online music stores and rewritable CD copies of
store-bought CDs, may be responsible for the drop in sales.
"The majority of my friends buy their CDs online," said Jon Barsook, a student at the University of Southern
California. "If the study says the music stores near the colleges have seen a drop in sales, that doesn't mean
that college students are not buying records."
BilldaCat
>Nobody who has access to broadband internet
>access buys CD's anymore.
Well lets see. I've got access to an OC3 at work, and a 512Kbps dsl at home. I dunno what UC has for bandwidth, but it's undoubtedly pretty high. Is that "broadband" enough for ya?
I bought three CDs in the last week.
Your tautology is disproven. Your auguement is invalid.
Next?
john
Imagine all the people...
I like a Slashdot and the educated patrons of the site but the fact that everyone sticks up for Napster and other programs of the sort is absurd. It would be one thing if we were all using the software for to download unsigned artists who are trying to promote there music, but we all know that programs like Napster allow us to beat the system. Continue beating the system but stop pushing the philosophical BS!
This is the paragraph that I like:
Those numbers compare with an overall sales growth of about 20 percent across the music retailing industry.
The retail music industry is growing by 20% and they're bitching about a 4% decline in small towns where people buy music online. These corporations are making more money then they ever have in the past and suing small companies because they "should" be making more. They sound like spoiled children.
-B
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students
Falling local sales doesn't implicate Napster. There could be other reasons, and both of these alternative channels are also likely to be more common amongst students than the general population.
Napster (and MP3 generally) isn't popular in the UK because our phone charges are too high. The fact that we're also seeing a big drop in high-street CD sales suggests to me that it's mail order taking the biggest bite out, not MP3.
Are you really so gullible as to believe any statements from rock stars to be literally true ?
Maybe she does "support" Napster in a rather agnostic manner (it's Geffen's money its stealing, not hers, so she doesn't care) by not taking Metallica's "sue-everyone" line, but that's hardly doing anything to support it in a pro-active manner. Love has a big mouth, and you shouldn't believe everything that comes out of it.
PS. Sorry to hear about the size issue.
I don't know what the costs are like in the US, but in Europe, the subscription costs for cellular telephones are astronomical.
Furthermore, cell phones are a must for your average adolescent/student. What this means is that young people with a limited budget are sinking all their funds into paying for their cell phones.
This means all that much money less for other discretionary spending. One of the easiest things to cut, given that you can either burn CDs on the cheap, or download mp3s even more cheaply, is music.
In France, the tv show Capital on M6 pointed out that there was a clear correlation between the rise of cell phones among young people and the decline in spending on music (in the form of CDs).
Which is to say it may not be Napster after all that is having this effect, but something completely different.
Gotta go now, have to see if my Autechre download is finished...
It's just like when the industry was whining about how home recording was killing music. The same concept held true.
MP3's aren't killing music, bad music is killing music.
I don't even know why I need to bother on this one folks!
-[ World domination - rains.net ]-
btw, I have spotted quite a few other possible causes mentioned in other posts for the declining sales:
I'm sure there are other possible reasons for the statistics that I missed. Note that like the Napster idea (Students aren't buying music, they're pirating it), these are all just possible reasons. Kinda like the reason Cindy Crawford doesn't return my phone calls could be that she thinks she's not good enough for me.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I agree entirely that the same problems (too much crap, too expensive) exist in music as they do in computer software. The GPL is, IMO, a good solution to the software problem. A much less good solution would have been to set up a network for distributing illegal copies of Windows and MS Office, but that seems to be exactly the approach that people are taking with music.
The situation is only going to get worse. It won't be long until you can download a full album of 24/96 quality music in a matter of seconds, free of charge. I don't see that there's anything that the music industry can to to stop this. They're going to have to change with the times, or disappear altogether.
I hope that the music industry doesn't disappear. They may produce a lot of crap, but they also provide the budget and infrastructure that is, IMO, necessary to produce the quality stuff. I have recorded enough garage bands and bleepy electronic outfits to know that most of what they output is far _worse_ than the drivel produced by the current bunch of pneumatic teenage pop-tarts. I find the idea of all those independent artists in a big online free-for-all quite depressing.
I don't have any solutions to the problem, but it seems to me that we (the nerds) are the people who should be explaining it all to the music industry, and trying to help them find a way to adapt. Instead we seem to have made an enemy.
Molly.
Could it be that people using Napster are previewing songs from a CD that they want then find out that it sucks and is not worth paying $16-$20? Could that be why sales are down? Maybe this will help put an end to the trend of "one hit wonders".
I just have to voice a beef I have with all these people saying that "yea cd's cost less than a buck to make but there are sooo many other costs that 20 bucks really is a reasonable price and they aren't ripping us off!!" First of all I would say that are two things you need to make cd's; one is a band, the other is a cd manufacturer. All the other costs, engineers, producers, etc. get a flat fee which basically is a drop in the bucket when you are selling millions of cd's!! Now as for all these huge promotional fees, advertising and the like that the big bands get do you consider that record companies wouldn't be spending this type of coin if they weren't getting MAJOR returns on it?? Actually making the cd is a fairly cheap affair, once it's finished it seems like it's almost a game to see how many you can get people to buy; spend 500,000 promotional fee here-sell 1 million more cd's, a few hundred thousand more here and a few hundred thousand more albums sell and so on. The fact is the music industry is a major cash cow if you play your cards right, 40 billion per year worth!!! I really doubt that all that money is "necassary" for promotion, and other added on costs; people out there are getting majorly rich and as a poor college student I don't feel too bad taking a couple bucks out of their pocket.
Thought everybody should know that there is a MTV News Now Special on tonight about Napster and the effect it is having on the music industry.
./ tomorrow so that the show can be ripped to pieces in a nice civilized manner.
I like the title, 'Napster: Grand Theft Audio'
Hopefully, there will be a story posted on
Since being introduced to MP3s I haven't bought any less CD's than I did before. Generally I bought about one CD per month, and I still do. But while I used to buy mainstream CD's, I know simply download the mainstream stuff, and buy the less mainstream stuff I otherwise wouldn't have bought, like Wendy Rule's album Deity which I bought last week, and Within Temptation's album Enter about a month ago.
When you download mainstream MP3s, you're screwing the record companies. Of the CD you would have bought, not very much would have gone to the artist, and mainstream artists have enough money anyway, so it doesn't make any difference there. Instead I buy non-mainstream CD's, so money goes to artist who earn a lot less who work for less prestigious (read: more human(e)) record companies.
So in effect, only the distribution of my money has changed. Instead of it all going into the huge pockets of the big record companies, it now ends up in the pockets of alternative artists and record companies. Doesn't seem too bad to me...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Okay, hypothetical situation. Let's say that 5,000 users download a copy of Enter Sandman by Metallica. Let's also say that these users would not have bought the Black album had they not found the song on Napster. Difference in revenue with/without Napster? Absolutely $0. I assume that if you happened to get a clean copy of the song from the radio, with no DJ voiceover, then that cuts into album sales too.
:)
I'm not saying that there are some people who would have bought the CD in the absence of Napster, I'm stating that 99% of people who download any kind of pirated material from the net would not have bought it in the first place. Either way, no money transfers hands.
What I'm waiting for is somebody with a lot of money to approach the copyright holders and pay them $ to distribute music on Napster and make this whole issue moot. I'd do it but I don't have a lot of money, I could barely pay for one song
And we're not defending our right to pirate something, we're defending our right to be able to distribute our own material as we like. Just think for a second...if Napster is outlawed, then it could be possible in the future to be disallowed from sharing any files unless there is explicit authorization from somebody, regardless of who actually holds copyright to that material. We all know that the RIAA wants to be the sole distributor of music, right?
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder
FC Closer
I can't believe you dissed Kriss Kross like that. I suppose you think ABC (Another Bad Creation) is all washed up too, eh?
Just wait until Menudo and the Jets start their comeback tour...it'll blow KISS out of the water.
"More organs means more human." - Zim
It seems simple to me; There has been alot of discussion and debate on the RIAA vs NAPSTER but from what I can see "Napster" isn't just some company trying to keep a thorn in the RIAA's foot. Its a movement now. This isn'tthe RIAA vs NAPSTER, it's the target market (the college students) that the RIAA is up against.
I'm not some politician or lawyer or even someone that gives a damn about the situation at hand. However I feel that as a college student I will continue to use Napster or anything that can get me the music so I can listen to it before I buy it. Granted some current Music stores have CD STATIONS where you are able to listen to a cd mounted on a wall. However when people are standing behind you its kind of annoying and you are rushing through the tracks. It sucks.
Anyway to make this quick before I start rambling. To the RIAA; you need to do something because I'm not paying 20 bucks for a CD and there is only one song that I like on it or I heard from someone else that doesn't have my music taste that its something I should get.
To the artists you shouldn't get on your fans back for this. It's not our fault we want to support you but we are broke. Therefore there is a limit as to what we can pay. 20 bucks for one CD that cost the RIAA 1 dollar to make isn't cool. I spend every penny of my money on CD's; Three 100 racks full.. Thats 100x20.. Well you can do the math. I just looked at it and 55% of the CD's I don't even listen too AT ALL! Its crazy I could of finally bought a car if I had saved all that money.
To Napster users/college students. Keep downloading, keep trading and if napster gets shut down start putting up napsterlike servers. Until the RIAA can figure out a way to lower prices and get me my music on my Computer. And I'm no hate the RIAA guy. I'm not out to bash them or make them seem bad. Off the record (no pun intended) they make themselves look bad. Yes; sales will drop because you are fighting the people that buy your CD's instead of finding a way so that I can pay and pay less for the stuff I "steal blindlessly" from you.
Geez... For $25 a month you can generally get 25 to 50 megabytes of disk space... for $50 a month it's around 100 to 150... 25 megs should be fine for a 56 or 64 kbps album... which would also be good because then the files wouldn't be that great a quality for burning to a CD... it'd still sound fine via headphones and if they wanted people could record it and hear the distorted bass and other artifacts, but if they really liked it they'ed go buy it.
Bite the hand.
I'll be the fist to admit it. I like getting my music, software, etc for free. Who dosen't? Although it was a brave thing for Metallica to try and stand up to Napster, they alienated their fans and will not stop the MP3 movement. I don't care if record sales are hurt.
I do believe that MP3's must be hurting sales numbers, but I don't buy into the fact that for every MP3 downloaded = lost revenue becuase there are a ton of MP3's that I have that I have downloaded that I wouldn't have bought if I didn't DL the MP3.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
This is exactly what happens when the public's media sources, which we look to to inform us unbiased, attend to a political agenda instead of giving us cold hard facts. Until the majority of the population stops believing everything they read and holding it up as gospel, we as open source advocates will continue to be crucified for the 'criminals' the public has been told we are. If Joe Public understood how much we are the front-runners for technologies he/she will be using later on, they would take up our cause in a second instead of remaining a part of the unwashed masses.
"The revolution has ALWAYS been televised. You just have to know where and how to look" -RLT
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
There is no evidence that Napster decreases record sales. Prove it, and maybe I'll change my mind.
Articles like these prove nothing, and in fact maybe cause me to think just the opposite (napster helps sales). I guess the all the anecdotal examples doesn't mean much, but here's one more anyway: I heard a Paul Oakenfold MP3 on a shoutcast server. I used Napster and got a few more of his mp3s. 2 weeks later I ordered the CD from Borders. And that isnt the only time I've done something like that.
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
From the Yahoo story:
Having a look at 1999 Yearend Market Report on US Recorded Music Shipments, there is a quote from the President and CEO of the RIAA which states:
My feeling the only people profiting from Napster are the lawyers who are fabricating loads of BS in the interest of the poor 'ol record companies.
Geez...
The solution to the Napster problem is pretty simple. When the recording industry stops charging me $29.00 for an imported Laika CD just so they can turn around and make yet another fucking $18,000,000.00 [ wide-angle lens | hum-vee | sportscar | shiny space suit | helicopter ] rap video, then i'll stop using Napster. Until then, they can fuck themselves, just the same as any other company that decides to waste my money. Don't like it? Boo hoo. I feel really sorry for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Personally, I think retards like "Puffy", boy bands that don't play any instruments, Disney-rock, and any other talentless acts that have to rely off enormous marketing campaigns to become famous can get in line and suck it..Napster is the great equalizer. Bands with talent survive. Bands with no talent get flushed down the toilet to visit the land of Hanson and Kriss Kross.
If you want to support a band, go Napster their music, tell a friend, and send the band a check. Giving your money to the industry is like flushing 99 cents out of every dollar down the toilet. You're sorely mistaken if you think even one TENTH of that money ends up in the hands of the artists themselves.
Your typical band benefits more from the name recognition and distribution Napster provides, than by the money the industry pays them for selling their work, IMHO. Bands like Metallica dont need any more recognition, which is why they're after the money. The rest of them dont give a shit. They make music for people to listen to. If you get involved in the industry with the intent of making _money_ , youre probably better off scrubbing toilets or laying bricks.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
I know that there's a lot of people who download things off the net and through napster, and then go out and buy the album. Lots of people actually like the liner notes, and a lot of times the mp3 may not come with a proper ID3 tag to identify artist, album name, track number, track name, year, genre, etc. So people support the artist by buying the CD even though they've already got the whole album on mp3 through napster. (And let's be more general - this isn't really about napster per se, but the easy availability of the media in the first place - IMHO there isn't much difference between napster and any other file sharing protocol, just that napster is what's in the news recently)
But there are a lot of other people who just download mp3s and never buy the album. I'm not going to make a value judgement and say that they are theives, or that they are are excellent freedom fighters trying to liberate ideas from evil recording companies. What I want is for people to take responsibility for what they do. There are a lot of people out there who just take from napster, and never buy albums. That's fine, I'm sure they have a moral justification one way or the other, but I don't like hearing people say that Napster is fine, because it boosts record sales, because most people buy records after downloading things. Conversely, I don't like to hear people say that napster hurts record sales, because that ignores all of the people who bought the album when they wouldn't have otherwise done so due to "sampling" the album through napster.
Frankly, whatever you want to do with napster is cool with me. I don't use napster, but I don't think that people who do are going to starve the RIAA out anytime soon. What I wish though is that people would only speak for themselves and not make arguments for the napster community as a whole. Because guess what? There are people out there using napster who believe that the RIAA have the right to make the money, so they pay for the albums after the fact. There are also people who see themselves on napster as information gurillas. YOu can't have it both ways. Speak for yourself, and live with your rationalizations, whichever way they may be.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
NAPSTER !Destroying 70's rock EVERYWHERE!
Yeah..I do. :)
I got tired of listening to black people whine around 1990-1991 or so. Rap is worse than 70's soft-rock. And, like 70's soft-rock, I've pretty much been waiting for everyone to get tired of it and move on to something new since then.
$traight outta Compton Estates,
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
As Hemos said, many can and will buy online now.
The reason is very simple. It's easy to check and compare prices and for items like well known CDs, buying 'unseen' is no big deal.
Stores near universities can no longer count on mere proximity to generate sales. They now have to compete on value. What makes a music store stand out now? Not just having the common items that can be ordered from anywhere, but having less common items or knowing how to get them. A really outstanding store would have used CDs and even allow potential customers to listen to them before purchasing. I've only seen this once, but I made a point of going back to that place. As for service, they "got it." Less risk of buying something for one track only discover all the other tracks are lousy.
As for Napster.. maybe it hurts some, maybe it helps some. It's probably irrelevent overall. College dorms are a places where CD and tapes are borrowed and dubbed already.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
I don't know where you get this "huge number" from. Everyone I know at my college has stopped buying music, preferring to get it for free via napster (or now that napster has been banned, gnutella, ftp sites or internal opennap servers). No one buys music online. Why would they? I don't support the RIAA, but I also don't deny that they're losing profits from applications like napster. The issue is that they had way too much profits to begin with.
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
So, if Napster caused the decrease, local sales should have increased again after Napster was banned. Why do I suspect these RIAA flacks didn't bother to look at that piece of data?
I didn't even know there were such things as "music stores." I always buy my CD's online.
C|NETlink to the story
Favorite Quote: "Cash-strapped students have turned to online music swapping because the record companies have priced the CDs of many popular artists out of students' reach"
Then whose fault is it?
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Me? I think it's insane to say that Mp3 made record sales decline. For years and years when I was a teen, I went out and bought at least one cd per week. I currently own approximately 400 cd's. My music collection is complete. Well, almost ;-)
I believe that my ability to purchase a large quantity of music cd's was fascilitated by the fact that CD's were only 11.99 at best buy... Right now they're approaching 15.99 if you want to get any decent music. Maybe some Floyd?
That's about a %25 price increase.
I currently do not buy cd's. I think that it is sticker shock =) I can't justify spending $15 for a little piece of plastic with tunes on it. Unless it is really good.
Maybe if we get some artists better than Limp Bizkit or Korn sometime soon, record sales will rise. Until then I'm going to stick with The Who, Pink Floyd, PearlJam, and such.
Yes, I download mp3's. But I own most of the music I download... I think.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Not like you'll ever see my reply, since you're an AC or anything, but if anyone decides to peruse this at a later date, here's why i do:
I'm a music fan! I've been involved with bands in the past, and i still have many friends who are in bands. I think artists should be paid for their work so they can continue making music. The majority of music out there today sucks, yes, but if you listen to it and by extension enjoy it, in all fairness you should be paying the people who produced the music for you.
All of the rhetoric people spill defending napster, i think, is completely bunk. It's one thing in my mind to tape a CD and give it to a friend or email mp3's to one another. But Napster has the motivation of making a PROFIT... So, in effect, they'll be making money while the artists whose material they're helping to distribute will get zero dollars compared to the measly amount that they receive from the record companies today... The system's fucked up, but at least the labels have figured a way to PAY the artists something, where as napster fans just expect that the artists should make up.
If napster were to figure out a cohesive way to pay the artists involved which sounded feasible and realistic, i'll immediately jump onto their side of this battle. But until then, I'd rather see the artists get paid something rather than nothing.
I know for a fact they lost sales from me. Titles I'd have bought I won't be buying ever.
Music I'd like to hear I won't be getting CDs for.
Music I like I won't be buying....
And I don't use Napster...
I'm just not willing to fund any organisation that activly seeks to keep technology out of my hands.
I want a digital recorder... Not to steal music.. but for personal use...
I want mp3 format audio.. not for stealing music but for personal use..
I like the idea of Napster... not for music but for talk radio...
But the music industry has Napster painted as a music piracy tool... Premotes it as such..
So I'm not going to find what I want...
I don't actually exist.
The fundamental point of copyrights is that it gives content creators the ability to control the reproduction of their work (with restrictions). It is irrelevant whether or not someone is losing money as a result of the violation of a copyright; focusing on the RIAA and its stupid, self-serving comments only draws attention away from the illegal, dare I say immoral, acts of IP theives.
As Larry Wall pointed out in Monday's WSJ, "Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking." It's one thing to listen to music, re-use code, etc. that people have given away. It's quite another to use these things without permission. That you're not also taking money out of their pockets is not a defense.
I'm willing to pay per song for music downloads, but noone offers this service. does noone want my money?
I think the problem here is that whether the study is right or wrong, biased or objective it all comes down to one simple fact: pirating music or anything else for that matter is illegal. Now, the arguments on where copyrights should be going are a totally different argument and are actually quite productive, but constantly trying to justify what ammounts to little more than common thievery is something else, just give it up. I fully support mp3 as a format for many uses, primarily mobile music and a distribution channel for previews, extra unreleased material and unsigned bands. If the piracy wasn't as rampant as it is and mp3 wasn't as synonymous with "illegal music piracy" as it currently is more artists would likely begin to distribute music either in mp3 format or release extra tracks or promos for legitimate free use. As long as we keep trying to keep Napster afloat and support an illegitimate criminal community however mp3s will never catch on with labels and will remain devoted to people who simply want to steal.
Because they know their days are numbered. Artist X signs a deal with a label, and with that comes all the RIAA support, BMI, ASCAP, etc. Label then sells Artist X's work for outrageous amounts, so they can give a cut to RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, themselves, etc. Artist X gets tiny percentage of the revenues. Now comes a new way to promote and distribute that same content. If Artist X has a significant audience, they can now sell that content at a drastically lower price, AND get more of the revenues in the end. As much as 80-90% more! If Artist X is not well-known, he finds other more dynamic organizations willing to promote and sell the work for less than the biga$$ labels. Maybe he sells only 50,000 copies, instead of 500,000. But if he's keeping just 10% more of the revenues, he won't care. Just wait until Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble start publishing works by well-known authors. BN's already done it with Stephan King. They're not looking for volume. They're looking for end profit. The labels will have to change. The RIAA has no future. Their future cannot even be legislated. I had a friend who wrote some music. Another composer wanted to put his music in a book. My friend looked into "protecting" his work. Turns out, he would have made absolutely nothing (and would have forfeited some legal costs) had he aligned with an agency. In the end, he settled for $300 bucks from the author of the book and felt pretty darn lucky to have made anything. I have no problem with an artist securing intellectual property rights, or maximizing profits from their work. I have a problem with spending the amount the labels ask me to. If the artists are smart, they will see this and the life expectancy of the RIAA will be numbered in days, not years.
I am one of the few who seems to be not falling into that MP3 craze.
I always BOUGHT the vinyl records and CDs I wanted. Sometimes I get tapes from friends, but when I really like the album I buy it after a few days.
Maybe I am a collector, or an old style music fan.
Most of the MP3 songs I downloaded were hard to find and/or of bad quality. And I NEVER managed to find a whole record to download.
I was never buying singles or CD singles, always the whole thing. And I will still do that in the future.
But I am buying most of my CDs online now, so I would also be one of the persons who is taking away money from the classic retail channels.
-- bmp System Support - Vienna, Austria
Whenever someone challenges our 'consititutional right' to pirate anything we want from anyone, we come up with some intellectual gymnastics which somehow, in some vague way, attempts to justify our illegal activity. When that justification is blown out of the water, we close our ears and yell FUD as loud as we can.
"Downloading studio mp3s cuts into album sales."
"No it doesn't."
"Yes it does, here's proof."
"WAHHHHHHHHH FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD!"
Of course albums being downloaded in mp3 hurts album sales. That's bonehead obvious. Pointing it out isn't FUD.
I've been thinking about that.
I've just been daunted by the prospect of having to copy all my CDs to MD. Also, do you know of any car MD players?
Maybe there's a MD player in my future...
A supposed 4% "loss" in an industry that grew 20% last year simply is not severe, unless you buy completely into the bullshit of this study.
The main reason for this is because it is too tedious to download an MP3, decode it, and burn it to a disk. However, 2 years from now when someone builds a program that does this automatically, and the bandwith/hardware can do it in about 5 seconds, there won't be any reason to visit the local CD store.
for now it's a great tech, in two years, the Record compnanies will probably have found a way to encrypt it anyway.
tcd004 Here are my Microsoft and AICN parodies, where are yours?
Either napster does not reduce CD sales so there's no conflict of interest or it does and the anti-napster have something to legitimate complain about.
The only way I can see a conflict of interest arising is if this company writing the report were a rival of napster's. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Or has napster just entered the protected digital content business?
the point is that they we (meaning the public at large) don't give a CRAP!
<//-------------//> /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."
"I like
Well no shit Napster hurts record sales. How could someone not understand that? The next question is: "Who Cares?"
.{redmist}.
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The recording industry should focus on producing more CDs that are actually listenable from front to back rather than producing 95% of their full length CDs that have only 1 or 2 tracks that you can stand to hear more than once.
The1Genius - Littera Scripta Manet
Hmmm...
Truth --> Raw Data --> Study Findings--> Yahoo Article--> Slashdot.
If there were ANY meaningful pieces of information somewhere along that chain, it's pretty certain they're lost by now...if there's one thing I learned writing psychology experiments, it's that the data can say whatever the hell you want it to, as long as you omit enough pieces of relevant information.
Next.
-
You're not using your head.
Of course it accomplishes nothing to look at the CD sales around colleges right now, so you don't do that. You look at CD sales around colleges over the past several years. Make a chart of CD sales near colleges, then a chart of Napster usage (I'm sure Napster's servers keep records). If you notice that whenever Napster usage increases, CD sales around colleges decrease, there's a pretty good chance it can be attributed to Napster.
Of course there's no conclusive proof either way. It could just be that Napster reflects online awareness, which results in online CD purchasing. But you can rule out things like studying political science, because the students were doing that all along without it affecting CD sales.
As for finding a university without Napster to compare with, good luck! The only ones without it are the ones that banned it (and even they're not totally without it, if you know what I mean) and they've already been tainted by it.
You final point was correct, though. The original study didn't really go the extra mile to get results that were in any way significant or useable. Too bad.
Actually, even if you showed that whenever and wherever Napster increased in usage, album sales at music stores dropped, you still wouldn't know whether or not Napster caused that sales drop. That's the funny thing about social statistics- there are jillions of things that seem obvious but aren't true. Social science has pretty much ruled that you can't prove causation with correlation ever. If you want to prove that Napster causes album sales to decline, you have have to actually isolate Napster as a variable apart from all other variables, manipulate it, and see what happens. Otherwise, you can't know for sure which way the correlation goes- if you correlate Napster and album sales, couldn't an opponent argue that if some external force caused album sales to decline (say, economic downturn, so the people don't have the money to buy the CD's anyway, for example), people would then turn to Napster to get the music they'd rather buy in the stores? In that case, the correlation would hold, but the causal link would actually be that declining album sales cause increased use of Napster.
Social statistics are very subtle things.
-jacob
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
When they say "a 4% drop in sales", do they mean unit volumes (# of CD's purchased) or revenues (# of dollars spent). Obviously, the record stores have increased their prices faster than college students have increased their income, so unit sales have to drop as students choose between eating and listening to the Spice Girls.
How does this does jive with the fact that the record companies have, by their own admission, posted record profits for the last fiscal year? How can sales be down and profits be up at the same time? (Again, perhaps they've raised their prices to the point where students can afford to buy far fewer albums...)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If you'd read my post before replying, you would have noticed that I never said you could prove it. But if you found that in Napster intensive areas, album sales had taken a downturn which correlated exactly with an upturn in Napster usage, it would be a pretty good indicator that Napster has something to do with declining album sales. At any rate, if you didn't find any correlation, you could probably assume that Napster didn't contribute to declining sales.
Hrm, perhaps I was a bit too restricted- I shouldn't have said, "it doesn't prove it," I should have said, "it doesn't indicate it." On a personal level, of course, if I suspect that Napster makes album sales decline, then the finding would indicate in a fuzzy way that maybe I was right. But from the statistical point of view, finding that Napster usage going up correlated perfectly with album sales going down actually doesn't indicate at all anything else about Napster and album sales. If you were to find that they did correlate perfectly, all that would do is give you strong motivation to do a causation study. Correlations often turn out to be either coincidence or covariance on some third variable.
-jacob
While I'd agree that the bulk of Napster users are more into mainstream music, I've found plenty of obscure stuff on there (e.g. Mogwai, Flaming Lips, Stereolab, Pavement, Sigur Rós, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Pixies....) It all kinda depends on timing, I guess.
Not just Metallica's right, but any artist's right. Ah, what the hell.
The correct conclusion should be that the educated population around colleges are actively protesting legal action by the RIAA, MPAA, and all other associations with 4 letter acronyms by not buying any CDs.
---
Three days in a row, you walk out your front door and a red car drives by.
Does this mean that walking out your front door attracts red cars?
"Study" is way to strong a word fopr this kind of nonsense. it impleis that tehre is soemthing scientific to it, which there isn't.
I'm not a big Napster fan, Piracy is Piracy even if it has wonderful side effects. But this kidn of nonsense in support of ANYTHING just annoys me.
Americans by and large all need a refresher in basic scientific method.
How about this senario?
.WAV, since I don't have any way to take analog line-in and convert it to MP3 on the fly.
/. and elsewhere) that opponents of digital copying insist that storing audio on computer disk is not 'fair use'; it isn't equal to making a backup of an audio tape and doesn't fall under the 'copies of the same piece to different media for playback in different environments' or something like that.
I own 400-500 cassette tapes (remember those? two reels in their own handy plastic housing?), many of which are albums that are out-of-print or very difficult to find, simply because they are so old. I like finding tracks from these albums simply because the quality will not decline with use, and I can preserve the tapes a bit longer by not having to play them.
If I recall, 'fair use' includes making copies for
personal use, but have you ever tried copying analog tape to CD? the quality is less than desirable unless you have some serious audiophile equipment to do it. Plus, there's the limits of memory and disk space required to encode all that audio to
What I tend to download with Napster and Gnutella is audio tracks for tapes I ALREADY OWN, that I would like a digital version for CD to playback at work, and in my truck, and that tend to be a bit more easily portable than 400+ tapes can be. (lessee...Case Logic bags-same size=120 tapes, or 250+ CDs? *ponder*)
I have read (maybe on
I'm not NOT buying CD's because I can download the music, I'm not buying CDs (ok, I own 12...and 6 of them were given to me!) because they cost too bloody much. I can listen to almost any music I want, simply by borrowing the CD from my roommate, or friends elsewhere, my fiance, her sisters (although why I would want to borrow top40fluff is beyond me) without ever having to to online. In fact, I'm even occasionally ripping and encoding stuff for them since I have the better hardware...
How many cds do you own? How many can you afford? How many mp3s do you download and rarely listen to? How many cds do you rarely listen to?
I download a lot of music and I buy a lot. It really comes down to the fact that I know somebody should be getting money for their hard work and effort in performing well. I will continue to buy music and continue to download. I do not consider this wrong and I do not worry about artists starving and not making the millions that they deserve.
A key question to consider is who will make music when there is no money to be made? I think there will always be people making music for the love of it and they will be rewarded if it is worth it. There is never going to be a day when people don't make money off of music. It simply will not happen. Today, retailers and artists and record labels complain of lessening profits, and online music downloads cutting into the cashflow. They still make BILLIONS! They are doing just fine by my standards. I for one will always support the musicians I really like and I will do so in order to receive the great music they make. (Everybody really knows that most money is made on tour!)
The record companies have traditionally relied on radio play to expose potential customers to new music. People are now looking to the internet to find new music, because they can download what they want, and don't have to listen to DJ chatter and commercials.
These statistics show that the entire strategy of the RIAA is doomed. If they are successful in their campaign to convince college students that "downloading OUR music is stealing", then college students will stop downloading their music.
If college students stop downloading MP3s of major label songs, and don't listen to the radio because they are listening to internet-label MP3s instead, then the major labels will have completely cut themselves off from their market. Disasterous!
This survey is important because it is the first documentation of this effect.
There are plenty of bands, and new distribution channels, like mp3.com, who are, at the same time, saying, "Go ahead and download OUR music -- we give you permission and it isn't stealing at all!" They sell their CDs for a lower price also, which college students appreciate.
The current strategy of the RIAA is completely self destructive. You can see the early results in the article -- College students are buying less music from the major labels anyway. Without Napster, they are buying MUCH less major label music. If the RIAA was hoping that by eliminating Napster, the hordes of pissed-off college students would come back and open their wallets again, then they figured wrong.
The only way for the RIAA to save themselves is to authorize MP3 trading, and begin a campaign to convince consumers that MP3s are a low-quality, preview format, like FM radio, and that if they want the top-quality, real thing, it is waiting for them at their local record store. The fact that they can't bear to do this will accelerate their demise.
This is so typical. Misleading statistics by bargain-basement statisticians confusing causation with correlation. To assume that there is only ONE cause for declining sales is pure stupidity.
To put it another way, CD sales were down this year, and coincedentally, the price of tea in China also declined. Clearly, the price of tea in China is having a negative effect on CD sales.
This is clearly a stupid argument, but it's not far removed from the one made by these so-called researchers. There is a difference between a cause and a coincedence.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
where is all of this music that never gets played on the radio?
Obscure music is on IRC, try #mp3_darkwave on dalnet for L.S.D.... -ruD
Stop generalizing. Without free exposure to music, 90% of the CDs I own would never have entered my collection. I use Napster, I use Gnutella, I use FTP, I trade tapes, I trade CDs, I listen to the radio. I listen to a fucking ton of music and my initial exposure to it is always without cost. I end up paying for what I feel deserves to be paid for -- music which I can enjoy for a long time, music whose creator I support and admire. It's a greedy philosophy, but evidently it works, because a I blow more of my monthly paycheck on CDs and concerts than anyone else I know.
From the Yahoo article: In stores near universities, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually dropped 4 percent in the past two years. In stores near the 67 colleges that have banned Napster, citing an overload on their internal networks, sales have dropped 7 percent in two years.
Let me get this right. They're saying that Napster is responsible for a decline in record sales at stores near universities, and the greatest decline is in stores near universities where Napster has been banned???
This is a little OT, because I don't usually use Napster, per se, but the concept is the same. In addition, let me say that I am not denying that there are people that rarely buy CDs because of napster. I'm just not one of those people, and here's why:
Convenience. Thats it.
I work at a company that, for one reason or another, doesn't have blazing net connections. Copying mp3s around our intranet, however, is quite snappy. A coworker will tell me about a band he likes, and point me to it on his machine. I'll copy it and listen for a while. If I don't like it, I delete it. If I do like it I will often go out and buy the album. Why? Well, I'm not sitting in front of a computer all day. I spend an hour each day in my car. I'm still on the empeg waiting list, so no luck there for mp3s. Sometimes I walk around. Oh yeah, there's the Rio. Except I think that shelling out for 32/64/128M of solid state memory with optical/magnetic media costing what they do is moronic. I'll wait for a portable CD/mp3 or a good solid microdrive player. I keep my computer in my room, but I spend time in the rest of my place. The CD carosel and nice speakers feel lonely when they aren't used.
Ok, so these are all technical concerns. I'm sure in a couple of years all of there things will be there. And maybe by then it'll make a difference, but for now I don't see myself stopping buying CDs.
Oh, yeah, and maybe I do feel a bit guilty violating copyright law. And not all record labels are evil. A lot of the music I buy is produced by small indy labels (e.g. Dischord,) and I have a hard time begrudging them their hard earned $$s. I guess I'm afraid that if I don't send my $9 postpaid to Beecher St. Ian McKaye will show up and kick my ass.
All of this is a lot like making tape copys. I used to do it, but if I liked the album, I'd go out and buy it. Better sound quality, etc.
Just my thoughts.
spreer
Sure, I believe that CD sales are down at college CD stores. What about at Best Buy, Tower Records, and all the other big chains? I don't have the stats, but I'll bet you they've been going up. Anyone have a link to any articles about the mom&pop record stores because squeezed out by the big retail chains over the last 2 years?
numb
Personally, I say: do what you want. If you get caught doing something people with more authority than you think you shouldn't be doing, you face the consequences.
That having been said, I doubt you'll be spending much time in San Quentin for having a big MP3 collection.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If it's mostly bands I know and like and some bands I haven't heard of, I'll download the unknown bands' songs.
-----
It's pretty amusing to see the RIAA, record companies and artists who make ridiculous amounts of money complaining about being screwed over.
Up until a few years ago, it was me who got screwed - by overpriced CDs, by "artists" who create one good song and an album full of crap and by not being able to buy music I like because record stores are full of the top 40s crap pimped by record companies.
I've downloaded a lot of music lately but I still buy CDs from bands I really like. The CDs I haven't bought are ones that turned out not to be so good after actually listening to the a couple of times.
Do I feel bad about this? Not really, the "artists" are probably pissed that their marketing didn't dupe another person into buying their crap. The record company is probably pissed that they "lose" part of their ridiculously high profit margin. And the RIAA have proven themsevles a bunch of dickhead, who cares about their profits.
Better still most of the CDs I do buy are from smaller labels and by bands I may never have heard of if not for the internet.
I'm sure many people are not concerned about the morality of the situation, obviously taking the example of the record comanies and the RIAA.
I have found PLENTY of obscure stuff on Napster. If you do one search and it's not there, disconnect, and reconnect. Chances are you'll be on a different server, with different people, and someone there will have the song. If not, do it again. Someone is bound to have it somewhere.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
> Courtney Love doesn't support Napster, she's
> just grinding her own axe in an entirely
> separate argument.
Wrong. If you had bothered going to the 'stone link, you quite possible would have read:
"... It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster..."
...which is definitely a statement supportive of the Napster concept.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Very true. Its the same with software, I think. Now that I'm working and not studying any more I find that I now buy games that I play instead of pirate, I can afford to. And I prefer it. I also believe that if record companies had developed something similar to Napster, but just had a "buy this song" button that allowed you to click-purchase and then "own" the mp3, they would be raking in tons of money now. The main reason I buy very few CD's is that I get forced to buy like ten songs for each song that I like. If I could buy just the songs I wanted (and for that matter songs you just don't find for sale in CD shops anymore) I would buy much more music. Napster could have been an incredibly ideal platform for selling music in a try-before-you-buy fashion. This would also have another effect - raising the general quality of mp3's. I've heard many badly recorded mp3's - parts of songs - songs named incorrectly or attributed to wrong bands, or the title is wrong, or there is noise in the mp3, or its been saved through a crappy sound card mixer and you can't turn the volume up without distortion etc etc etc . If the record company selled "reputable" mp3's, this would be nearly eliminated.
In the article, they said the study looked specifically at stores around universities, and further divided this set between universities that had banned napster, and those that hadn't.
Besides the obvious argument that they didn't count online record sales, which I suspect university students, being one myself, are more apt to do. There is another point that they didn't hit:
They said that there was an overall 4% drop in sales at stores near universities. They also said at universities where napster had been banned, there was a 7% drop in record sales... but whether or not this is due to napster is still out in the open. The study will be better validated if, in the next two years, record sales at universities rise more than a few points. (Ie, they need to show that when you have napster at a university, sales at stores go down, and when you don't have napster at a university, sales go up)
And, as a side note, if the labels want record sales in general (store bought and online) to go up, they could offer singles at reasonable prices.
I suspect this study was a little rigged too, but that's just my gut speaking. The story generally did a good job of covering most angles.
Humorless sig goes here.
Sigh. Mathematical proof relies on the notion of a formal system. It is great when you have a formal system. Alas, humankind has no formal system for talking about social structures- social scientists borrow from mathematics and statistics from time to time, but it's just not possible to know the axioms for social relationships. Without axioms, it isn't possible to do a formal proof. That's all there is to it. It isn't "sloppy thinking," it's a sloppy domain.
-jacob
The one and only time I've tried Napster was a few months ago. I had wanted to get the Moby album for some time but couldn't justify stumping up the money to find out whether it would be any good or not. I had been messing about with the Moby shockwave game and thanks to Napster, I found out that Bodyrock was actually one of the songs on the album. After downloading and listening to a full MP3 of it and Honey I was convinced and forced myself to stump up the £13 (approx $19.50) and that was with a discount. This may be rare case but napster encouraged me (a startving student) to stump up those extorinate album prices.
do you recognize how that's not the right solution either? most trolls have accounts anyway.
Don't be mean or my friend Oog will smash your head
The details of the story Hemos linked to does not matter (hell, I didn't even read it). Napster hurts record sales. Period.
This study is no more FUD than the Napster people saying that they are the cause of record sales going up in other areas.
My first exposure to Bob Dylan was in 1982 when a friend made about six audio cassettes for me. Four years later I had bought every Bob Dylan album out there. When CDs came out I repurchased about half of them. Fifteen years later I have the collection on MP3.
Now I'm previewing certain songs that I want. I recently purchased the Shawshank Redemption soundtrack after hearing a portion from Marriage of Figara on MP3. I have also purchased a Bjork and Jane's Addiction CD after hearing MP3s.
I will not purchase Metallica because I previewed their album and found it wanting. Personally, they sound like a bunch of old guys trying to sound relevant. So yes, MP3s have hurt their sales.
I found the things store managers mentioned quite interesting. Why is it that a CD Store Owners/Managers don't blame Napster? Instead they're saing it's the high CD prices that are driving down sales on campuses. I'm sorry but forking out $20 for a CD is way too much.
On top of that the study is flawed big time.
1. Didn't acount for online CD sales?
( I've personally not bought a single CD in a retail store. I buy everything on line especially since I can sample most of the music )
2. They didn't compare in sales statistics for CD swap/resale shops which usually have very low prices on used CD's.
( From what I got from the article those stores have not seen any changes )
3. The biggest drop was BEFORE Napster came about. ( Hmm.. ok so why was there a big drop? )
The RIAA is simply looking for anything they can use as artilery to kill Napster. I've been using Napster for the last 2 weeks. I've downloaded over a 100 MP3 files... and most of them I don;t have anymore cause I didn't like em. I've also bought 6 CD in the last 2 weeks of music that people on Napster recommended to me and I got a chance to listen to it before buying. Without that I propably wouldn't have bought them.
You want to know why the RIAA is scared of Napster? Because consumers have more power. I can listen to ALL of the tracks on a cd to figure out if it's worth buying. Not just the 1 hit on a $15 CD that the RIAA thinks will sell the CD to 90% of the target audience. It means they have less control over their consumers. It means they can't manipulate us as they have in the past.
They're a dinosaur that deserves to die a quick death. And trust me it won't hurt the Musicians 1 bit as newer, smarter, better companies that "get it" take their place.
Ex-Nt-User
Here is something to disprove that piracy is cutting sales:
Stores near universities: sales down 4% in 2 years.
Stores near universities that banned Napster: sales down 7% in 2 years.
If Napster was the culprit, things would be the other way around. If Napster was the culprit, those without it would be more likely to buy CDs. Look at the above statistics (directly from the article).
Also, most of the decline was from before Napster was even available.
And this tudy was commissioned by a rights management group to support the pro-industry position.
How ironic.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It's true I saw it online.
-
air and light and time and space
The scary part is that the record companies' reliance on one-hit wonders is what's exacerbating the trend. If they only have 1 tune on the whole album worth getting, why bother buying the whole CD for one track? And Napster does help that, because it's easier to hop on and grab the 1 hit than it is to go to the store and buy the single.
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students.
10 years ago the RIAA claimed that CDRs would destroy record sales, they didn't. 10 years before that they claimed that audio casettes would destroy record sales. They didn't. Around the same time, the movie industry claimed that VHS bootlegging would destroy the movie industry, it didn't.
Poor college students are going to bootleg music no matter what. They're poor college students, that's what they do, that's what they've always done, it's nothing new. If napster wasn't there, they'd be dubbing casettes or CDs.
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Burris
I don't like the recording companies. I don't like the RIAA. I don't like the MPAA. But there are people out there who provide content. Both their rights and yours are protected by copyright. Now you can go off on some tangent about the work of some artist who died 69 years ago. I don't really care - it's a nice smokescreen and not relevent to the parts of copyright we're talking about. The copyright laws are actually very generous when it comes to content that you have purchased the right to use.
DMCA and Sonny Bono aside, which I can agree are quite ridiculous, but also irrelevent to the topic at hand, you are allowed to copy content you have purchased the right to use. You can legally create mp3s. You can make cassettes. You can take the 1 good song on all the one hit wonder cds you bought and make one good CD. You are allowed to do these things. This is why I feel DeCSS and napster are fair, and hope the MPAA and RIAA lose.
But where's the "not fair" part? So you don't have the right to copy someone elses CD unless given permission by the copyright holder. I don't understand what you don't consider fair about that. Just because, if I were to release a piece of software, I'd put it under the GPL, doesn't mean I can disrespect the decision by someone else not to. I just won't buy their work. So what's the problem? What's your problem? Do you want people to respect your rights? Yet you feel you can arbitrarily decide not to respect theirs?
Now that's absurd. Where does anyone get off stealing the work of someone else under the guise of opposing copyright? If you really need someone elses work, for whatever reason, then you should either limit yourself to fair use (which has been defined) or pay the asking price. Anyone who steals anything they can live without under the guise of opposing copyright is still just a cheap bastard with a more noble, if invalid, justification.----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Favorite Quote from article: (as said by a record store manager) "The major label companies are (run by) extremely evil people; I'm sorry, but there's no other way to say it."
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
If an artist decides that they want to release their music in the MP3 format, they would most likely choose to put it on their own website
And how many will a typical 10 MB website hold? Two?
Oh, you mean the legal part of MP3.com.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you do one search and it's not there, disconnect, and reconnect.
I always called this "server hopping." It's how I increased my collection of Tetris remixes and Macarena covers (no really, hear me out). Just don't write a 5kr1p7 to do this:
There used to be a Napigator plug-in (or something similar) that searched all servers for a particular string ("tetris" or "macarena") and returned the result, but Napster Inc. requested that the "search bot" feature be removed.
Server hopping is OK; botting is not.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Declining CD sales could have nothing to do with the fact that the record industry is inflating the price? could it?
I mean, that would be far fetched, not bying at CD for $20 that costs 33 cents to manufacture...hmmm
Coincident with the arrival of MP3 and Napster, these sales take a pretty severe dip downwards.
.mp3 and the RIAA's boogeyman, Napster. One has to wonder who commissioned the study...
:) Shoddy science passed off as fact to an ignorant audience (for the most part).
The majority of people are so easily mislead by statements like this because they lack a simple understanding of the basic rules of logic. In this case, for example, correlation is not causation. There is a direct, frighteningly statistically accurate, correlation between the number of priests in a given town, and the number of alcoholics. Both are functions of population...
I suggest consulting this page for a brief summary of common logical fallacies.
This study is so vague it's almost silly. While they determine that CD stores with physical proximity to universities have slightly declining CD sales, they make no attempt whatsoever to determine the actual cause of said decline, and simply *decide* that it is the result of
FUD. This is the real-world equivalent of trolling
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
-motardo
and I don't know how many others are like me, but I spend a hell of a lot on music. The other day, I was on napster, getting a song or 2 from a particular artist - found that I liked the artist very much, and rather than thrash around with trying to find a full album online, I went to the record store and bought it. I think I buy just as many albums now as I did before I got napster - and I do buy a decent amount at emusic.com as well.
-lx
Quotes from store managers and students:
"We haven't noticed any real decline. Our business has been pretty consistent."
"There's definitely been an effect, but not an intense one. We've probably seen the most effect on singles sales."
"The majority of my friends buy their CDs online. If the study says the music stores near the colleges have seen a drop in sales, that doesn't mean that college students are not buying records."
"It costs major labels less than $1 to make a Pearl Jam album, but the list prices are nearly $20. They've precipitated this themselves--it's ridiculous. The major label companies are (run by) extremely evil people; I'm sorry, but there's no other way to say it."
Quotes from RIAA and friends:
"It looks like Napster clearly has an impact on sales in the U.S. Coincident with the arrival of MP3 and Napster, these sales take a pretty severe dip downwards."
"The findings come as no surprise and confirm our worst fears. This demonstrates the importance of protecting artists' rights on the Internet."
Quote from the article:
The drop in college music store sales was more pronounced in 1998 than in 1999--a year before Napster was written, released and began spreading quickly across college campuses.
Come to your own conclusions.
-cibrPLUR
A lot of people have been yelling about Hemos's comment that the study is FUD. That was my reaction too- "Not everything that goes against a particular belief system is FUD," I thought to myself, and got all ready to post a long diatribe about it.
Then I read the article in question. Here's what it says (my paraphrase): "CD sales around colleges have gone down, while CD sales elsewhere have gone up. Therefore, Napster hurts album sales."
The conclusion that Napster is to blame for the drop is completely unfounded. It was just made up. Even worse, it was tied to something that wasn't made up (ie the sales drop) in such a way that it seems on the face of it like a valid conclusion to make ("They did a study, and they found that Napster hurts album sales, see?"). That is FUD. It is a particularly bad kind of FUD. It would be sort of like Microsoft saying, "Windows 2000 didn't sell as well as expected among college students, and here's our study to prove it. Therefore, online piracy is having a demonstrable effect on our sales." It sounds almost like real science, but in fact it's a made-up lie to scare people and get your way.
That does not mean that Napster doesn't hurt CD sales. It just means that the study didn't prove it. If they wanted to prove it, they would have to actually do a followup study that actually analyzed why those sales dropped. Which they didn't do, so they can't legitimately say anything about it.
-jacob
These bands made a conscious choice to sign a contract with a record company, and should have been aware of the pricing policies before they did so.
I definitely am in favor of supporting artists. My income and my social life are both primarily from the entertainment industry. But when I talk to my friends in bands, I am sure to remind them not to blindly jump into a record contract without being aware of all the issues.
If I can't support something because it violates what I believe in, I have trouble feeling guilty about the people who chose that direction.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
I skimmed the Yahoo article and after reading this post it seems that the recording industry looks at Napster this way:
Bad things happen in the world.
I don't like you.
You must be the cause of all the bad things in the world.
Didn't Hitler say this about the Jews? Maybe he is still alive and working for the recording industry.
Too Lazy to look it up.
Hi all, this is my first post on slashdot, although i read it every so often. I am a long time apple user/fanatic=) Ayone know where to get Napster/MP3.com merchandise? I saw the special on MTV about Napster, it was really cool. Saw a bunch of stickers and a black shirt with the white napster logo, man do i want one! I've been searching the internet for about 15 minutes anywhere I could think of, and I've come to you Please! Can anyone help me??
Awright, anyone else remember how to lie with statistics? HINT: Narow down the focus of your data until you get the result you want.
For this number to be statisticaly significant, you have to have a minimum of 10 data points within a standard time frame (say, 10 months). Then do some math ( +/- 3 standard deviations) and see how your data looks... anything outside the norms MIGHT be related to a special cause... but also remember you can prove a direct statistical correlation between ice cream sales and violent crime. Sometimes, it's just the heat....
In the end, anything without raw data available could just be FUD... and this smells, walks and talks like a FUDuck....
Sure, that would explain why US CD sales totaled more than 5% higher last year than in 1998.
The sample was not completely random in the survey, as is made apparent by the article. This is bad. However, the biggest transgression is the attribution of causality through the results of a survey! Any student that's been through a first level research methods class can tell you that causality can only be attributed through scientific experimentation, with both a control and an experimental group of subject.
He has some valid points. Is your average 13 year old with a cable modem going to download the new xxxxxxxxx cd in 10 minutes or spend $15 and buy it?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"It looks like Napster clearly has an impact on sales in the U.S.," said John Schwarz, CEO of digital rights management firm Reciprocal, which commissioned the study, released yesterday. "Coincident with the arrival of MP3 and Napster, these sales take a pretty severe dip downwards."
4 percent? Doesn't sound that severe to me. I'm also positive that Mr. Schwartz and Reciprocal has absolutely no interest in putting a spin on obviously benign statistics. That man is a pillar of objectivity.
In olden days (pre-Internet), the entertainment industry survived on one thing, and one thing ONLY. Control of information. Period. CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, whatever! It's all just controlled information. Now, more than ever with increasing bandwidth, that information is even MORE freely distributed. That is something that isn't going to change. Now, all that can be DEFINITELY controlled is the actual source of the information, the bands, the stars in the movie, etc.
It's not a pretty picture to be painted for the entertainment industry. They can try to keep their control on the medium but there will always be another Napster or DeCSS or whatever. Tough times are ahead. INFORMATION IS NO LONGER A PRODUCT. IT IS A PUBLIC GOOD. Period.
Ham on rye, hold the mayo please.
thelocust[dot]org
You're also screwing the bands whose cds you are not paying for. How nice to show your support.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
seems simple enough to me: as a musician (which I am), I want my music to be heard by a large audience, and I hope to make money off of it so I can focus 100% of my energy on making more music. MP3.COM and Napster are a major help to me right now, as anyone can get their music out for free (or cheaply) without signing ones' soul to the record companies. who makes $$$$ on the cd sales? not the artist, unless you are Metallica or Dr. Dre and have the clout to sign a record deal to profit themselves. Most artists make their money where they should- playing live in front of a beer-soaked audience. THIS SHOULD NEVER CHANGE. The recording industry will have to change, and grow up... but, guess what? like the bitchy little brat it is, it will go kicking and screaming. hey metallica- little message from me if you ever read this: you're still the same bunch of dirtballs who revolutionized the metal scene... but now your fans hate you.
--endcycle--
Everytime the RIAA complains about lost revenue they always point to the artist as the real victim, while in fact they are only looking to protect their own monopoly. In Canada, the Tragically Hip, which is considered to have a good deal with their label, only makes approx $1 from every CD sold. So who is the RIAA trying to protect by blocking Napster? The RIAA. Where Metallica is concerned, they have created their own label for promoting their music.. so they aren't protecting themselves as artists, they are protecting themselves as a record label. One area where artists should be concerned are the bands who release albums with 1 or 2 good tracks and the rest being filler. Why should we buy a CD for 1 or 2 songs? The RIAA reminds me a lot of Encyclopedia Britannica... though for the record (no pun) EB didn't whine when they saw their hard copy sales disappear with the advent of CD technology. Technology changes the world we live in. Grow with it or be left behind. Face it RIAA, music will still be produced regardless of the distribution method... its just unfortunate that the RIAA may not be part of the equation.
I go to sleep listening to Headline News (anyone else?) and when I heard the statistics, I started laughing out loud... the numbers mean *nothing*... its like saying "Accidents involving Dodge Spirits increased by 90% at dangerous intersections"... Now... is the car? Or is it grandpa up from Florida?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Since when did college pukes make up the vast majority of Napster's user base? All of my friends use it. I use it. None of us have set foot on a college campus (unless community college counts).
Four years ago a vengful ex stole one of my favourite CD's. I wonder if it's piracy for me to download tunes made from that album. Probably so, eh?
I am presently listening to a CD on my computer at work. I shall bring it home in the morning and listen to it there on a stereo. I like the portability, so I bought the CD. The music industry should realize that music on the net is exposure, which leads to sales. The got their panties in a bunch back in the 20's when they thought radio play would damp record sales. By the 50's they had caught on, as indicated by the payola scandals.
Primus seems to make an effort to keep their music reasonably priced, and I am happy to give them a plug.
Metallica does not, and I am happy to give them a plug of another sort.
Fish on!
"I am an American. You are a sick asshole!!"
4% is extremely severe when you are talking about the economy. When the NASDAQ drops 4% or more, it is considered a huge drop and cause for concern. If any big companies sales dropped by 4% there would be a major sell-off and the stock would absolutely tank. If a company's sales dropped any more than 4% in a year, the stock would probably drop to zero and be de-listed from the market. I'd sure like to know how you get off saying 4% is not severe.
I lost 'large yet unspecific amounts of money also due to piracy of MP3s'
This isn't likely to make anyone think that I have actually suffered damage due to MP3 trade, just that I'm a blowhard. Yet the RIAA still thinks that this will convice us they are being unfairly abused. Lets see some stats guys.
-Elendale (and I mean real statitistics, not more FUD)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
what a crock.
I DL, I listen. If it's good, I DL more. If it's still good, I buy. Otherwise I delete the crappy band and start over at step one.
I buy about a cd a month because I can make an educated choice. Industry always flips out when the consumer actually gains a tiny little foothold somewhere. Napster gives the consumer the chance to not buy a cd for one song, then realize that every other song sucks.
Instead of whining, why doesn't the music industry embrace technology? Why not embrace the new and very powerful MODERN way of making money. Every other industry is picking up the pace, but the music industry is sitting back, suing, whining, and belly-aching.
If they don't want to play in the real world, they WILL lose profit, but it's certainly not our fault.
You gotta move with the times.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall