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Napster Spurs CD Sales; Gets Sued Again Anyway
hammy writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is running this story about the results of a survey demonstrating that users of music downloading programs (ala Napster etc) actually buy more music. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to any of the Slashdot crowd but it's nice to see a formal survey that supports our intuition. Makes many of the RIAA arguments ring a little hollow." Meanwhile, Napster is being sued yet again. That's gratitude for you.
I'm currently studying longterm sales in the music business, and here's the deal: the bands being sought after to sell beer and things (Bob Seger, et al), are the A-List of twenty years ago.
Around ten years ago, the music business shifted to all-out A-List promotion rather than any attempt at career building. This is when you began to see bands that came out, did double platinum in less than a year, and then _vanished_. I don't mean broke up- the record remains in the catalog whether the band's still around or not, but when the record industry does this, they do incredible volume for a very brief time and when they stop promoting, NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR ANY MORE.
Beer companies don't want to use bands like that to sell beer, either. They want Bob Seger or Brooce- catalog sellers from at least 20 years ago.
What the A-List artists are these days is processed stuff- 'N Sync etc. The RIAA _can't_ lose control of artists like that, because history shows that when the RIAA quits pushing that kind of act, the sales STOP. With real bands, the sales continue- sometimes in a big way, for what's called a 'catalog killer' album. There are no such albums being made these days, and that's intentional.
This is because dealing with always new and inexperienced artists means no nasty skepticism about deal terms, no griping about contracts, no questions about what's recoupable expenses: using only new inexperienced artists means they can be contractually hosed, wrung out until all the money is squeezed out, and then dropped. If the RIAA labels had to maintain careers they wouldn't earn as much relative to the artist because the artist would develop savvy and clout and ability to negotiate contracts. The RIAA needs _virgin_ artists with no savvy or clout in order to get away with the margins it needs to survive.
It needs these margins because it's viciously squeezed by rack jobbers and independent promotion- both of which have been consolidating, bigtime. The RIAA doesn't _keep_ its money- it's gotta pay a LOT of 'protection' to independent promotion, which controls radio. It's gotta bribe people to get CDs placed in Wal-Mart, when there's only 2 slots available and they're being viciously fought over. You can see why the RIAA doesn't dare allow genuine careers to develop- it needs puppet artists to manipulate and discard. They come cheaper.
The trouble is, once you quit pulling the strings, the puppet artists collapse, and sales completely stop. When you pick an act and a single and a video specifically because it's horrible enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and then you dump lots of it on the market, you can move a lot of units to half-interested people- then when you have to rely on the value of the material for back catalog sales, the sales absolutely fall off a cliff because nobody really wants to hear it- it's fake.
And this is shown by the tendency of commercial music (the beer manufacturers and so on) to want guys like Bob Seger in preference to fake A-List pop stars that have sold three times as many records as Seger ever did. They know that the fake stuff will stop selling the instant the RIAA label stops pushing- and they need more appeal than that, to sell beer. They know that the RIAA is operating on a 'push' basis and can't or won't invest in developing artists that people _want_ to hear.
And THAT is what the RIAA is so scared of.
Do the math: it's all a matter of public record. You can get the information online, about sales of platinum and gold albums, and look at the sales curves before and after 1990. That seems to be roughly the dividing point.
It seems people really need a lesson in correlation and causation. Just because two things are correlated (ie they have some link, whether casual or otherwise) doesn't imply causation (that one caused the other). CD sales went up and people used Napster. These things may be related, or they may not be. People who use Napster buy more CDs than other people. This could be caused by them using Napster. It could also be that people who buy more CDs are more likely to use Napster. There are many factors that can affect something like this, and just saying "CD sales went up and a lot of people used Napster, so therefore Napster caused CD sales to go up" doesn't hold any more water than saying "CD sales went up less than they have, and lots of people used Napster, so it must be Napster that is impeeding the growth". There is no proof that the relationship is causal in either direction, because there is no control group that never has seen Napster. There is no way to say with any kind of certainty that Napster has hurt or helped CD sales (not that that will stop either side from trying).
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Whether you support Napster or not (I'm actually on the fence), you can't use surveys to bolster your argument. Neither can the RIAA. Surveys are inherently flawed as a scientific method of producing data. Surveys can use misleading questions, slightly unusual definitions, and a host of other methods to twist the results even before they are collated. Even if you have NO agenda, and just honestly want to know the answer to a question, results obtained from surveys are highly suspect, and must be taken with a huge grain of salt.
I have some (small) experience in this area, as I used to do work for a group that wanted information that could only be obtained by asking our patrons questions. After working for months to design a survey with overlapping, interlocking questions so that we could run cross checks on the results, carefully picking wordings, working long into the night to tailor the questions to specifically address the issue we wanted data for, and then administering and analyzing over 3000 responses, we discovered that: what we thought we were very clear in asking was not at all what some of the patrons thought we were asking; that nearly 30% of the survey responses were internally inconsistent as far as we could tell (ask the same factual question two different ways, and obtain two different responses); that even when the data was unambiguous, it was very difficult to understand (interpret) what the answers meant; and many other problems.
Surveys to answer the question "Does napster encourage or suppress music sales?" will never produce a valid, reliable answer. There are just too many variables. The only way to answer that question for sure is to take a representative cross section of Napster, non-Napster, and former-Napster users, and analyze their music buying behavior before and after the introduction of the Napster service, and correct the results for economic growth, socio-economic status, locale, and many other factors. And then, you MIGHT be able to say something statistically valid. MIGHT.
This is not a Fugazi
Come on, this survey was awful. Take the time to read the story and understand the questions posed in the survey. The survey in no way showed that CD sales were "spurred" by downloading MP3's. People were merely asked whether or not they would buy music after downloading it.
And if you read on to the end of the story, you'll see that the guy writing the story has no idea what he's talking about...
a quote from the story - "Seriously, how many people are prepared to spend several days - because that's how long it wil take on 33 speed modem - downloading a whole album and then listening to inferior sound quality; additionally, how many people have hard drives with the hundreds of gigabytes of memory required to store more than a few dozen CDs? About 10-12 CDs worth will completely use up the memory of a 3GB hard drive."
I think that says it all right there... 3GB for 10 albums in MP3 format? I don't think so.
I support Napster, free downloading, etc... but this "Scientific Survery" was garbage.