Music Industry Staggers While Film Industry Blooms

GLX writes "The LA Times is running an article that explores the idea that while piracy has been the (supposed) bane of the music industry, it has yet to be felt in the video industry..." "Yet to be felt" might be too strong, but DVD sales are booming, and don't seem to be much crimped by illegal copying.

Comments

I've said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

and I'll say it again. The music industry isn't worried about illegal copying for the current market conditions - they're concerned about the future.
At the moment, someone downloads a song, and if they like it, they go out and buy the album. In the future, someone would download a song, and if they like it, download the rest of the album because broadband is normalised.

My take on it

[rattler14]

IMHO, there is very little difference between mp3 and CD quality. Yes, there are differences, and audiophiles will point this out every time. But the fact is, most users don't care.

Now DVD's vs DIVX. Not only can the quality suck (artifacts all the time), but the sound can be totally out of sync, which is really really annoying. Plus, unlike mp3 CD's which can be played in just about any new CD player, DIVX does not play in standalone DVD players without hacking the hardware.

But, this could change...

The markets a pretty different...

[Bozzio]

Wouldn't the fact that movies can be rented make a huge difference in pirating?

With a CD, you can't rent it at a low cost to see if you like it. With a movie, however, for just a few dollars you can enjoy the movie, and if you want to, purchase it without fear of wasting your money.

piracy is a red herring.

[uncoveror]

Hollywood made more money the Memorial Day weekend of 2002 than at any other previous time. Piracy is no threat to them. People who watch pirated movies on their computer are just sneak previewing, and will go to a theater. People who buy pirate DVDs at the flea market for fewer than ten dollars won't pay full retail for legit ones. People who do pay full retail for legit ones wouldn't be caught dead in a flea market or with DVDs from one. When you boil it all down, piracy is a non-issue. Shutting it down would not get Hollywood or the recording industry any richer. They are wasting their resources fighting it, and would waste our resources if Congress gives them tax money to combat piracy. This is all true of the recording industry as well. They are not interested in anything but protecting their power over artists.

Ok, so let's figure this out..

[sporty]

Dvd's have been around for what, about 4 years? Anyone find the back to the future dvd yet? No. But many other movies out of the past and present are coming to dvd. Music has been on cd for at least 10 years.

Now here's the clincher. Music now-a-days just sounds like carbon copies of everything. Remember bands like Bush, Motley Crue, Metallica (before they sold out), Rob Base, Run DMC and the likes? Today's day and age seems more of a rehash of everything that's already been done. Why buy crappy music much less rip it?

Re:Ok, so let's figure this out..

[MrHanky]

Now here's the clincher. Music now-a-days just sounds like carbon copies of everything. Remember bands like Bush, Motley Crue, Metallica (before they sold out), Rob Base, Run DMC and the likes? Today's day and age seems more of a rehash of everything that's already been done. Why buy crappy music much less rip it?

Interesting post, mostly because you are wrong. There's a lot of good, new music on the market these days. Much of it is both better and more original than the bands you list here. Of course, that also means it's more "difficult", and therefore it's not marketed as heavily.

I suggest the record companies really have a marketing problem: all the shit they try to shove down people's throats is, well, crap. :-) It doesn't create an interest in music, doesn't stimulate one's curiosity in new (or old) genres. The bands they advertise are just products, or commercials disguised as products (Spice Girls was a commercial for the product Spice Girls). The culture around it is lacking.

So where does this leave the interesting new music? You don't need marketing to make music, so it will still be made. And it will have an audience, since most people know some other people, and will tell them to listen whatever they listen to themselves, if they think it's of any interest. That's culture. Take part in it yourself, and you will find many people make good music, even though RIAA tells you it's out of fashion these days. The fact that the large record companies suck should not prevent you from listening.

It's a matter of value added

[Ride-My-Rocket]

When you buy a DVD, you usually get higher quality output, less volatile / damage-prone media, and the quality won't crap out with extended use. In addition, you usually get a bunch of extras / goodies tossed in, such as interviews, Easter eggs and deleted scenes. Plus, you're able to rent a DVD first if you don't wanna buy it outright, sample the goods, and then decide if it's worth it to buy it.

With music CDs, you can't conveniently sample the music before you buy it. Or maybe you can, if you go to a Virgin MegaStore and stand at one of those kiosks for 90mins, but that's not for me. Music CDs don't have any *bonus* features beyond what you hear on the radio, and it's rare when you ever hear more than a single song or two on the radio, to give you an idea of whether the price of the CD is worth the quality of the entire album.

So am I surprised that the music industry is faltering at a time when video is booming? No. Piracy does and will continue to happen -- you can bitch about it, or you can improve your legit product and/or change your business model to make it more attractive.

Do I have a good solution for how the music industry can solve its woes? Nope. But I don't feel sorry for them -- they've been dragging their feet for decades, exploiting the lack of choice of musical options by jacking prices way up for shoddy, over-produced sound. And they continue to do it......... and so, I continue to pirate most of my music and only buy those items I deem worthy of my hard-earned greenery.

Re:just wait for dvd burners

[killmenow]

Copying a DVD with a DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW burner is ok if you want to lose (or completely redo) the menus, extra features, etc. If all you want to copy is the film track itself, ok, but because all the DVD (re)writeable formats are single layer, many DVDs require a 2:1 burned DVD to original DVD ratio. So, your menus will not work unless you redo them.

And if all you want is the film itself, get yourself a decent DVD player and rip the DVD to SVCD on a CD-R. Much cheaper than burning DVDs and (imho) just as good quality.

On another note, I d/l-ed a DVD to SVCD rip of LoTR/FoTR that took 4 CD-Rs to burn, but is excellent quality. I will buy this DVD. Call me what you will for supporting the companies that try to thwart fair use, etc. but it's good and I expect additional features on the DVD would hook me if the movie itself hadn't already.

Renting of movies?

[taeric]

I would think one of the major differences in the movie versus music debate would be that you can rent movies.

Sure, this doesn't mean any difference at all to the high tech computer user who would be willing to download anything. However, for the average layman who isn't sure about a movie, it can be picked up for rent at the local video store for relatively cheap. Especially if you go in with a few friends for a cheap night of entertainment.

Compare this with music CD's. If you aren't sure about an album, you have very limited choices. You can buy it and hope it isn't horrible, you can not buy it, and finally, you can download it. In all cases, the price is either non existant, or at least 14 dollars (US).

Prices make the difference

[anewman]

Take for example, a CD. $20. Now, all DVD's (whether you buy them in store or on a place like Amazon) are, at the most, $20. Old classics, such as Airplane! and the like, can be had at some places used for as little as $6. The quality of the product is higher, and the price is right. As long as Hollywood can keep putting out some decent movies, the same fate that befell the music industry should not happen.

Re:Interesting pricing

[SerpentMage]

And that is the entire crux of the issue.

The movie industry is based on the concept of making new movies and then "renting" them. They have diversified their income that no one thing can hit them too hard.

Movies make money from sales at ticket office, sales to rentals, sales to individuals, sales to hotels, sales to TV stations and movie channels. What do radio stations sell? A CD and some sales to Radio stations (even that is the other way often).

The point is that the music industry screwed up in not figuring out how to make money elsewise.

The movie industry simply were better business people....

Re:Ummmm....Price?

[CProgrammer98]

Try Amazon.co.uk

Harry Potter DVD - £16.99
Soundtrack CD £17.99

Truly Bizarre!!!

Re:Some comparisons ...

[srmalloy]

"the bulk of the music industry's loss comes from the high amount of 'small-time" MP3 pirating."

Beware of assuming the precedent. Your statement about the industries "losses" assumes a tie to sharing over P2P networks, which is a fallacy (or at least an unproven hypothesis)

It would be interesting to see, if there was some way to get a statistically valid survey performed, how much money people spent on entertainment over, say, the last three years, broken out into spending on movie theatres, videotapes, CDs, and DVDs. Without numbers to prove it, I can't say with any assurance, but I'd be willing to bet that a significant fraction of the 'loss due to MP3 pirating' the RIAA claims is really a loss from people walking into a media store and deciding that their $20 is better spent on a DVD than a CD.

I haven't seen that disposable income has taken any abrupt jump in the last year, so with the amount of money available to spend on entertainment, if DVD sales are surging, that means that other forms of entertainment are going to have less money spent on them -- and that means that CD sales are going to take a hit. But the RIAA won't accept that; the premise that the market will provide them with monotonically increasing sales is Holy Writ to them, so any drop in their sales must, a priori, mean that piracy is the reason people aren't buying CDs.

Re:Some comparisons ...

[Kibo]

But even more importantly, there is a cost of pirating vs a cost of buying. I can walk into most stores, and get almost any DVD for less than $20 bucks, including special child-proofed editions of Memento with extras all over the place. CD's? Whoa! Maybe, is it on sale? And further more when I buy a movie I know for a fact I'll be getting around 2 hours, give or take, of enjoyment. With music, I suppose I could sit there and listen to the whole album before I buy it, after all it might only take 20 minutes, on a 74 minute cd.

I'm forced to observe that music costs as much as movies, occasionally more, provides far less entertainment for that expense, and for your trouble assumes you're a criminal just because that's one of many choices a person has. With the music industry so quick to screw me, and music downloading being so cheap and convienent, I sometimes wonder why I don't do it.

Not that I'm happy with companies like Disney, buying up movies like Kiki's Delivery Service and then not making them available on DVD, or making only vastly inferior versions of eXistenZ available forcing me to get the canadian import. Damn region crap.

Those businesses who choose not to serve their customers take a page not from Adam Smith's book, but from Lenin's, and they deserve all the mercy and compasion the free market reserves for such businesses.

Re:I hate dvd "features"

[donk, the magic llam]

check out www.nerd-out.com/darrenk/ for options on removing "UOP" or "User Operations Prohibited" from various DVD players (usually via a patched FW that can in many cases be flashed by burning it onto a standard CDR with a specific filename). I've done this on my DVD player (an Apex AD-600A), and it lets you skip whatever you want and jump back to the title screen whenever you want. Actually, by default (without any patching) you can make the Apex AD-600A disable all menus and just let you choose which tracks you want. You can just turn them off with a button on the remote. I don't think features like this are usually available on the like of Sony and Pioneer players... If your looking for a fun (in the hacker sense) DVD player, get a cheap-o one with an ESS chipset and a standard IDE interface. You can make them play MP3s, MPGs, view JPGs off a standard CD, or you can add a 80gig hard-drive, or compact-flash reader and use it like a jukebox for under $200US...

Music industry completely different.

[towaz]

The music industry has not followed the example of the film industry. If you download a movie and find it a good film you are more likely to purchase the dvd for the better quality and the extra content. Download some music and they is no incentive for the getting the album. Maybe if another cd with a few extra's like making of the music video or interviews would persuade custoemrs to buy the album.