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File Sharing and CD Sales, Again

Posted by michael on from the dissection-and-vivisection dept.

Andrew Leonard writes "Stan Liebowitz, an economist studying the effects of file-trading on the music industry, says in an article in Salon that new numbers have convinced him that the decline in CD sales may be partially attributable to MP3 downloading. But he also argues that the decline does not justify draconian new laws."

6 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Obviously, it does affect CD sales to SOME extent! by izx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're always going to have the unethical/innocent geek kid who downloads an MP3 and listens only to it since his PC, MP3 player and PDA are the only things he uses for listening to music.

    You're always going to have the normal guy who doesn't care about "branded" CDs or the slight (and sometimes perceptible) quality loss of MP3s over CDs...he goes ahead and burns his MP3s to a 5-cent CDR and listens to it anyway.

    You're always going to have the fellow who likes to support artists, and buys original CDs. Catch? He now listens to MP3s to sample new albums. He doesn't like the sample...he doesn't buy the CD. Whereas earlier he would be stuck with the CD as a sample (no CD returns!), he is now a "loss" to the music company.

  2. Might it possibly be....? by Newer+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That I and millions of others like me have decided to boycott the RIAA?
    Hmmm?

    Might we be sick and tired of their power plays and their intrusions into our personal lives?
    Hmmmm?

    Might we be sick and tired of being called criminals by them?
    Hmmm?

    Could we be tired of ther inane music they've been producing the past few years?
    Hmmm?

    Well, My Leibowitz...what do you think??

    1. Re:Might it possibly be....? by Alsee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      boycott the RIAA?

      Heck, you can throw away the term "boycott".
      I'd say that part of the reduced sales is simply "pissed off customers".
      And it's not like there's a single reason for people to be pissed off, take your pick:

      (1) Irritating the hell out of everyone by inturrupting the grammy's with a stupid-ass antipiracy speech.
      (2) Numerous prominent artists publicly complaining about RIAA's hideous contracts and treatment of artists. Everyone particularly loved the "10% breakage allowance" on CD's deducted from artist royalties.
      (3) Pricing.
      (4) Packaging (in particular a desire for singles).
      (5) Killing Napster.
      (6) Having no respect for the customer.
      (7) Reffering their customers pirates and thieves.
      (8) Making legal threats against a college professor for presenting research at a science conferrence.
      (9) releasing (mostly planning to release) crippled CD's.
      (10) Pushing for a law allowing them to hack people's computers.
      (11) RIAA's "work for hire" bill, a proposed copyright amendment which would steal the permanent right to songs from the artists and hand it to the labels.
      (12) Federal Trade Commission finding the Recording industry cartel anti-competitve and engaged in illegal price-fixing.
      (13) Hiring companies to flood P2P networks with bogus files.
      (14) Failure to keep up with reality and sell music downloads (their sorely belated attempt at this was nothing short of insulting).
      (15) I still blame them for killing Digital Audio Tape, a perfectly good technology. The Audio Home Recording Act mandated that it must include DRM and that cassettes and players carry a tax to balance piracy estimates. The DRM made it useless and the tax inflated the prices.

      And those are just the ones off the top of my head. I'm sure there's plenty more.

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      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  3. this is so easy to prove! by Dr.+Awktagon · · Score: 5, Funny

    You need 1) a time machine, 2) ability to access to the many-worlds multiverse, and 3) access to the album sale data.

    Just set your time machine back to sometime before Fanning writes the first Napster code. Then, choose a universe where he falls madly in love with a lovely blonde, and gets rid of "that stupid computer" at her request. Monitor CD sales for the next couple of years.

    Next, choose the current universe (or maybe one exactly like this one, except where nobody thought of this experiment, just in case there's some weird time looping feedback thing going on). Monitor CD sales for the same period.

    Then, you'll be able to say if Napster and file sharing affected the music industry, all other things being equal.

    I swear, I bet these so-called "economists" can't even change the gravitational constant of the universe!

  4. It's not the MP3s, it's the CD-R drives... by tRoll+with+Butter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    BEFORE Napster hit the scene, I got a Memorex 1622 CD-RW drive (Amazingly, they're also the subject of a major class action law suit at the moment...) and used it to burn copies of EVERYTHING for all my friends.

    It still all revolves around CD burners. Take the current MP3 situation and subtract being able to burn CDs. Sure, there's portable MP3 players, but the REAL album-purchase-killer is being able to actually have that shiny disc with the music on it in your hot little hands. Most of my friends who aren't interested in computers know that us computer geeks can burn CDs and won't hesitate to ask for a copy of the latest albums or songs they can't get out of their head.

    Do you actually tell your friends that they have to go out and spend money on something you can burn for them on an inexpensive blank CD? "Come on, you're supposed to be my friend... Help me out here." Unlike home taping of the past, CD-RW drives have become VERY fast as of late... A C90 tape actually took 45 minutes per side (yes, it had to be flipped) to record, a 40X CD-RW can burn an entire CD in less than 8. CPUs have become much faster as well. It's become a whole lot easier to fire up your CD-R mastering software in the background and burn CDs while you're say, reading Slashdot.

    When a friend asked for a copy of a tape, it meant rewinding, analog distortion, getting the levels right, and FLIPPING THE DAMN TAPE. Burning is just a blank CD and a few clicks away.

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    Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
  5. hypocrisy by hrm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems to be that the Slashdot-Correct way of thinking is to say that the music distributers brought these problems on themselves. But I don't think they're entirely to blame. Cheap bastards like me have something to do with it as well.

    I don't mind admitting that these days I only go out to buy a CD if, after arsing around with gnutella for a day or two, I still haven't found it. If there was a "perfect" file sharing network, I'd never buy a CD again.

    You might say, "you do this because CDs are overprized" (even more true here in the Netherlands than in most other parts of the world). To which my honest reply would have to be, "if CD prizes were cut by 50%, I would only cut the time I spend trying to find one on the net by 50% before giving up and buying it".

    My bottom line is, if p2p networks worked perfectly, I'd never pay for music, regardless of how reasonable the price might be.