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Yet Another Look at CD Sales
citizenkeller writes "Dan Bricklin, of VisiCalc fame, has published a very interesting essay on "CD sales, downloading, and burning". In his own words: 'Given the slight dip in CD sales despite so many reasons for there to be a much larger drop, it seems that the effect of downloading, burning, and sharing is one of the few bright lights helping the music industry with their most loyal customers. Perhaps the real reason for some of the drop in sales was the shutdown of Napster and other crackdowns by the music industry.'"
and so is this post?
It's the economy stupid. That's the reason for the drop. Plus there is a lot of crap that sounds the same. It's not the pirates.
Perhaps the real reason for some of the drop in sales was the shutdown of Napster and other crackdowns by the music industry.
Perhaps 1 + 1 = 2
=P
With a poor economy, basic economics says that a rise in price of a discretionary item already priced above the optimum point may result in a drop in total receipts.
>> This is the real reason. Also, the report does not say where he got his information.
-- Powered By Linux
Just maybe, it's the fact that the music that's being pumped out is inane trash, and maybe, just maybe, a handful of the sheep have started to break away from the flock?
... give me a break. Pop Music sucked before and it still sucks.
I mean, it sickens my stomach when MTV does a special on "Pop Music Post 9/11"
Maybe the real reason there was a drop in CD sales was *gasp* the fact that we're in a recession? The Dow Jones was up around 12000, now it hovers around 8000 - CD sales seem to have held up surprisingly well, actually.
Personally, I've bought many more CDs since Napster than I did beforehand, 'cause I discovered lesser known groups like Apocalyptica that I really enjoy listening to.
The slashdot crowd has been saying that ever since the shutdown of napster. Many /. folk have commented on how the nap music to preview before they buy. Others mention how Napster and after Gnutella have actually increaded their CD buying. Most people link the slow down in CD sales to the economic downturn rather than making the RIAA's claim that it's from file trading.
I think it's pretty clear that file trading is pretty neutral on the music industry and i join others in wonderment over the industry's heavy handed tactics to stop file trading when there is no evidence that it even might hurt their bottom lines.
I've said it before, but people don't seem to get it yet: The music industry has a larger plan, namely to seize on the issue of "piracy" to justify purchasing legislation mandating the infrastructure required to support ubiquitous pay-per-use. Today's battles aren't about unit sales of music, but rather about shifting America to a pay-per-use entertainment business model.
This is why the RIAA is perfectly willing to shoot itself in the foot in the short term (5 years). It lets them bleat about piracy while they try to get rid of that revenue-limiting buy-once play-many business model
Remain calm! All is well!
Napster is long dead. There are MANY other (better) options now available. When my roommate used Napster back in the day the average search returned a good enough list to download something at a decent speed. But let's look at Kazaa. The average list resulting from a search is insanely long and the combination of downloads for a higher speed is SO much better. Granted Napster would have incorporated the same thing into itself but that's not the point.
My point is that just b/c Napsters gone does NOT mean that people are no longer able to download/burn music. That's just stupid to say that b/c it is gone there is no more desire to buy CDs.
My theory (based on my own economic situation after the stocks went to shit) is that economics have played a large role in the downturn of everything, including CDs.
Already have an Internet connection, already have a CD burner, already have P2P software, blank CDs running me about $1 a piece/average.
New CDs run me $9.99 - $17.00 depending (especially for smaller bands like I prefer to listen to, SCI, WSP, etc).
What am I going to do? I am going to download the damn MP3s or SHNs and burn them. Just like everyone else is.
Stop w/the happy horseshit.
Support freedom of music. etree and FurthurNET
How many people buy cd's rip them, then sell them? You never really hear about this senario. Is this really bad for the record industry? You are purchasing the cd, and adding to the used industry. It may take a little form the RIAA, but remind me why I should care about Rosen again? :-)
... this article explains why I haven't bought a single CD since I started using file-sharing software.
I suppose it also explains why all of the independent music stores in my hometown are going out of business.
Dream on. I'm going to read the article now, maybe I'll be suprised, I doubt it though.
They are losing buisiness because they are treating their customers like shit. You dont' treat your customers like shit and stay in buisiness for long. Eventually they must learn the painful lesson that laws can never overpower market forces and customer satisfaction.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Are you suggesting that illegal sharing has no effect on music sales? Are you willing to concede that at least some of the drop is sales is due to piracy?
You can defend it all you want, but at least be reasonable. The economy is not the reason for lower sales; it may be a reason, but it's certainly not the only one.
How many times has this been discussed now? This is nothing that hasn't been said a million times in previous slashdot discussions.
File sharing and internet radio have helped me experience some music that I would have never listened to in the first place. As a result, I've bought many CDs that I would have never gotten in the first place had I not heard them on my computer.
"No manual entry for woman."
If the record labels weren't stupid, they would have offered Napster, Morpheus, and the like payola to make artists on their labels appear in searches first. Because downloading appeared to threaten their power over artists, they crushed Napster, and try to crush all file trading, damming up a huge potential revenue stream. When opportunity knocks, the stupid bar the door. The ultimate insult was calling us all theives by making "copy protected" disks that won't play in a computer. boycott the stupid recording industry.
How ya like dat?
If I opened a bakery, and all I did was sell white bread, eventually I'm going to hit a saturation point. After that, I can't expect my sales to improve much year over year.
... you'd think I was nuts .
So I could either increase the price of my white bread, to compensate for the lack of additional sales. But that's a dangerous route to take, because for every price increase, I'm going to probably lose customers (either to another bakery, or to people who just decide to bake at home).
If I wanted the government to mandate that people can only buy white bread, or only from me, or that other bakeries pay me a $0.05 for every loaf they sell, or that consumers pay me a $10.00 levy when they purchase a new oven
The right choice would also expand my product line. and sell other types of bread. Of course, this too will reach a limit. But as long as I sell a variety of products, at reasonable prices, I should make enough money to cover my expenses and be happy.
Right?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
by blowing up Canada. Those bastards deserve it.
The entertainment industry is trying to turn Peer-to-Peer into a bad name. This is wrong. Fax machines are Peer-to-Peer. Telephones are Peer-to-Peer. Email is Peer-to-Peer. Cell phones are Peer-to-Peer.
You catching your "Peeping Tom" neighborhood kid look as you are changing clothes is a Peer-to-Peer.
Too bad that most people think that this theory is crazy and will never happen.
Pay-per-view is the holy grail for the music publishers. (not the artists, it's actually the death of art) I hope that if they ever do get this passed that there is some sort of riot, but unfortunatly it will be silently accepted like everything else.
Apathy.
We've all seen reports over the past 5 years, that the increase in digital music trading has allowed for increased exposure of bands and styles of musin to which the music buying public would not otherwise be exposed, thus increasing overall CD sales. We've also seen the competing reports sponsored by the likes of the RIAA, that online music trading has caused grave harm to the recording industry, regardless of the fact they have had record setting in those years. This report is just a reflection of the economy, as the analysis says flat out, but you can be sure the recording industry will use the data of the sales decline and develop their own interpretation along the lines of their usual ramblings.
Particularly interesting was the 7% rise in CD prices in a time of economic decline. I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but it seems to me that a choice to raise prices on a discressionary product such as CDs might be made simply to spur the decline we've seen here. The raw data certainly provides amunition for the RIAA and company, without resulting in a significant reduction in revenues.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
So, it seems the more you buy, the more likely you are to download and burn your own, or, to put it another way, the more you burn the more you buy.
His "mathematical" approach to this conclusion is fundamentally flawed. He talks about how the Offline and Nonusers make up 54% percent of the population but only buy 39% of the CDs. Yeah no shit sherlock. When you look at who probably makes up the Offline and Nonusers groups, it is no surprise. Today, pretty much the only people who are offline are older people who are afraid of/unable to learn the "new" technology. I highly doubt these people buy many CDs; hell, they may not even own a CD player. As for the nonusers, this splits into two main groups the way I see it: younger people who are against piracy and older people who don't use their computer for much more than web browsing and email.
Ultimately, I think the only relevant numbers would be if you could figure out the statistics for Nonusers, Dabblers, Learners, and Lovers between the ages of 13 and 25 or so and their CD purchasing habits because these are the users who make up the statistically significant number of music downloaders and purchasers. I would be willing to bet that if you looked at these numbers, the CD purchases of Nonusers and Dabblers would be more per person than Learners and especially Lovers.
Besides the obvious - who in the current economy has tons of available cash to buy lots of CD's - there's the incredible rate at which the price of CD's continues to go up. Um, I'm not a marketing major, but seems to me that if your product isn't selling at $20 and testing says the people like your product they're just not BUYING it, odds are really good that your price is higher than they're willing to pay.
Add to that problem the fact that most music the recording companies are releasing (esp. the stuff they really push) all sounds the same. Either you get copy cats, really is there that much difference between the many "look at my navel" bimbos out there??? Or you get stuck with a group that had a hit album once so all their later albums try to sound just like their one good album. Even if you find a group you can enjoy and listen to, usually you're stuck paying $20 for their CD which has maybe 2 good songs and the rest is crap...
Of course, given alternatives, people are going to find other ways to get their music of choice.
I'm not saying there isn't good music out there but the only new music that gets any attention is typically the latest boy-band or a fresh piece of lip-synching-jail-bait and that is simply not the material I want to part with my money for.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Music these days, for the most part, sucks.
i buy, burn, and listen to the burns incase the burns get f'd up. it's better for me to not spend $15 more than once.
-knowles
Is this true?
He will be missed...
...We all stop sponsoring terrorism by not bying music which is under the control of RIAA?
Buy indie music from labels who have nothing to do with the helldemons. Check out text file I have attached below.
List of Record Labels that feed RIAA
Everytime you buy a CD that's on that record label listed, you directly finance the people who turn around and take away your fair use rights and civil liberties.
Think about that for a while. As for the Dropping CD Sales, all I have to say is:
The laptop sales are also dropping. I guess it could be attributed to the widespread online hardware piracy via Lapster
As someone else said earlier, "It's the economy, stupid".
I do freelance advertising/pr work and the amount of contracts have dwindled over the last two years. This, in turn, has led to less disposable income in my pocket.
With the economy like it is, and work hard to come by, I'm more inclined to hold on to my money and make sure I'm able to cover my costs not just for this month, but well into the future. Additionally, with interest rates so low, I've also been making larger payments on student loans and remaining credit card debt.
What this means, obviously, is that I'm not going to go out and buy CDs as freely as I did when I was making money faster than I could spend it. Plus, why in the world would I want to go buy a CD for $18, when half the tracks either suck or are filler? (That's my new pet peeve: I can accept the bad song, because at least it was an attempt. Those filler tracks of random noise or whatever just sound like a waste of my money, however.)
What has increased my CD spending recently, however, is the number of sub-$10 CDs I've found. Borders has tons of CDs priced at $7.99 and for the last several weeks, I've seen new releases at anywhere from $8-13. That's much closer to a reasonable price -- and at $7, it's in that impulse-buy range for me.
It's been said before, but I think the RIAA needs to wake up and look at the facts. CDs are priced too high, and the economy sucks. Add to it that a lot of CDs are just crap lately, and why would I want to fork over $18-20 for a CD where I might like four tracks, when I can use it to pay down some of my debt?
I am not Herbert.
(disclaimer: this is a shameless plug for a website, but I am a satisfied customer)
Convenient way to buy independent CDs, without giving any of your money to the RIAA: CD Baby
They even let you pass a message to the artist for every CD purchased. Plus I love the line on the "about" page: "No Microsoft products were used in the creation of this website."
Remain calm! All is well!
I've always been a big music fan. I've got several thousand albums in my collection. I still buy a lot of CDs but the difference now is that I buy most of my stuff from unsigned bands instead of stuff from the major lables. I find a lot more interesting music this way instead of the "cookie cutter" music being put out by the majors. For example, let's say that today I want to buy a heavy metal album. I go to my favorite search engine and look up "heavy metal band". This brings up a list of a ton of bands I've probably never heard of before. I even narrow it down to my home state of Illinois some times to see what the local bands are up to. Then I go down the list, visit webpages, listen to MP3's (yes, most unsigned bands that I've seen post MP3's on their respective sites), if I like what I hear I buy the CD straight from the band. Nice thing is most often the RIAA doesn't see a dime. Another benefit I've found is that most bands like this will actually e-mail you back once you've bought their CD. I've gotten to meet some really cool musicians this way. Try that with some big-name act.
Would I buy stuff from major label bands? Sure if they had anything worth listening to.
for the money. Most people realise that you get like 50+ hours of enjoyment out of a good game while you only get a couple of hours out of a cd until it becomes background music. With the exception of that rare album that you play until your roommate destroys your stereo in retribution.
Also video games have multi million dollar budgets, are in development for years. Most albums are produced with at most a couple hundred thousand dollars, and composed in only a few months. Video games are big business, and may eclipse movies (if they haven't already).
I bought twice as many cd's back in Napster's heyday as I do now....probably more.
Granted, the current economy makes me think twice about some of my more frivolous purchases, but the main reason is that my exposure to music has been cut down.
Back when Napster was kicking, my friends would send me an e-mail saying "Hey, check out this song by this band." I would go to Napster, give it a listen and if I liked their music I might go buy the cd. These days, I just don't get to hear the songs, except for what popular radio shoves down our throat during drive time. I won't be buying any of those cd's anytime soon.
The labels want to be able to steer people to the music they want to sell, not the music that the people necessarily like.
Screw that. I'll just keep listening to the good songs that I already have.
Where the article begins to fall down is when the author begins to speculate without hard data such as his belief that cell phone usage adversely affects music sales. It completely falls down when he counters the very data with the following quote So since burning and downloading didn't cause a sizeable dip in sales it must have caused an increase instead? This conclusion is incorrect and quite illogical.
The author also seems to imply that shutting down Napster reduced the degree of copyright infringement but this seems unlikely given the number of P2P services that sprang up in its stead from Kazaa to Audiogalaxy to Gnutella.
BOTTOM LINE: The article correctly points out that the claims of the music industry of the costs of copyright infringement are exaggerated but falls down by claiming that copyright infringement fuels sales without anything more than a gut feeling to back this up.
The RIAA just needs the money to feed their cannabis habit. Oh you wait until it's taxed in the US. Then compact disks will be $40 a pop, the artists will all be Mickey Mouse Club rehashed crap and the only form of entertainment will be staring into this glowing box that induces a trance like state. Oh wait what the hell is going on?
Yes napster shutdown is responsible for the declining record sales. Hehehheheheh hahaha heheheh ahhaahah hehhehehe
...will come when someone combines the media library/CDDB-title-getting/auto-ripping and encoding properties of programs like Music Match Jukebox, Windows Media player, or iTunes. With a peer-to-peer client for gnutella or openNap (or something similar). This way the client will be more likely to know what files are what, and you could just select an album and have it download the whole thing. It should be a good player, like winamp, but open source, and maybe detect when a user is online but idle and only share after several minutes of inactivity. It should switch easily from client to client in the middle of downloads as users come and go, and maybe give preference to downloads of less redundant files.
1) Content - Most of the mainstream material put out right now is not compelling. The music is trite and uninteresting. Let's face it: what was the last musician/group you were driven to purchase their CD?
2) Cost - Right now, the average cost of a CD in NYC not on sale is $18.99. What are you getting for this price? A bunch of songs, one or two of which you are familiar with. A front booklet which may or may not have lyrics to the songs. That's it. At the same time, for ~ $19.99, you can DVDs for movies that not only feature the movie, but have extras like commentary tracks, alternative scenes, scripts, videos, commercials, trailers, video games, screensavers. And in most cases, this is a movie you are strongly familiar with so you are not "risking your money".
When the content is compelling, people pay. Proof: Eminem. Weeks before the release of "The Eminem Show" the CD was so pirated that it topped the traded songs on most P2P sites, and bootlegs were being sold on streets across the nation. The official CD (with extras) comes out and what happens? It goes to number one and continues to top the charts weeks later.
A second proof is a bit more obscure: a collegue had bought the Ash album "Free All Angels" from a UK site a few months ago. It was recently released here in the states with a bonus DVD (a bunch of videos and an application to edit the videos as you want). He's going to be buying the album again to get the DVD.
So, in summary, the trend of several recent articles:
Long term plan for pay per use, my ass. They're selling less and less. If they make it more expensive, and even worse quality (well, that's far-fetched, ok), people will buy even less no matter what the method of paying for it.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
It's difficult to argue with such common sense. However, while I can cite dozens of companies that excel due to their excellent regard for customers, I can't recall any significant company that has genuinely lost business due to its poor treatment of customers. Corporate leaders know monopolies or otherwise gargantuan enterprises are largely immune to even the most scathing customer opinion.
Please, prove me wrong!
...trying to explain to my gf why I wasn't going to buy her a RIAA produced CD. Her eyes have an impressive range of motion.
Because of the media monopolies crackdown on Napster (and because I am also having a harder time finding music that is worth listening to and CD's that are worth the price.) I decided to boycott their products. So I probably helped a tiny bit with that drop.
I hoped at one point the RIAA companies would get the message. Instead my small boycott has been spun into more ammunition to be used against me.
Speaking as a part time, small volume, music sharer. I bought more music two years ago then I have in a long time and I KNOW for a fact the Napster helped fuel my desire for music.
Go figure.
-Derek
Just because you read some lunatics anti-U.S. rants (Chomsky et al.) doesn't make their so-called facts correct. The U.S. goes out of its way to prevent civilian casualties. Think about it. It costs a lot more to develop and deploy high-tech weaponry. The Taliban, like many other ridiculous regimes, often chooses to place military equipment in the middle of residential neighborhoods and other areas where the U.S. is fucked if they bomb it, because they'll look like assholes on Al-Jazeera or the BBC, and militarily fucked if we don't. And as far as Afghan civilian casualties, the best guesses are roughly 3,000 and those are made by the same people who attempt to demonize the U.S. military at every opportunity. In reality, the numbers are probably less than that. Finally, the reason you don't see videos from the Pentagon is because of the security, you fucktard. Nice troll though.
There's a recient report on the drop of CD shipments commissioned by the RIAA (sorry no link because I can't remember who done it! and the search on the register isn't working)
The figures went something like this.
Shipments dropped by 10%
$ales dropped by 8%
So it looks like they put the price up.
The report said
Shipments where 10million last year and only 9 million this year down 1 million
Taking where $10million last year and $9.5 million this year (down $0.5 million)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Uh, *where* does he do anything more than *suggest* a possibility:
Perhaps the real reason for some of the drop in sales was the shutdown of Napster and other crackdowns by the music industry.
That hardly looks like a case-closed conclusion to me.
Used CDs are around $10 here (in Canada ... YMMV).
I will almost always scour a few used CD stores in my neighbourhood for a CD I want first. Only if I can't find it there will I check out HMV.
RIAA numbers don't include those sales, do they? And (based on the fact that new used-CD stores are popping up all over), I'm guessing that might be where more and more people are choosing to spend their discretionary income.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Of the last 10 CD's I have bought, 8 of them have been because I had picked up MP3's of songs off them by swapping files with coworkers. I don't have broadband at home, so I haven't done much file sharing.
CD sales are slumping because a lot of things in the economy are slumping. I don't listen to commercial radio much since I don't like commercials and I can't stand listening to the morning DJ's, so, aside from MP3 swapping, I hear most new music by occasionally (and vainly) trying to watch videos on MTV/VH1 (don't have MTV2). Maybe CD sales are slumping since the music video channels don't show videos anymore.
Next, I find it annoying that most record store chains have higher prices than discount stores. I know it is a chicken and egg problem based on supply and demand, but I'm talking about nationwide chains, in every mall in America. This goes for movies, too. Why would I go to Suncoast and pay $5 more for a movie?
Finally, if a CD of ~12 songs costs ~$12 and I can obviously rip it as soon as I get it, why can't I just go to the record companies site and buy the MP3 for a song for $1? I would pay, they would get a lot more money per song, and I would be no more or no less likely to share the song as I would if I bought the CD (except that I might not bother buying the CD if I only wanted one song and my buddy has it).
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Have they looked into the effect of all the compilations CD's that are out now? I'm sure the artists get paid to have their song featured on "Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 235", but it probably also puts a big dent in the total sales of that artist's CD.
As proof of this, let's look at the top 20 selling albums of all time as an example:
1. Eagles: Greatest Hits
2. Michael Jackson: Thriller
3. Pink Floyd: The Wall
4. Led Zeppelin IV
5. Billy Joel: Greatest Hits
6. AC/DC: Back in Black
7.Shania Twain: Come on Over
8.Beatles: White Album
9.Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
10.The Bodyguard Motion Picture Soundtrack
11.Boston: Boston
12.Alanis Morissette: Jagged Little Pill
13.Garth Brooks: No Fences
14.Hootie and the Blowfish: Cracked Rear View
15.Eagles: Hotel California
16.Beatles: Beatles
17.Bruce Springsteen: Born in the USA
18.Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon
19.Guns N Roses: Appetite For Destruction
20.Elton John: Greatest Hits
The list is a little rock-heavy, but look at the difference bewteen the bands. There's a huge variety of musical styles here. In other words, the exact opposite of what's being sold now. Listening to the same carbon copy crap is boring, and the opposite of entertaining. Until the RIAA and the record companies start releasing albums from artists who are willing to experiment musically, then sales will not increase.
Personally, the last CD's I purchased were Ozzy Osbourne: Live at Budokan (and the remaster / reissues he's released this year), and Black Sabbath's Past Lives. I doubt I buy any more CD's this year.
if you look at the numbers, a minus 3% change in the cost of a cd resulted in a 17% increase in sales. while the minor changes 1-2% are unpredictable, 3-4% changes correlate to increases or decrease in sales. in the recent years a 3% increase resulted in a 6% decrease in sales, and a 4% increase resulted in a 10% decrease in sales. the numbre reflect cd unit cost, since most music is purchased on cd. coupled with the economic uncertainty, what would a business sector expect. i purchase at least a hundred cds per year, and likely much more, since i have nearly 2000 since 1984 (i was in highschool with a definite lack of cash).
I really don't see how your "mathematical" refutation works. First you're using totally unkown quantities to try and boost a group by making generalizations:
Today, pretty much the only people who are offline are older people who are afraid of/unable to learn the "new" technology.
You then follow this up with:
I highly doubt these people buy many CDs; hell, they may not even own a CD player.
Of course his statistics show that these people don't buy many CD's (thus the 54% of population and only 39% of sales).
Finally, you throw in:
As for the nonusers, this splits into two main groups the way I see it: younger people who are against piracy and older people who don't use their computer for much more than web browsing and email.
Convenient grouping. Care to back it up with any statistics or facts? I'm a P2P non-user yet I'm an IT professional with multiple computers and a broadband connection at home. I'm against piracy, but I don't classify P2P as piracy.
So, after all of this inanities you then trot out the following:
Ultimately, I think the only relevant numbers would be if you could figure out the statistics for Nonusers, Dabblers, Learners, and Lovers between the ages of 13 and 25 or so and their CD purchasing habits because these are the users who make up the statistically significant number of music downloaders and purchasers.
OK, fine. Let's control for that. By your figuring the percentage of users in that group should be *MUCH* higher. So, since these people make up a significant portion of total CD sales, then a drop in CD purchases because of P2P usage would also be *MUCH* higher.
If the 13-25 group represented 75% of sales and out of that group you had 75% of the P2P learners and lovers then say a 50% drop in purchases from this group would be manifested as a greater spike in total sales losses.
Again, no matter how you slice it, the numbers just don't add up. (Controlling for age groups is irrelevant as this study is about overall CD sales.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
> The author also seems to imply that shutting down Napster reduced the degree of copyright infringement but this seems unlikely given the number of P2P services that sprang up in its stead from Kazaa to Audiogalaxy to Gnutella.
.. the author has already admitted it is just that .. a gut feeling. :)
Seems? You go on to chastize the author for concluding something from a gut feeling, yet you did the exact same thing in the above quote. Many other services may have sprung up, but unless you have usage statistics, you're assuming that the total amount of burning and sharing has risen. Unless you can prove that, you're coming to conclusions in the same presumptuous manner the author has.
Asides, probably redering even my assertion moot, the part you quote from the article has the world Perhaps in it. Its no use attacking conclusions to which the author has already correctly prefixed with a qualifier
"Old man yells at systemd"
Its also the fact that the OPEN SOURCE LINUX MOVEMENT hasnt ported linux to my xbox yet.
MP3 never was CD-Quality, so stop pretending that it is, and then maybe ~just maybe RIAA/MPAA/whatever will leave the people alone.
Just cos YOU can't tell the difference, dosen't mean it isn't their. I have a very highly tuned ear, (I am a musician,have been for 10+ years) and so to me mp3's sound like shit anyway.
Tit for tat, CD will always win.
It's worrying over nothing.
Quit posting about this boring crap,
and they'll go away. simple.
Why are there so many damned articles here on the evils of the music industry's stand against downloading music? Obviously, music is a product and if people can get it for free, the,industry loses money. I hate the indentured servitude that most musicians are bound by, but this is a no brainer. If you download music and don't pay for it, your favorite bands lose money. Yeah, maybe if I hear a good freebie Dolly Parton tune, I'll buy an album. But if there's no restrictions on what I can access for free, to hell with buying CDs ever again!
If you oppose the practices of the music industry, find another soap box because this one is ridiculous.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Since I have been able to download and listen to music, I have noticed 2 things:
1) I buy fewer cds
2) I haven't bought a bad cd.
So, in my case the reason for my decline in purchases isn't because I'm listening to it for free, it's because I have the resources to know more about what it is I'm buying. Before, I'd hear a song on the radio, I'd like it, buy the cd, and hate the other 12 songs, and that cd would go to the boneyard because I just can't switch cds in my car every 5 minutes. Now, I hear a song, like it, download more songs by that artist, and if I don't like what I hear... I don't buy the cd that I otherwise may have.
So yes... in my opinion... digital music sharing decreases sales... but not because we're stealing from the record companies, but because we are more educated about the product they are selling. We're now able to open the hood of that "used car" that we're looking into and see if there's a birds nest in the carbuerator.
Which reminds me... why aren't the bands complaining like RIAA? Oh yeah... because they aren't seeing this money anyway. Maybe there's deeper evils at work??
I urge musicians to produce and sell their own cds. Only then will we truly be able to support them by buying a cd.
My opinion (and probably many others') is summed up quite well in this article. To sum it up: P2P should be viewed as a promo tool (a la radio stations), and if CDs were a bit cheaper everyone would be happy (including the RIAA, who'd see more sales).
You simply can't draw any conclusions concerning the correlation of an audio sales drop with anything, save perhaps a recession. Why? First of all, the economy is a complicated thing, and it's all very nebulous to begin with. What drives the economy? Faith in the economy, for the most part. Second, audio sales are entertainment. Entertainment is very subjective. Who's to say that the general public is getting tired of the latest music scene? I'm not claiming that this is the case, or the previous, or even that the poster's opinion is incorrect. All I'm trying to say is that it's a bit presumptuous to state that "This is why sales dropped."
Your brain is not a computer.
Everyone always talks about how CDs are so expensive, and they are, but there are other factors to think about. Relative to DVD prices, CDs seem reasonable, but with DVDs, you get a lot more for your money. Extra features, deleted scenes, and directors commentaries all add to the value of the DVD. CDs on the other hand have no such added value. What you hear is what you get for the most part. If record companies could find a way to add this kind of value to their media, then I may begin to consider paying their asking price. To further my point, I've purchased far more DVDs than CDs in the last year, and it's not because I watch more movies than I listen to music, it's because I like the additional material that comes with DVDs, material that isn't distributed through P2P networks.
I agree with most of what has been said in this forum but... That doesn't change the fact that people are stealing something they should be paying for. I am one of the "stealers". BEFORE napster and the NET I used to buy anywhere from 1 to 4 CDS a week. I had a bad habit of listening to music. Now that I am older, and do no have the same disposable income, I don't buy 3 CDs a year.
Because of the Internet (not P2P) I have had amazing exposure to all kinds of artists and genres of music. I still listen to the same amount of music I did when I was buying 1 to 4 CDs a week but now I download them. I make a mix CD every 5 days. So I am stealing the music I used to pay for.
I do agree that most of the music these days is disposible and ~$18 for a CD is crazy, but it does not change the fact that this product is on the market for a cost, NOT FREE. When I download it no one makes money.
I don't know the solution but I do know a couple of things. The economy has to change. The RIAA has to realize that the consumer is smarter than before and will not put up with paying ~$18 for a cheap piece of plastic. I do think I would buy more CDs if they were under $10. At that price it is not worth it for me to try find the whole CD on the net. Singles... Singles are dead. No one will pay for 1 or 2 songs on a disk for $8-$10 bucks.
My 2cents...
Everyone has some opinion about this subject. The only way to answer this question satisfactorily is for an independent firm to conduct a scientific study that is completely untainted by money or politics.
Until then everything is mere speculation.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
I used to buy 3+ CD's a month until the RIAA decided to turn into a Totailatrian agency that started erroding my rights by having junk leglislation installed in bills that have nothing to do with entertainment, etc.
The RIAA is now completely out of control (MPAA, also). Intel plans on installing digital rights software (Palladium) next year!
Ladies and gentleman, prepared to bend over next year and let the RIAA/MPAA shove its 100 pound dick up your ass.
.... although I'd refine it a bit saying this: by boosting prices to pump up revenues, the music industry is losing business to smaller bakeries that specialize in high-quality but somewhat less mainstream types of bread (French boulangeries, Jewish delis, etc). Or people would buy their own bread-making machine and roll their own.
All of this is true now -- people can buy their own breadmaking machines and make their own bread, and it actually does taste quite good (even if you don't get the satisfaction of window-shopping for it). Of course, the reason Wonder Bread is still in business is that their product is priced affordably, and the cost is in line with the convenience it affords. In buying a loaf of Wonder Bread, you don't have to buy your own ingredients, wait the requisite amount of time for the bread to bake, bother with the cleanup. And given the margin savings by baking your own, a lot of people (most?) do buy bread from the store.
The music industry, on the other hand, has not opted to price their music affordably. Or at least, to the point where people find that the time and money saved (on various "ingredients" -- in this case, burner + software + media + digital players) makes their music as attractive (no less so) than buying it from the store. In fact, pirating music has outstripped the music industry's own ability to give the people what they want.
The answer to the music industry's problems aren't as simple as some might have you believe. But I believe that it starts with their assumption that they are responsible for the success of the music industry. GOOD MUSIC sells good music -- it's the crappy flash-in-the-pan acts that require a $100 million budget to promote their schtick. And I think this leads to the biggest crime of all -- a lot of successful artists aren't being compensated fairly for their success, because their profit margins are being cannibalized to subsidize all the unsuccessful acts the Industry backs!
Here's an idea: instead of selling CDs at retail, boost the price of show tickets and give the CDs away while they're on tour (at first, anyway). More money goes to the artists and the fans get music for cheap. And if the fans should happen to share the music online, it's no big deal -- the artist doesn't make any money on them anyway, and it can only help to promote their music. It's an idea..............
DVD of a feature length film with all sorts of extras = $14.99
CD with 2 halfway decent tracks and alot of filler garbage = $19.99
Math looks pretty simple to me if all I have is a spare $20
You can't predict the future based on past events. Moron.
If the opportunity presented itself where I could legally give a swift kick to the behind of everyone behind the current dominate music distribution model, I would. That given, I thought I would give a take on this whole downloadable music thing that I haven't read before.
This article makes a little inroads in the direction, but I want to point out that just like music downloaders are in various categories, you have a whole continuum of music PURCHASERS. And it isn't a descrete category that people fall into... it is a continuum.
On one side, you have the people who compulsively buy buy buy everything music. On the other side, you have people who don't buy any music at all. In between, there are all sorts of levels of music purchase. And somewhere in between, is the "sweet spot" of consumers which can be swayed one direction or another to buy or not buy CDs.
Now, you have a disruptive technology like online music distribution. Some people like it for the convenience. Some people like it for the cost. Whatever. It doesn't matter except that in most cases, it slightly pushes them down the continuum towards not being as big of a music purchaser. (However, yes, there are counter-trends, like someone getting more excited about music and finding a new favorite group, and supporting them.)
But whenever someone downloads music, in general terms, it pushes them down the continuum towards being a non-purchaser. The effect on an individual level is probably quite small, and difficult to measure. However, when aggregated across a large population, the impact is dramatic.
I think the problem with surveys of how downloading CDs have affected music purchasing decisions is that it is too focused on the individual level. From their point of view, their behavior may not have changed significantly. Or they may not be aware of any change. But a slight change has occured.
That slight change is enough to push some people out of the sweet spot and into becoming a non-purchaser. Or the aggregate of a large number of people sliding down the continuum has an affect on sales figures.
So, this is the basic guts of the theory that I have when it comes to online music downloading vs consumer purchasing.
Comments? Questions? Criticisms?
Where does mp3.com fit into the RIAA scheme of things? I assume that a lot of the artists there are trying to do things independently of the RIAA. Thus far I've got 2 CD's full of (legal) mp3's from Mp3.com. Most of them contain artists I've previously not heard of before.
Every so often somebody hears a tune from one of the CD's and I tell them where to find the artist (hopefully they buy the songs). For several of these artists, I'm waiting for the new compilations so that I can buy CD's.
Artists get noticed, artists get money, I get lots of mp3's and music to listen to, often at a reasonable enough price for something I've been able to completely pre-listen to. Of course, lots of people probably just DL without buying, but that still gives the artists recognition that they may not have already had.
Legal Mp3's/CD's online... that's the way to go for me...
(I still wonder why there aren't any videos of the Pentagon, the best-guarded building in the world, when this plane crashed in it.)
And why would there be video? There is only one video that exists of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center and that was just a matter of timing. The other videos only exist because at the point everybody had a camera on the towers.
Do you really think there are external video cameras trained on every part of the outside of the Pentagon? What purpose would that possibly serve? Cameras would be trained on entrances and would be zoomed in enough to capture faces.
Spread your disgusting America-hate somewhere else.
First, the most important hard number that matters: 13%. This is the percentage by which record sales (as measured by SoundScan) are down this year over the same time last year. That's a HUNK. Study after study has failed to demonstrate that downloading either is or is not responsible for this dip. It ain't the only thing, IMHO.
Among other things, this bust comes at the end of a decades-long boom period for the record industry, and like so many other businesses, labels have spent the last few years riding a bubble. Unsurprisingly, the bubble has burst. We all know that selling records is a low-margin business that usually loses money (SERIOUSLY. NOT KIDDING.). If a larger label makes a killing it is probably on a runaway hit that sells hundreds of thousands, or millions, not ten thousand or less like the vast majority of releases do. Most labels lose money most of the time, and the ones that steadily make money generally do so on a scale that doesn't even register on the radar of the major-label wonks.
So what do we have? We have: four major labels, owned by conglomerates who wish to use the Beatles/Dylan/Zeppelin/Stooges/Clash catalogs to cross-promote their products, and to finance other ventures. These conglomerates have little patience or interest in sinking money into new artists who will lose money for years at a time.
We have Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. selling discs for LESS than WHOLESALE, to the point where small record stores are buying their stock on the sly FROM THESE STORES instead of from the labels themselves.
We have an environment where, in the last year, TWO of the largest distributors have gone out of business (That's like WB Films and Paramount going tits-up), and TWO of the largest retailers-- Virgin and the Musicland family of stores.
We have radio AND touring in the hands of basically ONE company.
We have declining fan interest in the lastest dead horse trotted out by U2, Britney Spears, String, and the N'Backstreet Boys.
All this adds up, not to downloading killing the industry, but the industry starting to feel the effects of too many boardroom ultimatums and short-term decisions.
13% of sales have gone PFFT. It's a market correction, and a lamentable one, that the conglomerates that own the majors have precipitated themselves. Janis Ian is right-- the future is with people selling their own records out of the backs of cars, and this just might be the real start of that.
What about video sales?
That's the main area where video games directly competes with movies. Arcades are dwarfed by movie theaters. I don't know about the movie rentals as compared to game rentals, probably fairly even.
We can always use another warm body over at the OPEN SOURCE LINUX MOVEMENT.
At this point, the argument's getting ridiculous. Everyone's made up their minds, and no new evidence has been presented. (Every time a study is made, it's praised by the group that agrees with the conclusion and lambasted by the one that doesn't.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The only way these money- and control-hungry bastards will ever get the idea is if we all (I mean ALL) stop buying CD's from record stores. My personal policy is that I only buy CD's from the musicians themselves. They've almost always got a pile of CD's to sell when they play someplace, and the prices are usually pretty good.
Most bands today can mint their own CD's; wouldn't it be great if the musicians themselves could say "Our music sales are doing just fine" while the 'music industry' saw plummeting revenue?
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
You can buy a full movie for the price of music, which do you want? {On a side note: is it legal for you to download the soundtrack to the movie (excluding CD exclusive tracks) since you have the rights to it?}
MP3 got bought out by the recording giants (Vivendi Universal) some time ago (this is why they're now plugging artists like eminem on the front page). Then they changed the mp3.com contract so it screwed the artists.
Most of my favorite mp3.com artists stopped posting new material after the contract change.
So, no, mp3.com is not an indy option. Sorry.
DNA just wants to be free...
That's obvious, nobody likes to realize that has being manipulated for years. And that's what RIAA is showing us, even if statistics shows that CD sales increased due to the Napster Network influence they smashed Napster just like we do to a bug.
But why? Because they want to control whatever we'll listen. They want us to think we choose what we like (which now we know it was not just that way).
By controling the distribution medium they can control whatever is avaiable to the masses and avoid unawanted content to become highly avaiable.
Now we have realized what was happening and avoiding being manipulated (although I still believe that many of my likes and dislikes are still manipulated). That's why networks such as Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella aren't bigger just because they still can't live in a pacific and compatible way.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Well, I'd really like somebody to do some real statistics on this matter. I'm not a statistician (though I play one on TV :-) ), but I figured that a nice analysis of variance might do the trick. What you do is that you input CD sales, compare it with some good metric of what P2P did, like number of downloads, if that number exist. Then you input metrics of how the general economy was doing. Also input the for example how albums were received by music critics. In a similar manner, you include metrics for what could conceivably influence CD sales. This is usually what you do in statistics to find out what factors contribute to the variations in a certain variable. Often, the important factors make themselves known very clearly by a good analysis. This is something I'd like to see, but it should be done by a real statistician, not by people like me...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
No, not the ones the RIAA would like to beat "pirates" with. I am talking about BMG/ Columbia. I would like to see how the popularity of these clubs affect the music industry numbers since CDs sold through clubs do not count in units-sold stats. In these recessionary times I would assume that more people are joining clubs.
. . . right? Am I supposed to go to the music store with a six-page printout of those labels and make sure something's not on that list before I pay for it?
Does the phrase "needle in a haystack" mean anything to you? I'm all for boycotting the RIAA, but believe me, that list is not gonna help.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Why do so many people expend so much time and effort trying to help the enemy - a broken dinosaur middleman industry that has nothing but contempt for both its customers and its suppliers? They peddle nothing but lame crap for which they charge ridiculous sums of money, give virtually none of it to their artists, live lives of luxury off much of the money and turn around an use the rest to buy politicians to legislate against the free market and your freedom of choice. Don't download their crap, don't trade their crap, don't buy their crap. Starve and ignore the bastards out of existence. Seek out the inspired an innovative independent artists and independent labels. There are many out there - you just have to try a little harder to find them. But with your support and time that will change. And the world will be a better place.
The truth is that the truth has little impact.
As far as the RIAA is concerned, the ONLY reason for the drop in sales is piracy, period. This is what they will spend all of their energy on, and what they will pay their Congresslaves to vote on.
Despite the findings of several studies which say piracy is NOT the largest part of the issue (if any at all) the RIAA issue their own study that says it is. Even when asked about the economy, they have commented that it may be an issue, but really the true cause is piracy.
This is their mission, as they refuse to yield to change. Copyright is a red herring, distribution and the cash are the real issues here.
It is up to the consumer to pressure their congress folks and to support those tech industry folks who oppose the RIAA's lunacy.
K.
Just imagine a future where artists don't need to sign with a label to make it big. This is the future the internet enables, and the future the labels want to kill.
The labels are smart. There greatest fear isn't the loss of sales, it's that the industry will someday no longer need them.
Look at The White Stripes. Six months ago, their CD sold for $9.99. Now that they've won a few VMAs and gotten popular? Same CD, $13.99.
Betcha the band doesn't see a cent of that extra four bucks...
I'd say the real decline in cd sales is the lack of musical creativity being produced which is, of course, directly related to the consumtion of drugs and alcohol.
All these Anti drug campaigns are having a negative impact on cd sales!
Come on! I don't buy CDs anymore. Very very few of my friends buy CDs anymore. And the biggest reason for this is P2P. Among my friends, P2P is causing a serious drop in CD sales. I just can't see the logic in saying I would be more likely to buy the CD when I already have the whole album to listen to.
This article (and many others on here) seem to be biased. To me, it sounds like this guy went into it with the goal of showing that downloading does not negatively affect sales. But his weak statistics just show that the numbers can't say whether it's affecting sales or not. There are too many factors. He even says in his article that you've got to have surveys and interviews to really find out what's going on. He failed to talk to record executives, but why didn't he try to talk to the customers? I think if he asked people, he would find that quite a few people are skimping on buying music because of P2P.
I think the RIAA is right. Free MP3s are hurting. Good!! Why is everybody set on disproving them? Maybe people feel bad because they have a fat hard drive full of stolen copyrighted music and they're trying to justify it somehow.
Most of the music I've been downloading lately is copyright free. There's plenty of it around and it's growing all the time.
-Paul
It's worked just fine for anyone predicting events since September 11. Idiot.
>>>...really is there that much difference between the many "look at my navel" bimbos out there???>>>
;-}
Cool - I was too busy staring at her rack to notice...
-
I bought 4 CDs in the last couple of weeks due to internet radio. I would have never heard of the artists, if I wouldn't have listened more intensly to intenet radio. You learn about a much greater variety of music. It's not all "Britney Spears and clones" as on FM broadcast radio. At least for me, the internet radio/mp3 filesharing *increased* the CD purchases.
Thus it ever was and ever will be. Every 20 years in show business, there are a group of people who will do everything they can to keep the market as it was when they built their fortunes. And the same thing happens, new people see the new ways to make money and then they become the powerful. You can talk about big band music, radio, television, cassette tapes, vcr's, cable television, vaudeville and the same pattern plays out. "Thin gruel pop music" and scapegoating by the record companies of one consumer pattern of behavior is the evidence that the models are changing. Don't look to the RIAA to figure that one out -- it's just Hollywood, Jake.
i have always used p2p sharing to hear NEW music. i find a band i like and i try and buy some of their albums. what i find more interesting is how many songs i can download that are no longer in print. and many more songs are b-sides and really really rare live songs. if i can actually find the albums with the music i like ill buy them. i like cd quality. p2p sharing quality is quite often terrible.
Blah.
I know late -- but here is my view. I used to always get burnt in the 80's - 90's buing CD's that ended up being crappy. After awhile -- I got tired of the whole "hear one song on the radio" -- think that maybe, just maybe this CD may be the next "Dark Side Of The Moon" -- 90% of the time it ended up being bait and switch. So I stopped wasting my money.....Thus without ever even offending me -- the RIAA was out my cash.
Fast forward to Napster and AG. I am really able to give the music a proper test drive -- hence I find a new band that makes the hair on my arm stand up -- I rush to the record store to purchase said CD. Rinse, Repeat. Hell, from my point of view -- the record companies should have been paying Napster and AG rather than suing them. (Maybe the radio stations would have gone broke...)
Fast forward to Post-Napster, Post-AG...(never used Kazzaa (I don't have a windows machine -- they don't have a linux client) -- I have played the dangerous game of trying to decide what bands to buy based on a carefully placed track on the bands website -- or maybe a low quality snippet or two elsewere. I am about 2 for 20 again...Right back to where I last left off.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm with everybody else when I think RIAA and the record companies themselves are horrible for holding the prices of CDs high and paying artists absolutely crap but I can't disagree with them that cd sales are dropping due to piracy. I read the article and the author certainly to have done his homework about empirical data but I can only speak from my personal experience and that, due to the ease in pirating music, both myself and all of my friends have significantly dropped spending on cds. I used to buy about 1 cd a month, now I'm down to about 1 cd every 6 months. I listen to way more music on a way more frequent basis. I don't know a single person that has started buying more cds after they started pirating. I think they dug their own grave with their policies but to disagree that pirating isn't hurting their business seems silly.
This whole "get more money through pay-per-use" makes the assumption that you don't have a strict entertainment budget. A lot of people have only so much money they can spend on entertainment, whether that's music, movies, video games, internet access, theme parks, or scuba diving.
The basis for pay-per-use of music and movies seems to be that consumers have an unlimited entertainment budget, or that they are willing to sacrifice some other form of entertainment to be allowed to listen to the same music over and over.
I don't believe either of these to really be true. I have a set amount of money I'm willing to spend on music in a given year. I'll spend that much, and then I'll stop, because I have to budget for other expenses. Doesn't matter if I am buying unlimited-play music CDs, or pay-per-play music. Once I hit that magic dollar amount, I'm done. If I spent it on unlimited-play music CDs, I'll just keep listening to those for the rest of the year, and not get new ones. If I did pay-per-play music, I'll find other forms of entertainment.
The budget only stretches so far, and there are a lot of things competing for my entertainment dollar.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
read this article- File sharing: Guilty as charged?
"At that time, I had assumed that record sales moved with income; during a recession, you could expect fewer records to be sold. When I actually ran the numbers, with income as a variable, it had a very small impact. It was what is known as statistically significant but it was so small that you could ignore it."
This article had some interesting thoughts and the table with sales figures was handy. However, I've come to the realization that I no longer care how downloading affects CD sales. I am so completely fed up with the record industry, the RIAA, the MPAA, and media companies in general that I can barely stand it. Screw it, if it hurts sales, I don't care. If it helps sales, I don't care. I'm buying used cd's and supporting my local record shop instead of RIAA member companies. I'm also buying my DVD's used when possible.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here on slashdot but as long as I'm pissed off, here's a short list of the things that I'm angry about:
1) RIAA using "Artists' Rights" as an excuse for a campaign against file sharing.
Yeah, the record companies have such a great history of protecting artists. Just ask any black blues artist from the 20's through 60's (or his/her surviving family) about how the record companies were champions for their rights. For that matter, ask any current signed artist what they think about their record label.
2) The standard record contract.
Let me get this straight, you're going to give me an advance(that means loan btw) for a million dollars. I'm going to use it to record an album. Then I'm going to have to pay you back but you own the copyright on everything I've written and recorded? Yeah, that's fair. Thanks for the loan. I'm glad I could buy you something nice with it.
3) The increasing success of lobbying efforts.
Let's see, I can't legally create a streaming radio station without owing you more than I can possibly make in revenues. If I bypass copy protection for perfectly legal acts covered under fair-use provisions, I've broken the law by bypassing the protection. Soon you'll be able to legally hack my computer and there's a chance that as a musician, I won't even be able to protect myself from debts owed to a you through bankruptcy. Given what's already passed, god knows what's coming. Half this stuff shouldn't have even made it to a vote in congress. And how do you fight back when most people are ignorant as to how their rights are being slowly bled off? Let's face it. It takes more than 100 pissed off letters to your congressman to outweigh $200,000 in campaign donations.
4) Continual extension of copyright duration
Enough is enough. Mickey mouse has to be public domain sooner or later. Deal with it. As an artist, I should be able to draw on the work of another artist who's been dead for 30 years and create something new with his/her work without having to pay royalties. Copyright is supposed to protect an artist for a limited amount of time. Not an artist, the company he works for, and his great-grandchildren, forever. How is this good for society? How does it encourage innovation? Maybe if Disney had to create a new icon, we'd see more innovative material coming from them. (Not to mention the profits Disney themselves have reaped from the public domain)
5) The lock on distribution.
You want airplay? You gotta have more money than you're likely to see in your entire lifetime to pay off Clear Channel. Payola is alive and well, it's just had a bit of a facelift. Want your stuff sold in most CD stores? You gotta sign away everything to a record label. Thank god the internet has opened things up a tad. However, even the internet is slowly being legislated into submission.
6) Suing companies out of business only to buy them at a discount.
Ok, I can see where the myMp3.com service or whatever it was called was a bit controversial but gimme a break. It was completely sued into the ground just to be aquired . And now that Vivendi owns it, what has happened to the site? It is a big promotional vehical for bands signed to their label. I used to love going to the top 40 lists in different genres and hearing small unsigned bands. It was also a great resource for finding bands in cities I would be travelling to. Now it's terribly difficult to find those bands to do the deluge of signed acts all over the site. To some extent, you can say the same thing about Napster or Audiogalaxy though their services were obviously much more controversial.
Ok, I've ranted enough, there's not much point in going further. I know that eventually things will get to a point where the market will fight back with their pocketbooks and lawmakers will have more votes to gain by campaigning on the right side of these issues than they gain on the dirty money that they use to purchase their tv advertisements. I'm just afraid it's going to take a really long time. Until then, I'm just going to do my best to educate my friends, express myself with my pocketbook, and write the occastional e-mail/letter to my congressmen.
That is good. I have responded 100 times with those same thoughts in my head -- yet never been able to find the right words. But you got it -- "Manipulation", "Control", "Availability" ...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Your can present all the facts, all the statistics, all the most fair and reasonable proposals, but it won't make a difference to the RIAA. They believe that an iron-fisted, totalitarian approach is the only way to do business, and they are so blinded by greed that it's absolutely impossible for them to even comprehend any other way.
Look at Janis Ian's site - she points out that if the record industry had partnered with Napster and set up a system to charge people 5 cents per song, they would have taken in $500,000 a day.
Half a million dollars a day, every day.
But the RIAA's mindset is "why should we let people have one song for a nickel when we can shut down Napster and people will be forced to go to a store and buy an entire CD for $15".
One. Sell music tapes at standard media distribution rates.
Two. For a one dollar fee, sell a backup of the tape. After all, tape is a fragile medium, right? Who'd want a tape without a backup? Oh, and our backup medium of choice will be... burned CDs. Easy to use for everyone.
Result: You get to sell CDs for the cost of tapes plus a buck, undercutting the entire industry. But you're not selling the CDs - you're selling the tape, plus a small service. You'd just have a music store full of tapes and burn the CDs at the counter, where you provide your custom backup service.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Something occured to me when reading the part of the article that talked about a small number of people buying a large percentage of music sold. Those incredibly valuable customers, for the most part, care about music. They like music and they like bands. And often they buy music as a pledge of support. I think a significant thing that's come out of all this is that the general public is starting to understand that buying a CD is a bad way to support an artist. The more the general public understands this the less guilty people are going to feel not paying for music.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
That brings up another thought: who else "loses" when P2P is the major method of getting "free samples" ??
A: advertising revenue, and the people who control it. Frex if you don't need radio, radio doesn't advertising or payola, and another whole class of leeches is out of a job.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Why is it, nobody seems to be able to make the connection that the drop in CD sales could be because of the poor economy?
Every other industry is blaming their troubles right now on the reduce consumer/business spending, why doesn't the music industry?
It seems obvious to me. Layoffs, salary cuts, etc... mean less discretionary income to spend on stuff like music.
Why is this so hard???
So if I rip a CD I'm lumped into the same catagory as those who download copywrited music? Every time I buy a CD the first thing I do is to rip it so I can listen to it on my computer while my CDRom is being used as a CDRom, not a CD Player. Nothing about ripping music I already paid for is against the law.
"If just half of the blank discs sold in 2001 were used to copy music, that would mean that the number of burned music CDs worldwide is about the same as the number of CDs sold at retail."
That is a statement with absolutly no statistical backbone. I just said that I rip every CD I buy. I then make my own CD's with my own mix of music. Once again, nothing illegal. And yet the RIAA wants to use that statistic to show that I'm a "pirate".
"...over 50 percent of those music fans that have downloaded music for free have made copies of it.
Yep, and I'm part of that 50%. But I still didn't break the law because I downloaded the songs legaly from Amazon.com or epitonic .com or any number of artist websites that give away free music. Once again the RIAA lumps legal behavior in with illegal behavior in an attempt to boost their statistics. I don't have a single illegal mp3 on my computer, but once again, I'm lumped in with the "pirates".
While Bricklin missed pointing out these statistical errors at least he did point out some other significant points:
- CD prices have gone up significantly.
- Radio and MTV are presenting a narrower selection of music.
The obvious answer there is to support college radio and internet radio. Present more choices to the customer and they'll buy more. And yet the RIAA is killing both!Unfortunatly, in this country rather than letting an absolete industry die a well deserved death we'll probably prop it up with more unconstitutional laws and continue to prosecute the industry's most faithful consumers as prirates. The record industry keeps shooting itself in the foot and then blames it's customers for making it pull the trigger. It's pathetic.
Your empire won't last forever. None do. Get used to it.
That's what you think. This time, we will NOT allow our Death Star Plans (ver. 3.0) to be stolen!!
Besides, we also decided to make the hole smaller where it's not so easy to get inside and blow it up by an X-Wing or something similar in size and scope. Only anything the size of Yoda will be able to fit.
Regards,
The Emperor
Where the hell does the RIAA pull a "just 50%" number? Let's see - I burn ~600 CDs per year at work for client deliveries, archives, source-code escrow etc. Data backups on my home server add some more. This is far fewer than in my previous job where we had a 4-drive Rimage auto burner to handle deliverables and burned thousands of CDs per year.
So...if the average of the most fanatic group was listed at around 10 CDs per year then to reach 50% usage for music I alone am offsetting 60 fans who burn a copy of every album they buy. My former company is offsetting hundreds more.
But wait, I rip/burn music at home to listen on my Rio CD/MP3 player. My base MP3 collection is about 5-6 discs. As I buy new music I often rip it and then reorganize my MP3 cd collection to reflect new stuff I like and to eliminate the stuff I've discovered I don't like. I burn new discs and destroy the old ones (cds in microwaves are fun). So while I may be "using dozens of CDs for burning music" (all of which I have purchased and for which I still have the original CDs I might note), it's just the same stuff being reorganized over and over.
But why am I wasting my breath - it's just a hypothetical number they invented to try to prove a point anyway - it seems to have no basis in either fact nor result.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
well, the basic concept is sound - it's basic statistics. Unfortunatly the oppoiste of what you said could be true. Maybe they were pushed into more music buying. Maybe they were pushed toward more downloads because of RIAA heavy handedness.
What you have is two things. First sampling. In order to get the whole picture you have to depend on two things. Truthfulness of the people polled and large enough sample of them. The level of thruth is very difficult when taking peoples memory of what they have done. Sample size is easy - sample enough people. You are having trouble with wheather or not they are telling the truth. note: the lie could be unintentional, you bought 1.001 versus 1.002 cd's per year - you would not notice that number but with a large enough population it becomes signifigant. (of course since it's so small a change I could just as easily and with the same amount of authority say that people buy 1.003 vs. 1.002 - you just don't know).
And lastly, remeber with all of this correlation does not imply causation. Just because cd sales coincide with directly and perfectly with copyright invringement (which they don't, but assume for the moment they do) does not mean, nor even imply in the slightest that they are causational. Unfortunatly this goes against common sense and what people are bombaded with every day. Maybe the reduced sales cause the downloading. For example: "hey all music is crappy, they only sell pop-crappy music, so i'll download the good music off the internet that I can't find in the store". In this scenario the direct cause of the slump in sales and increase in downloading is crappy music at stores. Maybe the two have no interralation. Money is tight so music sales drop. Broadband is cheap so downloads go up. The two could just be nothing more than pure coincidence.
Basically if you only want to talk about what is provable you have no real information. As for interpreting the results, well decide weather or not the people polled are truthfull - if they are then we know, if not then your guess is just as good/valid as mine.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Score:3 Interesting?
How about Score:0 Stupid?
As "conclusions", then yes, the author would probably be incorrect. But as theories, they bring up a good point.
NOT TRUE. Free MP3's/Ogg's are NOT the same as free CD's. Think about that for a moment. Even when/if you burn it onto a blank, it is STILL NOT A CD like the one sold at Tower or Amazon. What people are downloading from P2P networks, and copying from their friends' burned disks, may be many things, but it is not identical to the product as sold at retail music outlets. In particular, the free stuff is of lower sound quality, takes greater time and effort to procure, and comes without art, images, lyrics, and the feel-goodness of fandom, supporting the artist, etc. (which has economic value).
You acknowledge that "there are counter trends" but it's not clear at all that the sense of the effect is as you describe. On the contrary, music labels pay enormous sums of money to advertise their product, and one thing free online music most certainly is is free advertising - advertising whose tab is picked up entirely by the consumer - advertising that doesn't cost the labels a penny. How often have you (in your entire lifetime!) purchased a CD that you had not previously listened to in any way?
If the sum total of the effects of free online music (which is unknown, present article and its conjectures notwithstanding) is to decrease CD sales, then it is because the marginal utility of the actual CD product, 44.1kHz 16 bit, liner notes, fan sentiment, and all, over that provided by the free online music, has been judged in the marketplace to not be worth its sticker price - to the extent that this effect has overcome the demand stimulation provided by the free advertising that online music also provides.
Personally, I buy CD's, but only CD's that I know, and only second-hand or at discount. That's what it's worth to me, and that's what I pay.
-Renard
I think that's about 50% right.
They've held a stranglehold on the music industry because they were the only method of distribution. Artists had to play with them and so did the consumers.
I think they know that they have to lock their business model in place, and fast, before artists and consumers wake up and realize they don't need the middle man anymore.
Distribution is no longer difficult. They no longer have a reason to exist.
If the RIAA had to live off people like me, their sales would have dropped below 1 billion/year by now. I hate the mass marketed junk on the radio, and none of the CD stores in town (new or used) have listening stations to check out anything but the cover artwork for albums. With Napster gone, I have NO reasonable way to find new music that interests me.
Since the shutdown of Napster, I have shifted all the money that I used to spend on CDs over to DVDs. In two years I have amassed a collection of over 100 DVDs (every one of which plays fine on my computer, BTW). That is a LOT of money out of the RIAA's pockets.
The RIAA complains about having to shell out tons of dough to get stations to play their music. The internet has created an incredible new 'radio' format where they get to go directly to the user, without having to worry about FCC decency laws or paying local stations for airtime (indirectly, but only by one step). Don't tell me it can't be done. I've listened to radio stations from halfway around the world that play in WinAmp. A small Java applet runs in your web browser to tell you what song is playing. To fight piracy, all the record company has to do is overlay a message halfway through the song saying the recording company, artist, album and title. If they are still worried, they can just reduce the song quality to about 96 kbit/sec (radio quality). At that point, anyone who still rips the song from the stream probably would never buy it anyway.
There are dozens of other ways that the RIAA could use the MP3 format to recognize huge profits and goodwill from customers, but their shortsightedness is clouding their judgement.
I've heard countless people make the argument that filesharing of copyrighted material shouldn't be illegal because the CDs sell more when they are shared (and thus the owners of the copyright make more money).
That is a classic argument of the logical fallacy "assertion by complex argument".
For example:
I could make the argument that open source developers would make more money if everyone charged a $10 license fee, therefore all open source developers should be mandated to charge a $10 license fee.
Obviously there's something wrong with that argument. The two assertions (that developers would make more money and that developers should be mandated to charge license fees) are completely unrelated. So what if the developer would make more money? That has NOTHING to do with whether or not he should be required to do so.
In the same way, whether CD companies/artists would make more money (or sell more CDs) if they allowed their music to be shared is a totally disconnected assertion to the "file sharing should be legal" assertion. The copyright owner owns the material, and so it is his decision what to do with that material....regardless.
Now, if a copyright holder tries to sue Napster for direct damages the holder would have to prove that Napster cost them money. But the copyright laws provide for penalties that are not direct damages, and those are applicable whether the copyright holder makes less money or not.
The cause of the decline in CD sales could be rip-and-burn. On The Other Hand, it could be the economy. It may be that P2P sharing *helps* music sales and it may be that it doesn't. It's possible competition from console games is responsible and it's possible it's not ...
.sigs here attributed to Robert Heinlein; that no person or corporation should be able to go to court and demand that the clock of progress be stopped. That makes sense to me, and it may make sense to the public and the politicians they send to DC.
Anyone familiar with Economics knows that it's trivially easy to come up with multiple *plausible* explanations for the same observed statistics. What is not easy is to come up with is a *correct* explanation. There *is* a way to do it, but you're not likely to see it except in an article written by an applied econometrician published in a peer-reviewed economics journal. The rest are just *opinions* pretending to be *studies* behind a mask of percentages and statisitcs.
Let me suggest two facts that I think are indisputable:
1. Regardless of what's causing the decline in CD sales in the past couple of years, "Rip, Share and Burn" *will* kill CD sales within 5 years if it's legally unrestricted. If you don't believe me, just project the technology underlying "Rip, Share and Burn" a little into the future and ask yourself why anyone would bother buying a CD when it'll become a matter of a couple of mouseclicks and a few minutes wait to burn one. Even those with moral qualms will find a way to compensate the artists directly through online payments. The RIAA is *correct* in predicting its own demise if there's no legal intervention.
2. People, including politicians, understand point one above. If you want to fight the RIAA, it's a non-starter to accuse them of being Chicken Little, because they're not, and people understand this. The only sensible argument is the one I've seen in some
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I very much enjoyed your response, and you've echoed what is probably my greatest question/concern, which is the obvious bias that anyone would have in answering a survey. (Along with the lack of precision focus in observing their own habits.) Also about the correlation/causation -- there are a LOT of factors at play here which I don't think anyone is bound to get their arms around in one particular survey.
Nice reply!
I would expand on what you pointed out and say that different people DO want different things from music. There are benefits to owning CDs, yes. There are also benefits to not owning CDs.
Myself, I'm interested in the music itself. Not the benefits of having a large CD collection. Or hyper-fidelity of the sound. In my case, having a random and immediate access to of 100s of songs on my hard drive beats the hell out of a pile of CDs.
But I think the point I was trying to make is that, to a small degree, it displaces the actual purchase of music. If someone "might" have purchased something, they may be more content to do without if they have an electronic copy. (Or they already have a good selection of downloaded music and feel less of a need to add more to their library.)
You do, however, raise some good points. Personally, I only buy a cassette (now CD) if I really really like a musical group. I think my purchases average 1 per year. But come to think of it, I think I've slipped down to no CD purchases at all anymore. I'll be damned if I put that on a survey, though.
...Customers stop buying.
News at 11.
Seriously, about two years ago, August '00 IIRC, there was a big uproar about the RIAA v. Napster case and everyone yelled "Boycott". It seems few have followed through.
Well, I did. If not for +Live+ still being on a major label, I would not have bought a single RIAA-member CD in the last two years. I struggled for weeks with the decision of whether or not to buy that +Live+ album, too.
Stop giving them any of your money. Do it now. Buy from indies (real indies, not RIAA "indies"), but don't give the RIAA any more money to throw at legislators.
All sweeping generalizations suck.
Good Post! So far the labels for all intents and purposes have not addressed the online market that is out there. There is no "legitimate" service out there that one can go to and download mainstream RIAA member music without dealing with DRM. If the RIAA could just get off their high horses and offer a convenient non-DRM service at a reasonable price, then p2p trading would not be a major issue.
The RIAA needs to learn to go with the flow instead attempting to fight change with legislation. The labels need become a service -- their job being to seek out good music and bring it to the customer in formats that the customer wants at a fair price. Most people will pay a fair price for good service.
Beware of Sleestak
(preface: never take a personal testimonial as signifying any trend)
For me, it's exactly the opposite. I will not purchase a CD that I haven't heard at least 2-3 tracks of - usually from downloading mp3s (since the sort of music I most often buy is rare to non-existent on the radio). So it in no way displaces an actual purchase for me - it's a necessary step in the decision to purchase.
On another note, I agree wholeheartedly that looking at the continuum of music-buying and downloading behaviour is important. The best way of finding the true trends is to not bias yourself to only look at differences between preconceived classes.
[TMB]
Yeah that's a really good point, and something I thought of after posting. IMHO it only goes to show the extreme nature of the tragedy the RIAA and its members are fomenting here - if they were to allow unencumbered downloading, for a price, they might well be able to charge more than they charge now for CD's (greater functionality). In any case it seems like the margins would be a lot better.
But I think the point I was trying to make is that, to a small degree, it displaces the actual purchase of music.
And the point I was trying to make is that it ain't necessarily so. Free music is free advertising, and just because you buy fewer CD's now, and also listen to a lot of downloaded music, doesn't mean that there aren't other factors in play that have a greater effect. Absent those other factors, you might be purchasing more CDs because of online music. Causality can be a tricky thing.
Other factors that may be playing a role: the recession; increasing CD prices; availability of DVD's, video games, and cellphones; RIAA strongarm tactics; overall poorer quality of music (if such is the case); poor selection of radio stations (Clearchannel); even, lack of access to more/different online music (Napster effect)!
My point is not that online music isn't hurting CD sales, or couldn't possibly - just that one thing we know for certain about online music is that in its function as advertising, it is guaranteed to be stimulating CD sales, and that it's an unsolved question whether the sum total effect is positive or negative.
-Renard
Yet another reason I only listen to the music (and voices) in my head.
> Most people will pay a fair price for good service.
I would be willing to purchase music with some frequency if the price point was way lower than it current is, and doesn't have DRM weighing it down like a sandbag.
For me, it's exactly the opposite. I will not purchase a CD that I haven't heard at least 2-3 tracks of...
I think you're in the mainstream there. Most people don't blindly buy a new CD without any idea of what the songs sound like, unless they're a die-hard fan of the performer.
I can certainly see your position how MP3s augment the current 'free advertisement system' in a positive way.
I'm tired of Britney, I'm tired of the Boy Bands, the Crap-Rap artists and the average bullshit you hear on the radio. Is the radio playing it because its popular? Or is the music popular because the radio is playing it? I believe the RIAA (rather, the companies under its blanket) select a few artists to fully promote, and the cutting-edge bands tend to get left in the dust.
Anyhow...that's a whole different argument. My point here is that the dip in CD sales can easily be associated with a whole lot of things. But it's one of those cause/effect issues. What causes what? Did napster cause the dips in sales? Or are there people out there that only like one or two songs from an album (the rest being crap), and they resort to programs like Napster to get what they want? Or they borrow and rip from friends. What about the lesser known artists? Maybe the CDs are harder to get ahold of, and much easier to get via digital means.
We can make broad sweeping statements about what is happening in the music industry all we want. There are so many things that can easily change CD sales. Would it really hurt the industry THAT much to experiment with some online distribution methods? I would gladly pay a dollar or two to download a tune from any artist if I liked the tune. Or is that not legit in the eyes of the RIAA?
Maybe it's just me, but was anybody else bothered by the flipflop at the end of the article?
OK, I suppose I can see that, it IS nice to get a gift that shows effort on the part of the giverHmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'm essentially agreeing with you, but I think its even worse than you state for many people.
If music is too inconvenient or expensive, some people may stop buying altogether. My music buying has tapered off over the last 15 years, until the point where I went to buy a new release for $18 and decided "thats just too expensive. I don't need any more CD's" and I haven't bought a new CD for at least 2 years, maybe 3. Same thing happened with DVD's: I bought lots at $13-15 each, but now that most of them are $20 or more, I don't buy any. Well, thats not quite true, I'll probably buy the $30 FOTR Special Edition. I bought a used $15 copy of Crouching Tiger. I'd like to buy Moulon Rouge, but its $18 used, and that is just too much.
Sorry for the ramble, buy the point is that I don't think the function is linear. When THEY cross some line, purchases drop off a cliff, people change their habits, and they may not come back. I'm sure I could find that Cake album I wanted to buy so long ago for less than $18 now, but I already chose not to buy it, I'm not interested in looking for it again.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
You're actually gonna have to think about your consumption?! I feel for you, really I do. I suppose when you buy food, you just grab indiscriminately from the store shelf and gorge yourself. Good thing they keep the antifreeze out of the beverage section. If you think having to be diligent in a free market economy is a pain in the ass, try picking something you like out of an RIAA/MPAA-sanitized media selection. If you don't like what they have, try playing your indie-rock on an RIAA-approved CD player. Sorry, it only accepts Sony-encripted media. I really apologize for burdening you, the consumer, with the responsibility of having to think for yourself. But look on the bright side: if you wait long enough, you won't have to.
There was an interview in one of the local papers with one of the big discount retailers of CD's here in Australia (JB-HiFi). They were asking the sales manager about the drop in CD sales (aprox 80% of previous years) and he squarely pointed the finger at DVD sales. He said they have seen a drop in CD sales but DVD have exploded. Previously they only sold a couple of Videos (eg a small percentage of CD sales) but DVDs are growing in leaps and bounds. They have even taken over the shop next door to one of there city stores to cater for the selection of DVDs and it is always full. The sales manager beleive that DVD's were taking up a fair proportion of the CD budget that people spent on entertainment, and believed that downloading and coping of songs has nothing or very little to do with it.
Go out and get sailing!
People who never download or burn their own ... make up about 54% of the population and only buy about 39% of the CDs. ... Those that do sometimes download and burn their own (combining the other categories) make up 46% of the population yet buy 61% of the CDs.
But, the ones who don't burn could be older and buy fewer CDs than the younger ones who actually know how to burn or download their own music -- and who spend more money on entertainment.
Which hypothesis makes the most sense?
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
To paraphrase...
...and then complain that Napster is stealing."
"The music industry charges $18 dollars for a CD...
So true....Maybe if the RIAA would stop listening to themselves talk and actually look at some of these reports, they might change their mind...wait...sorry, I was having a case of wishful thinking.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
According to this link April PC sales were down 22.5 percent from last year . Are we to believe that everyone is downloading new computers? Hello the US is in a recession.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
My discriminating tastes: 1% of inventory appeals to me, 1000 CDs.
Average CD length: .75hrs.
Time taken to listen to 1000 CDs: 750hrs.
Time each day spent listening: 15hrs
Days between hearing the same song: 50.
I don't know about you, but I can live with that, plus the occasional new songs put out by people who actually WANT to, who feel INSPIRED to write songs. Same goes for movies, books and computer games. Novelty is overrated.
Ever since I have downloaded music off of the net approx 5 years now I have bought more CD's than I otherwise would have. Not only music I listened to previously but new and diverse music which I think is for the better. If any one says downloading music hurts musicians they are wrong under the basic idea that they do to create and want to share their emotions an ideas with everyone. If they are in it to make money and money alone they should not only stop for making music for it probally is a lesser grade of music but do something that takes no thought at all such as a McJob. If the RIAA is so convinced downloaders are hurting music they should actually talk to the downloaders themself to hear what they have to say. Not only look at the bottom of the sales sheet and think that downloading music off of the net is the only reason for a drop in CD sales. Currently the majority of music coming from the BIG LABELS could be called at best formulaic and derivative if they want to make more money look at the music people are downloading at find out why they are chances are its good music. This is my two cents take it at what you will. Thank you
Been living in Japan for the past few months, and I must say, they've done something really right here when it comes to CDs and music. New CDs might cost an outrageous $20 or more, but used CD sales are very common. I buy a lot of used CDs for anywhere from $2 - $5 or so, and so if there's a new album out that I realy have to have, I'm willing to shell out the extra money for it.
We have to really look at the big picture. So what about the last couple of years. This is the infancy of a revolution in the market place. The old models are going to swept away as the non technical public learns about this new world. Just thinks about it, most of the population has no idea about the internet. They think, porno, banking and "Napster dead" == "music swapping dead". Over the next few decades it's gonna happen. What need to happen though is the protection of artists. Without them no music. Screw the companies they are gone, unless they make us want them.
You're prolly right. While many of us can truly claim we buy more music from new groups we find out via mp3s, just look at our friends and we can prolly name 3-4 that have gone the other way.
As an artist on one of the big media congloms' major labels (who also happens to offer all of his songs as free downloads on his site) I'm still not sure what effect piracy has on my career....the jury will probably be out indefinitley.
What has suprised me is a lot of /.ers' misconceptions about being a musician and the music industry in general.
The RIAA's actions shouldn't suprise any of you nor anger any of you (which, by the way i find insanely funny) they are, at heart, a bureaucracy and, like all bureacracies their medium of choice is the obvious- things like piracy.
Secondly, not buying RIAA sponsored material won't 'stick it to the man' like you think. You are effectivley cutting yourself off from the majority of the artists that you will in turn 'pirate' anyway. The congloms will still make their cash on the britneys of the world (after they lay off hundreds of employess and artists as a result of this 'correction'), and the only person hurt in the end is the artist you enjoy enough to listen to.
The suggestion that artists should forgo the major label route altogether and 'sell cds out of the trunks of their cars' is completley ridiculous. Mostly major labels give an artist a chance to actually make rent and worry about making the best music he or she can make. It's like telling software engineers to quit corporate jobs at Symantec or Electronic Arts and start making utilities and games out of their garages. Give up your healthcare!!! Worry about coding, and marketing and packaging and positioning your product!!! Sure there ALWAYS successful indies in any field, those people are truly dedicated. But most people, including those who post on this board, will opt to stay at their nice job, wouldn't you?
The one point that keeps coming up that is absolutley hilarious is that 'music sucks nowadays.' This claim is made for many reasons, the obvious being that the person is comparing all the CDs that have come out in the past year to their entire collections, which usually span 30+ years. Of course 2001 sucks compared to 1964-2000!!! Are you people listnening?? Most years only have 5-15 important albums anyway. Are you in denial that modern bands like Tool, Radiohead, Air, PJ Harvey, Nine Inch Nails, et al, are making some of the most important music of the 21st century?? Should they get paid for it??
Next time you think that the RIAA is trying to shove shit down your throat and you shouldn't support legitimate artists because of it, have some respect and remember your history- for every Beatles there was a Hermans Hermits, for every Led Zepplin there was a Bay City Rollers, for every U2 there was Mr. Mister, so on and so forth. Same as it ever was. If music sucks for you now then it is obvious you are continuing to listen to the radio and watch MTV like you always have, because that's where all the bad music is, plain and simple You're not looking hard enough in new areas.
I honestly believe that most intelligent people do use swapping as a way to 'preview' an album. My only fear is that the Joe Sixpacks of the world who love 'free shit' are getting their hands on this technology.
Being a musician is really not that different from being a software engineer, we keep insane ours (mountain dew = cocaine, we just go straight to the source), we usually slave for years for free or on minimal pay to acheive any kind of success, projects (albums) can often take 2+ years and cost enourmous amounts of money, and we pull multi-layered, intricate creations out of thin air to enhance people's lives with nothing more than inspiration. How come you guys don't bitch when the IDSA goes after pirates?I used to spend US $100 for a 4 or 5 music CD's at a single time. Granted, this was once every month or two.
Now, I spend the same amount of money (USD 100) for 3 to 5 DVD's.
In a comparison of content, just in minutes of 'enertainment', you get an average of 1 hour per CD (4 to 5 hr total, on average) vs. 2 hours plus per DVD (6 to 10 hrs total, on average).
In the age of the internet, I crave 'entertainment' that is video based much more than I did 5 or 10 years ago. I no longer listen to the radio for hours on end, nor do I watch network TV for hours. I go to the internet to pick and choose my content, for news, music, chat, email, or whatever. Instead of TV and radio, I pick and choose my content with CD's or DVD's. As I explained before, I tend to focus on the video now instead of the audio.
I still watch TV, I still listen to the radio, in the car, sometimes. With my limited time, I choose the most beneficial 'entertainment' per my ocnceptions of price, as well as time.
At 20+ bucks a shot a CD is not a trivial purchase and to find you've bought only 1-2 goods songs makes you feel like you've been burned. Plus at those prices I'm not going to buy like a collector ("Gee, I bought 10 cds today...hope they are good"), I'm going to buy like a picky consumer ("Better check it out online to see if has more than 1 good song").
I've found myself buying mainly cds by bands from the 60's and early 80s not just because they are cheaper but because the music was far better than most of today's, and I'm not some nostalgic old fogey either. Bands like Radiohead and the Foo Fighters are just too rare nowadays.
The cookie cutter mentality of the recording industry seems to be worse today than ever before. Radio airplay is especially bad. Many times I've flipped the dial between two completely different stations (with different owners) and heard the same exact song being played with only a 1 sec difference. It's no wonder I find myself being drawn more and more to small local and college stations and NPR.
Any industry that needs artificial propping up (barring acts of god) by the government to survive should be allowed a merciful death.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Awesome album. That and Disturbed's The Sickness were essential for me.
You're missing the point, and so are most of the comentators above. The argument isn't "this is bad", the argument should be "The Law of Supply and Demand is INEXORABLE."
We all know that when the Supply of a good is greater than the Demand, prices drop until Demand equals Supply. Conversely, when Demand exceeds Supply, the price rises until Demand falls off to the level of available Supply.
This Law CANNOT be circumvented, no matter how hard you try. It just turns around and bites you on the ass if you do.
Classic methods of attempting to circumvent the Law of Supply and Demand:
1) Attempt to fix the price artificially low by goverment fiat. (the old Soviet Union)
Market Response) Instant shortages, as too-low-priced goods disappear off the shelf. Demand rises as Supply drops to non-existant, and the price people are willing to pay becomes sufficiently high that an extra-legal black market comes into existance. Black market prices are significantly higher than legal market prices, but the supply is much better.
2) Attempt to fix the supply artificially low by government fiat. (War-time Rationing).
Market Response) If the Demand is sufficiently high, again a black market will develop to Supply that Demand. Black market prices will be higher than legal market prices.
2) Attempt to fix the price artificially high for the available Supply through monopoly control, price-fixing, whatever. (What the RIAA is doing)
Market Response) Create alternate sources of Supply by evading the monopolist control (buying Region 1 DVDs and playing them on your Region-Free player in Europe), monopoly-busting (remember Standard Oil? Ma Bell?), product substitution (buying DVDs or video games instead of CDs), cottage industry/black market (home ripping and sharing of MP3s, indie bands). Or, if the item is a luxury, demand drops to zero. A black market will only develop if the monopoly price is so excessive that the black marketeer can sell his goods at sufficient profit to cover his risks, and still sell at a price consistant with Demand.
Since the current CD-ripping and file sharing market has very low risk and very low distribution costs, a black market is inevitable. If the risks become higher, because of future draconian laws that are enforced, casual ripping and sharing will die out--and so will the monopoly music business. CDs are a luxury, and if overpriced, people can do without or substitute other forms of entertainment. We are already seeing this!
THAT is what people are pointing out.
---dragoness
...so that's £200 a month I'm no longer spending on CDs, DVDs, games or anything of that sort. I guess in the eyes of the RIAA, the MPAA and their buddies that makes me EEEEVILLLLLL and should be forced to sell my car and spend all the money on Britney CDs. It appears the phrase 'opportunity cost' is unknown in certain organisations...
You must think in Russian.