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Ipsos-Reid: More Americans Downloading Music
An anonymous reader writes "Ipsos-Reids ongoing research on file trading called Tempo again confirms a continuing rise in the number of Americans downloading music from the Net. Furthermore, almost a third (31%) of those who do download claim they have paid for at least some of the music they got online. Of course, having paid once from services like Rhapsody and PressPlay doesn't mean you were satisfied with the value. It does mean though that a sizeable audience are willing to give these record industry endorsed services a shot even though they can get it all free on KaZaa. You can see the the report graphs here."
Actually no it isn't...Because since July 13, 2000 when I first registered boycott-riaa.com and threw together the website, I have purchased not one REPEAT not one, major label release. Nor have I downloaded any either. I don't feel the need. But I have bought close to 150 independent cds. The RIAA drove me to it, and you know what? Its usually much better music, production without overproduction, and usually much better priced as well. My shopping habits have changed as a result.
As for me and my cookie cutter friends usually most people are quite surprised to find that I'm not a 20 something geek that's pissed that I can't download for free, but instead a 50+ year old who works the system writing letters, meeting with congresscritters, attending events like Future of Music Coalition Policy Summitt or SXSW Educating consumers and artists alike.
Tha whole point is to make the RIAA, Hilary Rosen, The IFPI, and Jay Berman irrelevant. They are are a Maginot line to independent music. We just go around them. If an indie is given a chance to distriubte their work, get airplay without paying millions in "bagman" payola they will have a chance to make a decent living from their music. It doesn't take millions of sales to make a damned decent living if you aren't having 90% of every dollar in sales (of those actually reported) skimmed by corrupt record labels, And you pay the expenses out of your 10%.
BTW, up to the last few lines, that story is 100% true. The fact of the matter is that since I discovered SoulSeek (never cared for the business models of Kazaa and the like), I've been buying MORE music than I did before because I can be reasonably sure that I'll be happy with my purchase because I've already listened to it.
When I was in high school, I copied cassettes with my friends like there was no tomorrow. When it college, I started buying CDs, but still went copied almost everything I listened to. But all of that fueled my love of music and now that I'm making decent money, I buy music.
If the record lablels squish music sharing, kids interests will turn to something else and they will have lost a generation of future consumers with money. They need to tread very carefully here....
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Well, as I pointed out here and elsewhere, the RIAA etc. is very aware that a large, non-crippled, commercial downloading service would be very popular and make a considerable amount of money. Studies have been done, etc. Trust me that the RIAA knows this for a fact.
However those same studies have shown then that such a regime would end up making them significantly less money than they do now (for various reasons, mainly related to the profits on album vs. per song downloads). I can't stress enough how much effort has been put into coming to this conclusion by the RIIA/Record labels and various technology companies.
Knowing this, they are simply unwilling to jepordize their album sales by building a large-scale, effective and popular downloading service (which could be done EASILY).
They won't change until they're FORCED to by a major drop in CD album sales (at least 30%). So if you want legal downloadable music stop buying CDs. Pirate for a while if you prefer.
So if Sony the label wants people to stop pirating songs... Why do they make MP3 players to play those illegal songs?
Because, maybe, just maybe, Sony has different divisions and they don't talk to one another?
Sony Electronics is virtually a separate company from Sony Entertainment. Each of which have sub-companies which don't talk to one another much. The money funnels upstream, but very little corporate direction funnels back down
It's a huge company... as are many nowadays. You don't think that the GE engineers making lightbulbs sit around and have lunch with the ones making high performance jet engines, do you?
However, for me it happens to be somewhat accurate. I had a subscription to emusic.com for about 6 months. I cancelled in the end because it was taking longer to find music I liked and I wasn't using it enough to justify a subscription fee. (If downloads were priced individually I'd still be a customer. If all the latest and greated music were available, I'd still be a customer.)
From my experience, finding what you want on a website in seconds, then downloading it at 1.5mb/s, completely blows the socks off P2P.
If the music companies got together and sold their music online for low prices in accessible formats, the only people left on P2P would be kids. My total spending on music would at least triple. As it is, I only buy buy music as gifts because knowing what it SHOULD be like, I can't be bothered with making a trip to the store to buy overpriced CDs that I might or might not like.
Actually, yes, there is rampant piracy of DVDs. I have a fairly large number of movies, in Divx format, burned to CD next to me. Where do I get them from? campus filesharing, IRC, Kazaa... all sorts of places. One can make a divx movie which fits on a CD, and has almost as good, if not as good quality as a DVD.
The point is that $20 is actually a ridiculous price to pay for a DVD, when the VHS version of it costs $10 or $12. As a starving college student, I don't have $20 to slam down whenever I want a copy of a movie. I've even made some of the divx movies I've got myself! And new DVDs cost substantially more than $20, anyways. Case in point? Lord of the Rings, platinum edition. $40. There are more, too. even the 'cheap' widescreen one is still $30. Doesn't seem like a terribly good deal to me.
The RIAA would rather have no music industry as opposed to a music industry where they don't control their own profits.
... for their hardware will dual boot GNU/Linux, does now (for the most part, goofy video connection cables notwithstanding) provide as much openness as Intel and, with the advent of Palladium, soon to be much more openness.
This is part and parcel to the monopoly mindset. Recall the AT&T fought its breakup tooth and nail, despite the fact that now, as one competitor among many in an industry that has grown by orders of magnitude due to competition, they make vastly more money than they did as a monopolist, and despite the fact that many, many economists and analysts were predicting exactly this behavior.
Microsoft is another example: with Palladium and DRM they are flirting with the very real risk of making their entire product ("the PC" in most people's minds) so crippled and singularly unattractive to consumers that it will go the way of DAT tape (not extinct like the original DivX pay-per-view DVD scheme, but relegated solely to professional use). They lock out GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and anyone else who might wish to compete on the Intel/AMD platform and lock in their monopoly, only to kill the feature that made the Intel platform appealing over the Apple, Atari, etc. platforms, despite the other's superior software and (in many cases, at the time) hardware: the apparent openness and competition that existed on the IBM compatible side of the fence. Once that is gone, all Apple has to do is continue business as is
Suddenly the equation shifts, and Microsoft becomes a legacy providor on a closed platform no one wants to stay with. They get the 100% market share they so desire, in a rapidly shrinking market. The odd thing is, the cartel oligopolist and the monopolist prefer this to outright competition, even though they stand to make so much more money in a vastly larger competative marketplace!
The recording industry is no different. In an industry saddled with incompetent people at so many levels, and the fear of competition that incompetence breeds (remember how poor AT&T service could be, back in the monopoly days, or how poor SBC Ameritech service remains?), they would rather cling to 100% of a tiny (and shrinking) market they control, than face the uncertainty of having to compete on their merits, even in a market place orders of magnitude larger, where even despite their incompetence they would likely earn vastly more money.
It is a very odd mentality, but one that is well documented and recurrs over and over again in the industrialized world, and is arguably one of the best arguments for why monopolies should be illegal, and not merely tolerated and "guarded against" should abuses arise (which doesn't happen when the government chooses to willfully ignore its duty under the law *cough* Baby Bush's DOJ *cough* anyway).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy