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Millions Delete ALL Music Files?
Honig the Apothecary writes "CNN is reporting that millions of people have deleted all the music files from their computers in a story here.
My question is how the hell would they know? Are they substituting "deleted" for the words "disabled sharing with other users"?"
As far as the RIAA is concered, deleting and 'unsharing' are same thing.
Their goal is to stop filesharing, not convince users to pay for what they already downloaded.
Take out deleted and add in burned. With cd writers being under $50, and with blank cds being damn near free, it makes a lot more sence to just burn all your mp3s instead of archiving them on your hard drive.
I took a couple of marketing classes and I understand the principals involed in calculating marketing data, but where are they getting their data?
In May, 606,000 households deleted ALL mp3's. 1,400,000 in August. Let's just say that 1mil/month for 4 months. 4,000,000 HOUSEHOLDS(not people) in 4 months. At that rate mp3's will be wiped from existence sometime next year. It just doesn't add up.
Does windows crash to the point you have no hope but to format/install: YES
Given an installed base of 100's of millions, if it happens to even 1%, we have millions of machines a year dying.
Does everyone back up: NO
Do these crashes case music to be deleted: YES
Since when has been ok to post stories and articles without backing it up with proof?
Now, were this a link to The Weekly World News, that'd be different. ( I love that rag )
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If you go to NPD Group's website and click on their press release, they had this to say: "Methodology Note: NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users. NPD's MusicLab survey was fielded in September of 2003 to a representative sample of 5,000 respondents aged 13 and older." How were those volunteer panelists chosen? Perhaps they were provided by their client the RIAA from people who signed their on-line forgiveness document. It's hard to believe any of this information when their clients spend a lot of money to get the answer they want. I could probably produce a study showing that music-swapping is up 400% by monkeys in Nepal.
There is no way they could know that.... but the RIAA probably loves them saying it... "Look ma, we're winning!"
Some probably have deleted everything our of fear... but those are the users who simply don't know the difference between a bark and a bite from the paper tiger.
I haven't deleted a single music file, and I doubt most have...
This is just another PR story for the RIAA.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
I love these lines from another CNN Story... "In a culture without copyright, only the rich, or the government-sponsored, could be this culture's full-time creators. Poor artists such as Loretta Lynn would have to flip burgers long into their music careers -- and might even give up on music entirely." So, instead, in a culture WITH copyright, only the rich and government-sponsored (through government-protected monopolies) are this culture's full-time creators. Poor artists flip burgers even though they have multi-platinum selling albums, while the music companies get billions.
The statistics presented in newspapers are almost always flawed if not totally inaccurate (as this one seems to be). Good luck trying to find out how the NPD conducted their poll. Odds are they took the 11% decline in file sharing and multiplied it by the number of users. I wonder if NPD even knows what "deleted" means.
It is, because it explicitly says the downloading is illegal. It is NOT. In fact, no one has been sued because of downloading.
Downloading is legal.
RIAA sues people because of uploading (i.e. distibution - because that is what copyright regulates).
I think they are spreading misinformation purposefully (as this article is coming from a law expert) and I guess we should counter this FUD as much as possible.
Real life is overrated.
Seriously, the American news media is starting to sound like Pravda/Isvestia in the old days.
I'm not even using hyperbole.
This is what oligarchy does - doesn't really matter if it's the capitalist overlords or the party members. It all comes down to the same thing - "Happy News! Poor peasants celebrate obeying the Law!"
This note completely explains the situation. These people volunteered to be monitored. They had big MP3 collections and thought "Eh, maybe legal, maybe not, but who cares, nothing will come of it." Then they hear about lawsuits.
Now, since they *volunteered* to be monitored, of course they want to delete all their MP3's. It's kind of like saying "100% of drug dealers who volunteered to have their houses searched with several hours notice have been found to have NO DRUGS!"
Yeah, sure, of course. But that number isn't going to be representitive of all drug dealers.
"If you buy CDs you're paying the RIAA to sic lawyers on 12 year old girls."
If you don't buy CDs the RIAA sics lawyers on 12 year old girls.
Wanna get their attention? Buy a CD then return it unopened and in re-sellable shape. When a million dollars materializes one day and disappears the next, they'll have to notice.
"Derp de derp."
I like how they mention the decline occurred during college summer vacation but the tone seems to say that the measured decline is an indicator of people not sharing due to RIAA junk, but they said it themselves -during the college summer vacation- meaning, no one has bandwidth anymore.
I personally deleted all of my mp3's as well as all traces of said mp3's in the registry because I didn't want to chance being harassed. However, I also have not purchased a CD since then nor will I ever purchase one in the future.
The music industry stifles musical creativity by picking up the latest britney clones and telling the masses that they are popular. Even the artists that are lucky enough to be chosen don't make anything from the CD sales. It's all about some old man somewhere making 90% profit from each CD sold, just because a group of those guys controls what gets sold to stores, what plays on the radio, and what is seen on MTV.
I can safely say that I've given up on the music industry and the only time I am exposed is when I'm in the car and the radio happens to be on. Good riddance Recording Industry Ass. of America. You can take your pop music and shove it up your ass.
As did I. How does such bad journalism make it to cnn.com..
So without copyright, they never would have made it. Oh, ok. I guess I'll just take your word for it, since you didn't provide any reasoning or proof behind that statement - which the rest of the article is based on, I might add.
Speak before you think
It's just more difficult locate downloaders as apposed to uploaders. In order for the RIAA to locate downloaders in a peer to peer network, the downloaders would have to be receiving their material from an RIAA host. The problem with that approach is that if the RIAA actively shares material it owns the copyright to, the downloads become legal, hence the difficulty in suing downloaders.
Uploaders, on the other hand, sit on a steady network connection with their entire library available for anyone to browse.
So, downloading is just as illegal as uploading, its just more difficult to get busted for it.
The RIAA is a political organization, looking to ban technology to save their business model.
The recording industry fatcats want their money, and are scared of new technology. No one wants to split from the group and try selling music in any other fashion than the current model. They feel threatened. The industry is behaving exactly like they did during the cassette tape scare, just like the motion picture industry was scared of the VCR and video tape. Remember movie rentals? VHS videos were frequently $100 or more until used movies became available... and movie houses started dropping their retail prices down to the current prices.
Movie rentals threatened the movie industry, until they realized that it actually developed new markets for their material.
The RIAA is not filled with innovative, bright individuals. The RIAA throws money at weak-minded, spineless senators and congresspeople like Conyer, Fritz Hollings, and any politician from California (Berman, Feinstein, etc.). The recording industry sees technology as the end of their business. They are in denial. The emperor has no clothes.
What's really funny is that they also profit from the downloaders. They research what the downloaders' are trading, and call the radio stations to increase air time, which sells more CDs. Hypocrites! They profit from the very process they're trying to stop.
I don't fault them for researching the downloaders' behavior. That's the bright people helping the record biz survive.
The political side of the biz is what I can't stand. This is why most people can't stand politicians or the courts.
Politicians choose not to understand the technology, they choose to listen to those with the biggest pocketbooks. Ostriches... with their heads in sand.
With the RIAA and Fritz Hollings' old method of thinking, the school systems should only be using chalkboards and chalk. The police will be stopping by later to pick up your VCR, computer, and cassette tape recorder.
"No new technology, it ruins our business."
-- No sig for you!
If im counted in the 'millions' statistic, they are wrong... i, and many people i know have stopped publicly sharing, and started sharing to people we download from and know :)
I know of more than a few non-technical people who still were able to figure out Napster/Kazaa/etc and download songs who deleted EVERY .mp3 the second they heard about RIAA lawsuits/etc. They didn't understand that the RIAA was going after sharers--they heard 'mp3' and 'lawsuit' in the same sentence and freaked out. Granted, this is just anecdotal and not representative of the whole population, but I think it's an attitude more than just a few people had.
I have a feeling a good number of other people did the same thing, even if they did just rip the music from their purchased CDs. To the uninformed, it must look really scary.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
To quote the original release:
...
The music industry's success in reducing file-sharing activity has been impressive, but now the real work of winning back the hearts and minds of consumers must begin," Crupnick said. "To capitalize on this success, the industry must re-double efforts to educate the file-sharing public about how illegal file sharing affects not just the industry's bottom line, but also the artists themselves and the ability of the industry to continue to offer a wide range of new music to consumers. New legal ways to purchase digital music on the Web can work hand-in-glove with these education efforts and help to improve the public's perception of the music industry."
Not a single mention about winning our hearts and minds with better content, fairer prices, or better treatment of artists. No. They want to reemphasize how BAD the public has been. Yes, the floggings will continue until morale improves!
The RIAA so profoundly does not get it
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Yeah, the sample size isn't the problem here, it's the fact that the population agreeing to be monitored by the music industry is, by definition, dramatically different from the population on the net as a whole.
;) and close to 100% compliance from the drivers that putz down the road at 5mph under. The two populations are essentially independant, and any extrapolation is going to be dead wrong.
It's as if the highway patrol had a voluntary program to install speed recorders/transmitters in your car, and got one in every 2500 drivers to agree to the installation-- they're going to get 0% compliance from drivers like me
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
I think CNN's interpretation of "Deleted" is actually just wishful thing. Although I bet a lot of kids have been yelled at by Mom and Dad and probably grounded from "web use" for having kazaa installed.
On a side note (sorta related) I saw the Matrix Revo- last night and before the movie was this ad about software piracy and why it's wrong because lot's of people work hard to make good movies. This was laughed at, booed, and general flaming comments shouted by the audiance at the ad.
Ave Molech Setting
The funny part is, Loretta Lynn didn't get bubkus because of copyright, she got where she was because she worked her tail off performing live and distributing her music to every radio station around, usually by hand. People weren't trying to copy her music...in fact, while she was 'rising to the top' she would have been only too happy to have someone play her music and make it more famous.
--trb
The study measures deletion of songs off users' hard drives, not pirated music only. I have an actual social conscience, and an aversion to lawsuits. Yet, I have several gigs of music on my harddrive. Every song on the machine is from a CD that I have stacked in my closet, from which I've ripped the song as per my court-approved fair use rights. On a regular basis, I space-shift those songs off the HD onto a memory card to listen to in flight. None of this is even a little illegal, despite the RIAAs telling me so.
I will, however, agree that there are, in fact, millions of rather naive users that probably believe the RIAA can see into their harddrives and will sue them any day now. Kinda sad, if you ask me.
--
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Editors ask writers to create content on subjects that they think will be picked up by other news services. The union rules state that the writer retains the right to withold their name on a story if they feel the story is inaccurate or if they disagree with what they've been asked to write. Editors hate when writers do this because those in the industry know what a authorless article implies. This is why you will sometimes see stories from the AP or Reuters that do reference the author:
Move Over Beauty Queens, Italy Seeks Miss Digital
And others that don't:
Dog Shoots Man
So what does this mean to you, the critical consumer of news? If an article carries the author's name, it means they endorse it's content - they believe in the validity of it. If it does not, it means the writer was either forced to create content that they didn't agree with or believe was accurate or that the writer was up against a deadline and failed to provide content that they were proud of.
The cnn article, interestingly, does not provide an author. Any thoughts on why? The question of how they know content was deleted is awfully vital to getting the point of this article across. It really doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny.
That struck me as odd also. There are statistical methods for generalizing to the larger population IF you have a representative sample.
/.-ers deleted much of anything aside from those incriminating Milli Vanilli rips.
I don't know if people who would volunteer to have their PCs monitored constitute a representative sample. Although they could get around this by defining the population in terms of demographics rather than PC prowess. I doubt any
The second issue is, as its been pointed out, there is a question of legality of the behavior they are measuring which makes compliance socially desirable. That means they should take self-report data with a grain of salt. Again, there are ways to control for social desirability. I'd need to see the questionnaire in order to gauge that.
I also emailed the address they provided inquiring about their methods.
--KS
I may be a little behind the bell curve here, but how does that add up then to "millions" of households. I can understand maybe millions of files deleted...but I checked and rechecked the release and it plainly states "More than a million households deleted all the digital music files they had saved on their PCs in August".
Through the miracle of statistics, it's possible (within a certain margin of error) to extrapolate information on the behavior of a large group of people by analyzing the behavior of a small (but representative) group of people. Thus, if you know how many households are involved in music sharing, you can apply the results of your sample to the population at large and get a very good idea of how that population will behave.
Or is NPD MusicWatch Digital just a puppet of the RIAA? Spreading around a little FUD and dis-information...kinda like the inflated enemy body counts of Vietnam.
It's just statistics, not a conspiracy!
-h-
True, but as others have said, I seriously doubt the population of people that willingly and honestly allow an outside organization to monitor the files they have or delete is representative of the overall filesharing population. It's kind of like going into a prison and asking how many people have comitted murder and then extrapolating that to the general non-prison population. Your results are going to be grossly skewed to the point of not being useful.
What I want to know is why did they delete them?
The fact that people feel they need to delete all the music files on their computer is downright scary.
Why scary?
Its not illegal to have music files on your computer! Did they delete "legal" and "illegal" ones alike? If so that means the RIAA has scared people into believing they aren't allowed to have music on their computer.
To me it means the RIAA, MPAA, FTC, courts and elected officials have us afraid to fully use technology in a way that is beneficial to us. We're now afraid we may be dragged into court and fined $millions for having music on our computer. We're being told more and more what we can't do, and not what we can do.
Sorry for the ranting, but its sickening to me to think that so many people may be deleting "legal" music from their computer all because of FUD.
Whatever happened to the pursuit of happiness?
but when the sample is large enough (and 5000 is certainly a large sample), it is also representative of the population whose behavior is being examined. Yes, there is some bias, but if the sample is large enough then that bias is small.
If you ask enough people if they speed you're going to get a pretty good statistcal answer because no-one is very concerned about the police actually coming after you and saying, "Look you confessed to speeding. Here's your ticket." But if you ask the general non-prison population "Have you ever murdered someone?" the response is going to be pretty close to zero. That doesn't mean that that answer is anywhere close to accurate--it means people are reasonably scared of telling the truth even to a survey.
With the RIAA running around threatening lawsuits and looking for multi-thousand dollar settlements I don't think very many people are going to be very honest about their activities in a survey. Even if I had a 1000 MP3s, if someone called me on the phone and said, "Do you have any MP3s or did you delete them all last month" I'd either say I didn't have any or that I deleted them. I certainly wouldn't say, "Oh yeah, I 0wn thousands of MP3s. Take that RIAA! Here's my address and phone number in case you want to sue me."
Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree. You are making an assumption about the behavior of how people would answer a survey without having any data to support that assumption, other than, I suppose, your own reaction to how you would participate.
Now as to your analogy, again, I must point out that it is still flawed. You are using the results of your sample of prison inmates to apply to the population at large. The problem is that your sample only applies to the population of prison inmates. In other words, you can draw some conclusions about the number of murderers being held in prison, but you cannot extrapolate that to the number of murderers that are in the population outside of prisons.
Likewise, NPD cannot use the results of their sample of 5000 online PC users and draw conclusions about the behavior of the general population that are not online or that do not use PCs. In other words, in your analogy, a requirement to be a member of the population is to be incarcerated. To be a member of the sample, the requirement is to be incarcerated at a given prison under study. To be a "positive" in the sample, you must be incarcerated at the prison under study and you must be a murderer.
In NPD's study, the population is that of online PC users. The sample is a group of 5000 online PC users participating in a panel. A "positive" is one of the group of 5000 in the panel who deleted all of his or her music files.
I can't begin to count the number of studies that have shown the significant reduction or elimination of bias in large samples, even in studies that researched participation in illegal activities. There are virtually no studies, however, that hold that significant bias does occur in large samples. An example is that of focus groups. They are widely used as statistical predictors of any number of things. One could argue that those focus groups are really testing the behavior of people who are apt to participate in focus groups. But, time and time again, research has shown that a properly crafted study will return accurate results. Believe me, I know, because, to twist a phrase, it is my job to know. But you don't have to take my word for it, you can Google around a bit for yourself, or better yet, take a course on statistics and ask the question there.
Finally, it's important to realize that the numbers that are being tossed around in NPD's press release are incomplete. Yes, the claim is that 1.4 million households deleted all of their music files. What is not stated is the total number of households that had music files to begin with! A million is a big number, but without having an idea of what the population size is, we have no way of determining just how significant that number is.
-h-
What you are suggesting is that the prison population and the general population are significantly different in terms of the number of murderers and how many of them will respond honestly. I agree. The prison population is not representative of the general population.
Where we disagree is that you seem to think that the behavior of NPD's sample of people who willingly admit to engaging in an illegal act that is being cracked down on by the RIAA is representative of the behavior of the anonymous masses who would never participate in that such a survey. I believe that these two populations are very different--maybe not quite as different as the prison/general population example, but certainly different enough that the results are inherently skewed.
In NPD's study, the population is that of online PC users.
The population is that of online PC users that are willing to answer a survey about their illegal online activities and trust that their responses will not get into the hands of the RIAA. I submit that a small percentage of those that are participating in an illegal behavior subject to an ongoing crackdown are going to participate in such a survey and are bound to lie about their behavior if they actually do participate.
But, time and time again, research has shown that a properly crafted study will return accurate results.
Agreed, and I don't deny this. But we don't know how this survey was crafted and times have changed. How much research has been done regarding the response of participants to a question when an active witch-hunt is in progress and has even hit 12 year olds with $2000 fines?
As we all know, statistics can be made to say whatever the statistician or interviewer wants them to say. And as technology increases and it becomes easier and easier to tie people to their supposedly-anonymous survey responses I think you will find that some of those old studies need to be revisited--primarily where there is potential jeapordy on the part of the participant.