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New Zealand Shows Music Piracy Boosts Sales
vik writes "According to This NZ news article it appears local music is being boosted by piracy. Strangely, their Associate Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, Judith Tizard, supports this when she warns that "... while sales of local music are high, so are illegal copies of New Zealand albums." Unfortunately as always, government bodies don't seem to be able to make the connection even when it stares them in the face."
water is wet
It all depends on what state it's in, wise guy... I bet you won't say it's wet when it's -200 degrees Celsius.
But it all comes back down to think like American Idol etc!
Interestingly American Idol is based on a TV show that originally began in New Zealand. The show was called "Popstars" and was selecting a group of girls to sing as a girl band type group. It was successful in NZ, and was then run in Australia. From there it moved to getting runs in England, and elsewhere in Europe where the idea morphed a little. Finally it was picked up and converted into American Idol.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Um, Enya is from Ireland.
That hardly seems to be the case though, does it?
h tml ) where she very eloquently tells 'em to go shove it.
Janis Ian's got a nice article posted here ( http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.
In particular, she points to the one clear experiment being conducted in this area: the Baen Free Library. If increased availability of illegal and free entertainment guts the industry, then surely increased availability of LEGAL, FREE, and PRODUCER-SANCTIONED entertainment would be its death-knell, no? Yet what happens every single time an author puts their work up on the Library? Sales jump.
So go to the Library ( http://www.baen.com/library/ ), find a good author, and buy a book. Support an author today.
Get a copy of BNL's Everything to Everyone, and go to a concert. Support a band today.
And please stop forcing me to compare the music industry to the printing industry. It's really not a good analogy.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
An interesting side effect of the Baen Free Library - it has indirectly contributed to my buying a Sony Clie and a 256 mb compactflash card, just so I can store my books to read on the go when traveling. What happened? I downloaded one book by David Weber to start off (Mutineer's Moon) after reading about the free library on Slashdot. One thing led to another, and I became the owner of War of Honor, and later Hell's Faire, both of which have CD's containing a bunch of eBooks, completely free.
In addition to the random selection from the free library, I can now take advantage of Project Gutenberg titles, and I've been seriously considering signing up for Webscriptions just so I can get first crack at some of the new titles coming out.
So, more digital media for free not only helps to boost sales of physical copies (I also bought dead-tree versions of Sluggy Freelance as well - I got hooked on Sluggy after reading obscure references in John Ringo's "When the Devil Dances" and visiting the Sluggy website trying to figure out who "Torg", "Zoe", "Riff", and "Bun-Bun" were.)
So, just from trying out one free eBook, I went ahead and have bought:
(2) Hardcover books from Baen, new
(7) Softcover Sluggy Freelance books from Plan Nine Publishing
(1) Clie NX60 [320x480 screen, a bit small, but very legible]
And a 256mb compactflash card [overkill, until you start putting MP3s on it]
That's several hundred dollars of spending on my part, and it cost Baen about 15mb worth of bandwidth for all the books that I've downloaded from the free library. For me, it's a great deal - lots of books for very little money. For Baen and their authors, it's a great deal - they get new customers (I never would have tried David Weber otherwise - now he's one of my favorite authors), and lots of good press (ie, Slashdot and word of mouth.) Incidentally, this happens with titles I check out from the library (I like a book or author, and end up buying books to add to my personal library), so there's preceedent for the sharing of "free" media.
i am just about finished conducting a study on why individuals share music. as part of this study, i also try to find out why people download these files.
/.? the /. title and blurb do not actually represent what the article says. not only do /. readers not read the article - apparently the posters don't read the articles they post about either.
of the following reasons regarding why people download music files in mp3 or similar format:
1) Cheaper than CDs
2) More convenient than buying CDs
3) Not worth buying CD for 1-2 songs
4) To sample songs
5) Instant access to songs
the results indicate that answer 4 is the least important of these reasons - by a long shot. the most important reason was found to be answer 2, followed very closely by answer 5.
the results also show that the availability of free music causes considerably more people to reduce the amount of cds they purchase - not the widely-viewed, non-sensical concept that seems to be floating around that people buy more cds because of fileswapping. of those surveyed (students attending a technical institute), the feeling that music file-swapping helps sales is widely held, but almost nobody responded to the survey to indicate that they personally did this. everyone assumes that everyone else uses this service for music sampling, but in reality, it seems that this is not the case.
if you're interested in any more of the research findings, let me know.
as a side note, how did this so-called 'story' make it to the front page of
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
An excellent example of how 'Net file sharing can actually be used deliberately to boost sales, while also making the fans happy, was how Iron Maiden promoted their latest album, Dance of Death.
The album wasn't recorded all in one go, as albums usually are, but was recorded during the breaks between tours and gigs. When Maiden had written and recorded a new song for the coming album, they'd perform it on some of the subsequent tours. Whenever they were about to play some new material, frontman Bruce Dickinson would tell the gathered hordes of Maiden fans that if they wanted to record it and share it with their friends on the Net, that was OK, "just buy the album when it gets out, right?".
So in the months before the release, tons of concert bootlegs of Wildest Dreams, Rainmaker and the title track Dance of Death were floating around the net. People's anticipation of the new album was boosted to the boiling point, and Maiden had come across as sympathetic people who wanted to share their music with the world rather than greedy Lars Ulrich clones. When the album was released, it had killer sales. Lots of people who had come across one of the aforementioned bootlegs (with poor sound quality -- you don't drag your studio quality recorder to a concert, do you? ;) ) just had to hear them in a studio version. It's likely that encouraging filesharing had actually boosted the sales of that record. At any rate, the move sure gained Maiden more respect from their fans, which I personally think is something that also translates to better sales.
I believe this is the way to do it if you're a major band -- adapting to the new reality of 'net file sharing (legal or not -- the illegal status of sharing copyrighted music obviously isn't stopping anyone) rather than whining about it.
Six sick
As already noted Ms. Brennan (Enya to you) is irish. Also it's 'Orinoco Flow' not 'Sail Away' thankyouverymuch.