Slashdot Mirror
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."
Correlation is not causation.
A blog like any other.
How does this stuff get put on the main page? This is a 4 paragraphs or so article just saying that local music is popular, and mentions that piracy of the music is up too. How is this in any way proof or causal? Dear submitter, here is what is staring you in the face with this tiny, tiny article: Piracy happens more for bands that people like than bands they don't like. If a band becomes more popular, piracy will increase. To attribute some weird "the popularity must be because of the piracy, duh!" idea to this is ludicrous, and crazy illogical. God I hate myself for reading slashdot, especially on a saturday night.
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
I think it boost sales of less known album but reduce sales of more commercialy pushed album..... Free access to music give the power of choice.... thats why any big commercial distribors, RIAA etc are against it.
Overuse of the Pumping Lemma causes blindness
Do those bands promote bootlegging from their concerts? they generally drives up their raving fan base and promotoes sales of cd's and and concert attendance. Sure correlation, but there is some methoed of caustation here
...you know with RIAA and cousins constantly using my own government to screw me, i had pledged not to buy anymore cds...it's been months.
usually i just listen to the radio or existing collection.
but a friend loaned me a cd with a couple hundred mp3s on it, and two of them were by "no doubt", god i just love gwen's voice, and they just released some interesting stuff...
well i had to do it, buy some of their older cd's (and some of their newer stuff, too) as well as some dvd's i've been wanting.
so i was doing pretty well until this dude loaned me mp3s, then, bam! $250 spent on media just like that.
i hate the corporate bastards taking away my rights, but music has always been a calming, enjoyable thing for me--makes it pretty fucked when you have to choose between loving great music and hating corporate scum and knowing you can't support the former without supporting the latter.
Nothing in the article says or implies towards the fact that "Piracy boosts sales". What boosts sales is the fact that there are plenty of new zealand artists in top lists, and new zealanders love to support their fellowcountrymen.
I think that there is a delicate balance in place that makes music piracy actually help the industry, and people should realize that a possibly integral part of this balance might in fact rely on music piracy continuing to be illegal.
-Zeecog
That doesn't matter to Slashdot when they can find some random thing (wow, some article in New Zealand) that supports piracy and latch onto it.
I'm sorry, but music piracy will always be wrong. There is no justification for it, because in the end, you are always damaging the artist in some way. It's become an anti-corporate culture movement by Slashdot, but that's really just a moral justification imposed to get rid of any pangs of guilt anyone might feel when they fire up Kazaa.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Yet we try to present music sharing as "helping the music industry!" It's like telling King George that Britain will benefit from granting the colonies self-rule. Sometime the reality will strike: music sharers don't care about the music industry and they don't care about the artists. Sales will eventually fall.
Better that we tell the industry what our resistance is really about: We reject the government's copyright system that makes Federal authorities into thugs that enforce the music companies' restrictions of our freedom to spread information to whomever we want.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
First off, I do agree with that article being, well, not an article at all, but a news brief at the most. A more in-depth view is needed to really understand what's going on. But past that, I do agree with music piracy being a boost on sales and popularity, as it widens dramatically the potential market for any artist to not just people with 20 bucks but to people with MUCH much less who probably couldn't afford it at all otherwise.
Same thing happens with books, as pirated books, costing way cheaper than legits (at least in my country) find their way not only into a segment of the population's homes, but to a much broader market, and it is usually the widespread distribution through illegal channels that ends up dragging forward the non-pirate books or CDs or movies or whatever.
So, in a sense, piracy - despite its many cons - has the big pro of making culture (and yeah, a lot of garbage too) widely accesible to lots of people who, usually driven off by high prices, simply turn away in resignation. Knowledge for the masses, if you like, and in poor countries like my own, maybe the only working scenario to raise population's literacy levels.
http://castorexmachina.wordpress.com - Filosofía, tecnología y cultura.
...and doing this doesn't harm anyone.
Of course it does.
Better that we tell the industry what our resistance is really about: We reject the government's copyright system that makes Federal authorities into thugs that enforce the music companies' restrictions of our freedom to spread information to whomever we want.
BS. Ask the average Kazaa downloader why they download music. Because it's there and it's easy! It has nothing to do with some sort of revolutionary movement. It's all about convenience, nothing more.
Maybe on Slashdot, it's something different, but that's because Slashdotters feel the need to build everything up into things they're not (for instance, this article, which is nothing more than a four-paragraph description of the local New Zealand music scene).
"Sufferin' succotash."
As many have pointed out - there's no good causality link here. It's equally likely that local music is more pirated _because_ it is more popular.
If I was to try and pin some causality to the rise in popularity of local music in NZ, I would say that the Governments request (with threats of legislation) that NZ radio stations fulfill a certain quota of airtime to local music has been a huge boost. And it links in timewise quite closely with some of the rise of popularity of local music. Mostly though, that is simply down to exposure. As noted in another post, local music gets lost amidst the larger marketing budgets of major overseas labels. I'm also not a fan of the government mandating local content quotas - I would prefer the radio stations choose to do that themselves.
My point is, simply, that greater exposure is what has boosted local music sales. Internet sharing of music is another way to increase exposure. That doesn't mean, of course, that I would advocate piracy - but perhaps local artists who would like to get known should release some tracks under a license that allows copying. Hopefully they already do.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
We've seen this already with games sales in China.
- A
The problem with adding that to the slashdot submission utility is that the submitters/editors wouldn't actually be able to see it because of their crazy myopia where any news story at all that is somewhat related to any of their pet causes automatically becomes proof of them. Here are 2 situations I can imagine coming up and the slashdot spin on them:
1. Major record companies report record profits
slashdot spin: "See, ever since P2P has been thriving, sales have gone UP! GET WITH THE PROGRAM STUPID RECORD COMPANIES"
2. Major record companies report record losses
slashdot spin: "The stupid record companies have to get with the program, of course noone is buying cds when they cost too much and with P2P thriving. They need to change their model and offer high bitrate non-DRM downloads for very very low prices! GET WITH THE PROGRAM STUPID RECORD COMPANIES!"
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
My guess is that sales are up for both legal and illegal copies, but only temporarily. Eventually pirated ones will replace legal ones.
I'm not saying this through the top of my hat, I went to China and there, even stores sell only illegal copies!
It's nice to try saying your pirating is ok, but it's not; the governments and record companies are right.
The music industry apparently figures out the amount of money lost by piracy with the following formula:
Amount of money made = $X
Amount of money I think I should have earned = $Y
Amount lost to piracy = ($Y - $X) + $C, where $C is some large constant.
Unfortunately for the music industry, demand for music is sensitive to price. A lot more people will listen to a lot more music if the price is cheap than they will if it is expensive -- raise the price too high and you will see entertainment dollars flow to movies or computer games or kegs of beer. You can't just say "A billion songs were traded last year, so at a buck per song we would have made a billion more dollars without piracy." Even if the RIAA had absolutely perfect content protection and people were so law-abiding they hesitated to cut the tags off mattresses, the amount the recording industry would have gained would be a tiny fraction of the amount they are claiming -- and with some artists, especially the lesser-known ones, they would actually lose sales since no one is going to spend fifteen bucks on an artist they have never listened to.
the trouble with online music piracy is it doesn't just threaten the industry's sales, it threatens their control over distribution. Put simply, why would the music biz tolerate music piracy for a modest increase in sales when they could use their strangle hold over distribution for a massive increase in sales? For profit's sake the music industry ought go on doing what it's been (crushing pirates and stuffing digital restrictions down people's throats while screwing artists). That's gonna pay off a lot more in the long run.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Beside the point, I think that most people (myself inculded) have a hard time correlating PHYSICAL goods, which cost money to produce each and every one, and DIGITAL goods, of which an infinte number of copies can be made with no direct cost. This is the inherent difference, and why many people have zero guilt about copying songs, software etc. Sure, it cost money to produce the good, but the copies are free, and that fact cannot be changed, regardless of what the RIAA would like to believe. If it was no longer profitable to produce music, then music would stop being produced, but this is obviously not the case. I'm sure this argument has been made many times, but somehow people like to think making a copy directly costs somebody money, when it in fact is completely free, and is in no way related to shoplifting anymore than spam legislation is related to my spam count going down.
Doesn't everybody love femtoseconds?
Looks like you've let the *AA slide YET ANOTHER ONE past you. People are taking the RIAA "stolen goods" crap at face value. Perhaps the astroturfers I've seen around here have managed to spread some disinformation.
128K MP3s are FM broadcast quality (by definition) promos. The business model has one big difference from FM. The users are storing music promos at their own expense and serving up copies using their own bandwidth.
The only differences between taping MP3 promo tracks being played back over a wireless analog channel, like an FM radio and downloading identical MP3 promo tracks off the Net is that one is illegal and the other isn't. Does listening to 128K MP3-quality tracks displace sales? Why would the labels be paying to have them broadcast if they did?
Either works for promoting records. The digital version is illegal because the *AA organizations paid off a bunch of politicians to make it illegal. As for morality, some people think getting law in exchange for campaign contributions is immoral.
Sales aren't displaced by MP3 downloading, they're driven. That's why indie musicians release their own stuff for download on MP3. Not because of generosity, but because they want people to buy their CDs and higher-than-broadcast quality digital tracks at iTunes.
The most downloaded album on Kazaa was the last Eminem CD, "pre-released". People were waiting to buy it so they could get a higher quality music experience than they could get off broadcast quality CDs.
Records are sold when people hear enough of what's on it to decide they want a high-quality copy for their own listening. Nobody hears it? Nobody buys it. People hear it, whether on FM, P2P, or via FM radio, people might buy it. What's so hard to understand about that?
Why is the digital version illegal? Record companies want exclusive access to media channels suitable for broadcasting promotional reduced-quality audio tracks to the general public. So they paid a bunch of politicians to make it that way. Just because it's legal doesn't necessarily make it right.
The only damage done to legit artists by MP3 is that fewer people buy CDs by mistake anymore. People who like a specific band are likely to check out the new album by buying it. If they've heard all the tracks, they aren't going to buy if they find the one good song is the one on the radio and the rest is filler. What's wrong with that? Record labels do not have the holy right to profit at our expense by selling us crap we wouldn't buy if we knew what was on those shiny discs in advance.
That's why the MP3 downloads from networks like Kazaa are being tracked by places like Big Champagne. To find out what bands are most popular in a kind of real-time readout simply impossible via traditional radio end user polling methods used to find out what music end users are. Arbitron's every few days or month. MP3 downloads are realtime.
If THE RECORD INDUSTRY didn't think P2P downloads caused CD sales, why are they using Big Champagne tracking info to run marketing campaigns? If low-quality promo downloads automatically killed the market for the CDs they're taken from, all they could find out from the tracking info is who will not be buying their records. If an album were getting millions of downloads, it would be time to pull the plug on marketing and write off the investment because everyone who wanted to hear it's got it on the hard drive and in their MP3 player. Funny that it isn't happening that way, isn't it?
Or maybe you guys are reacting instead of thinking to RIAA disinformation and conflating a law (AHRA) created via political campaign contribution with morality.
If you gave public policy issues the kind of concentrated thought you give your software when a program blows up in your face, you might be able to make sense of a lot more of what is going on around you.
While correlation isn't ca
Tech Public Policy stuff
Let me quote the text relevant to illegal copying: "But Tizard warns that while sales of local music are high, so are illegal copies of New Zealand albums. She says piracy and copying of CDs and cassettes is estimated to cost the music industry $40 million a year." That is it. No more information than that.
/. editors need to read the links before they post. There is nothing -- no surveys, no time line analysis, no reasoning -- to indicate that there is any causal relationship. The more rational explanation is that those songs that are liked most will be bought more and copied more.
The
Damn it people. Use your fucking brains for a minute.
Let's see - the article says "A" is high, and it says "B" is high. So? Two observations don't make a correlation without some supporting evidence, wishful thinking aside! Otherwise the following two statements would be correlated:
1) The average highway speed limit in the United states is higher now than it was 20 years ago.
2) The average annual temperature in the United States is higher now than it was 20 years ago.
Almost anyone can see these are independent (I'm sure at least one reply will attempt to argue otherwise, since this is Slashdot after all).
Given the article as presented, the strongest valid statement one could really make is "Those Kiwis love their music!" If you want to draw stronger inferences, present data that actually links these two observations.
#DeleteChrome
Here, at the end of that article, is yet another example of the widespread, thoughtless assumption that every music file traded illegally constitutes lost revenue.
I know that if I couldn't download music without paying for it, I wouldn't listen to as much music, since I ain't that rich. Because I can "steal" mp3's, listening to music has become a much greater part of my life than it could have otherwise, which means that I'm more interested in buying the albums that I really enjoy. True, I'm not the kind of customer the music industry is really interested in; they cater mostly to the people who listen to those crappy NOW compilations, because those people form the meta-cliche of all cliches: the lowest common denominator. They're undiscriminating morons by the truckload who will, in a twisted bit of irony, undiscriminatingly download the same tripe from Kazaa, and will also likely never give the record industry another penny in their lives. Could the executives responsible for signing artists possibly develop a variegated, thoughtful customer base which really appreciates what it listens to enough to buy it, by refusing to offer up any more flashy, shallow nonsense? nah... Maybe they shouldn't have artificially jacked up the price of CD's (which they lost an antitrust suit over). Or allowed the heinous, evil Clear Channel to become so prevalent as to force musiclovers to find other means of listening to music for free.
What I'd like to do is simply steal every bit of major-label music I listen to and then mail a check of the full amount of the CD directly to the artist/band. The middle men don't get their cut. Everyone should go that way. Wouldn't be the "end of the music industry" as the press so often likes to say: it would just be the end of the bloated, manipulative corporations that have no place making a commodity of something as specific and inherently idiosyncratic as individual people should be.
One of the things that people need to keep in mind when speaking of "music piracy" is that there are two forms of piracy out there, both of which are as different as night and day, but he RIAA would prefer that people blur the line between them.
The type of piracy that people think about when the RIAA spews its propaganda is file-sharing "piracy". They whine about this and then point to their multi-million dollar losses.
But this is NOT the piracy that's causing them to lose money.
What has the potential to suck them dry is the second type of piracy. This is the kind sometimes run by organized crime. Big warehouses with CD duplicating machinery churning out fake copies of copyrighted music. This is very common overseas, usually in Asia. This type of piracy is very real and indistputably illegal AND immoral because it robs not just the RIAA of profit, but the artist as well.
But the RIAA purposely blurs the line between these for the purpose, I believe, of maintaining their strangehold on the distribution of music. The internet scares them because it opens up the possibility of increased competition. Thus they use the mass CD-duplication piracy problem (which IS a real problem) and use it as a convenient vehicle by which to forward their political agenda.
The moment that a major label Gets It and strikes out on its own to change its business model is the day that the RIAA will cease to be a cohesive political entity.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Which one of these complaining artists/labels are "eeking out" an existance? The artists whose mp3s are most downloaded are not those who are eeking out anything. Sure it's hard to notice the tightness of somebody elses shoes, when their shoes cost more than my car. Indepedent artists (who one would think would have the most to lose from copying of music) have embraced mp3s and p2p sharing as a way to spread their music without the need for the RIAA labels. Go to http://artists.iuma.com some time.
"Actually it's not obvious, hence people's complaint with the article. Also most economic and social systems have a certain degree of slack to them that tolerates deviations. That's why a single murder doesn't bring the system down. A single pirate isn't going to change the world that much."
Yes, but when the system is tolerating millions and millions of "pirates" (as it currently is), one has to at least consider the idea that these pirates are not damaging the system and may be perhaps helping it. At the very least, one has to consider the idea that some, if not most/all of these pirates also happen to be the largest consumers of their product, and attacking them may hurt you more than allowing their "transgressions".
"Then I suggest you give all your efforts away, then tell us if there are any costs to you? I'm certain reality will do it's damdest to accomodate you."
I'm certainly not asking musicians to give their efforts away (although most of them do on some scale, which generally is how I decide to buy music). I AM asking the corporations who produce and distribute their music to at least consider the fact that piracy make not be hurting them, and in fact make be helping them make money. Piracy has forced them to embrace portable digital formats and distributions rather than shunning and preventing the technology from existing as they attempted. These are the same corporations who wanted to prevent people from selling used cds.
"OK everyone. New economic model. Charge the millions that LOTR cost to one DVD. Now who will be the the exceptional soul that will buy it, and let "free" copies be made. Oh come now, it will have no "direct" cost to you, so give it up already."
If it worked, don't think that they wouldn't jump on it.
"Copyright is a social agreement, not the terms of slavery. We as a society struck an agreement with certain members of our society, that balances both our interest, and theirs."
Copyright IS a social agreement, and when a large portion of society has begun to take actions which indicate that they would like to change the terms of said agreement, should they be offered the chance?
"Next on Jeopardy. Download, or leave it be, and let market forces set the tone? The fate of an entire society hangs in the balance."
Haha, let's be a little melodramtic here. Next on Jeopardy, what should the RIAA claims it's losses were for the year due to piracy (even without any proof), 20 million, 100 million or 10 BILLION virtual dollars?
Doesn't everybody love femtoseconds?
we've heard the testimony from metallica and dr. dre about how they've lost their homes and cars and have to live on the streets, but have you heard from the indie scene?
during the days of napster and audiogalaxy the indie scene was booming. i know because i donwloaded an album or two every day. i got music from bands you've never, and i had never, heard of. soon i began going to concerts every weekend, where i'd buy on average 1 album and 1 t-shit each show. depending on the record label, the money from the album probably never made it back to the band, however the $10-$12 for the tshit, and the money for the concert ticket went directly into the bands pocket. as you can see, at least in my case, my piracy was leading to more money for the indie music scene.
since audogalaxy was murdered, i have literally purchashed less than 10 albums (remember, i purchased at least 1 per week before that). and these albums are not indie; in fact you've probably heard of every one of them. in my opinion, there is no indie music scene anymore, because there is no way of finding it.
the only musicians who benefit from enforcing anti-piracy laws are the musicians who dont need the money. the musicians struggling to get their music heard, the ones who someday could be the fat-cats rolling in dough, are the ones who lose money, because they lose fans.