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 didn't know that Middle-Earth was at the top of the music scene, good for them.
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.
You'd almost think that you care about us in the Southern Hemisphere ;)
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 the boost in local NZ music by copying is not that surprising. There is a lot of very good New Zealand music, but a lot of it stays relatively unknown, even to the local market, as we tend to get swamped by the more affluent overseas marketing. A little exposure can take you a long way.
As to New Zealand copyright laws - that's an interesting one, as they are currently under review. I haven't checked recently (but made plenty of submissions while they were taking them) but I believe that while they aren't doing a DMCA (because enough people spoke up) they aren't doing the right thing either.
This article by the IT editor of one of the major NZ newspapers goes so far as to suggest that they ought to be trying to enshrine Copyleft and Creative Commons in the copyright laws, so there is a movement towards this at a reasonably public level - how much sway that actually has over politicians is hard to say.
All the New Zealanders reading this: Write in to your local MP and ask them for their stance on Copyright law, and explain the benefits of having Copyleft and Creative Commons as a firmly enshrined concept under law. The more they think people are paying attention, the better the chance thet something good will come in the copyright review.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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
Always damaging the artist? So, downloading a song from 1942 which I can't buy in any store, or hear on the radio, is damaging the artist that died 20 years ago?
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.
I wonder if Radio listening has been ont he increase at the same time sales are picking up? I'd take a guess and say yes. But it all comes back down to think like American Idol etc!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
After all, how do you quantify someone like myself, who either:
A) Downloads a track or three by an unknown (to myself) artist to 'test the waters' and based on the tracks in question either buys their CD's/Merchandise, or immediately deletes their tracks of my HD.
B) Downloads live/unreleased/discontinued tracks by the truckload.
Both of those show as 'piracy' by RIAA's standards, one of them 'MAY' contribute to higher music sales, HOWEVER, in the case of 'A', even tho' I downloaded tracks to which I will NEVER purchase said album, it can not be considered a 'lost sale'.
Bascially, just goes to show, you can skew the numbers to show whatever you want them to show...
Also of note, I'm up to about $400 in sales to the iTMS. Quantify that...
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
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
Let's look at the flip side of that. The music industry is, as is almost any other business, out for profit. The money made by such groups is only given to the artist at a factional amount. The "rich and famous" are a small portion of the artist whom we are "damaging." The price of a blank CD is c. .10(us) at the most; the burning, labels, cases, leaflets, et al, is probably around 4 dollars a CD produced. These are then sold to Record stores at around 10-15 dollars (US) Then, the record stores sell them to us (the consumer)at 29-21 dollars (US). The royalty charges go to the record company (i.e. Sony, Columbia, etc) not to the artist. The artist is paid by the record company in proportion to how many CD's are sold, how many concert tickets sold etc. This amount is Negligible when talking about the total amount of profit made. The real thievery is put to the consumer with massive profit margins, from such a relatively cheap commodity. Why not download half, or more, of the music you listen to? The ends, music (for the consumer) and a "loss" for the record company. The whole thing balances out. The ends, justify the means in this case. The consumer is happy, the record companies are still making money, and the world did not end.
That's my 2 cents anyways.
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
in store stickering of major label cds:
"WARNING: this record label pays radio stations to keep independent music off the air"
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!"
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
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/
Hey, I pirate music, but I agree, it's wrong. (Yes, I'm proud to be a hypocrite underneath my anonymous sheath)
I also buy a lot of music. I also work in the music industry.
Do I feel compelled to feel bad because I might download a song that's on an album I can't find in my local stores? No. What about the song that's on an album with 14 other songs, which I can't stand? No.
Do I think slashdot has the right to promote piracy? Yeah, sure, it's called freedom of speech. Do I think it's morally sound? Not really. Do I think that slashdot has some example or integrity to uphold? Not in the last 6 years, no.
Get off the soapbox and download iTunes so you can pay and get in on what everyone else is doing already for free. Micro-payments for music is the best thing since sliced bread, and I'm happy to be a customer.
Now, when it works on my FreeBSD box, I won't just download the files, pull them through a stream ripper and encode them mp3 to share with family and friends, but that's another story entirely.
HAND,
Your friendly politically-incorrect anonymous coward.
Its a..*sniff*... visious cycle....*sniff* :,(
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
What if I download a few songs to hear a new artist, not on the radio or television, then buy their album? I may be one of the few, but I *do* tend to buy albums if the music is decent, and I can't listen to radio, because the same songs are played to death here. Technically, even if I buy a CD later, it's still "music piracy." /. users fire up their P2P, they're downloading porn, and we all know it! ...Wait, it's not just me, right?
And let's be honest, 90% of the time
What the heck, time to burn some karma.
The crux of this argument I think is 'since the labels make most of the money, and the artist doesn't, we aren't hurting (many) artists (much).'
As much as we demonize the labels, we agree that not a single person in the entire process does anything of value? No one found the band, hooked them up with some lyrics (yes, a minority of bands do all their own work), promoted them, bribed radios to play the songs, etc, etc, etc?
Yes, the labels are 'evil'. Yes, we don't really 'need' them, but artists seem to think there is no other way to succeed. Yes, the companies likely profit (I haven't seen a financial statement though).
But assuming you know enough about the entire process, the costs, the options the artists have (I can't think of any well-known bands, or even bands I hear on the radio, stating they're proudly label-free) and having the arrogance to skip to a conclusion amounting to "they steal from the artists so it's ok to download music for free" is a little hasty.
"Cheap commodity" does not begin to address the true costs of producing music.
Not for a second do I think labels are a good solution to the whole problem of publishing music but demonizing every single label, stating they add zero value to the process and we should only pay the direct costs is childish and simplistic.
Also, exaggerating costs to prove a point doesn't do much for your argument. $19-21USD for a CD? In Canada, several chains offer the newest and most popular CDS - the guaranteed money makers - as low as $9.99CAD ($7.69USD). Going to the most expensive stores, I have seen $20-25CAD prices, but using $19-21USD as an average price is grossly exaggerating.
If you don't like the prices, don't pay them. Don't buy the music. But don't confuse your unwillingness to pay (what you consider) a high price as your right to download music illegally.
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.
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
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.
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
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)
Be sarcastic all you want but the parent post has a valid point: why does copyright extend BEYOND the physical existance of the creator?
The idea behind copyright is that the artist should get paid to be creative. Once you are dead you STOP being creative. So the idea to have copyright extend beyond the life of the artist goes against the whole basic fundation of copyright.