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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."
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
...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 ;)
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
So which way does the causality go? Being smelly, white and pasty causing the "not getting the sex"? Or not getting sex can lead to smelly, white and pastiness?
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
True, but irrelevant. Consider:
If the availability of free music causes people to buy music, the studios shouldn't try to stop it because it's helping them.
If buying lots of music causes downloading lots of music, the studios shouldn't try to stop it because they'd be attacking their best customers.
If there's no causation either way, then the studios are wasting money trying to stop it since it has no bearing on their bottom line.
Any way you slice it, this suing of children and grandmothers is pointless, a PR disaster, and ultimately suicidal. Whether the campaign works, fails, or has no effect, the studios LOSE.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.