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CD-Rs and MP3s Not Hurting Record Sales

Posted by michael on from the duh dept.

David Gerard writes "Forget the industry shills' spin - the numbers prove that, for Australia, CD-Rs and MP3s are not hurting record sales in the slightest - based on a recent Australian Record Industry Association survey. It would be interesting to see what the numbers for the US or UK say."

2 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting by metlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmmm, according to this article it has not affected the sales in the US either.

    But this article at ABCNews seems to indicate that its not piracy thats really affecting the sales, but services like iTunes -

    "CD sales are down 15 percent from last year, while legal online services like the new Napster and Apple's iTunes have taken off, especially for the holidays. Apple's iTunes sold more than $1 million in download gift certificates since October."

    I think that more than CD-Rs or mp3 piracy, its services like these which would affect the records sales.

  2. Australians pay directly for every byte downloaded by alien_blueprint · · Score: 5, Informative

    In Australia we pay directly for every byte we download.

    For our monthly ISP fee we are granted a certain number of megabytes that we may download without incurring extra cost. This "bandwidth cap" varies depending on how much you pay per month. Beyond that we typically pay some rate such as 15c per megabyte, or are cut back to dialup speeds.

    Now, this doesn't directly affect the discrepancy discussed in the article (between the rate of people burning CDs for their friends and the lack of a corresponding drop in CD sales), but in general you have to keep this in mind when trying to draw conclusions from any investigation of illegal music sharing in Australia.

    Of course, it might just be that illegal music sharing has no effect on sales elsewhere in the world, but it's important to realize that our usage patterns will be very different from areas that have unlimited downloads.