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File Sharing Increases CD Sales
Andrew writes "ARIA have released figures that show for 2003, album sales have reached an all time high. In fact, according to Peter Martin, who recently went on Australian radio, before file sharing and CD burning they were selling 10 million less. Total unit sales were also at an all time high at 65.6 million. CD single sales declined 1.9 million over the year, but as Peter said file downloading is doing a better job. Should help Kazaa's legal problems."
Yes i Download songs, usually individual songs, if i really like what i hear i go out an buy the album... but and this is the thing, i only buy vinyl. I stopped bying cd's about 2 years ago when they all started coming with crap on (wtf is multimedia enhanced) half of them stopped working in at least one of the players that i own. If i cant get get it on Vinyl (if you are under 25 or a not DJ try it sometime, to my ears it gives a richer more comfortable sound) then i will either rip a CD or dl it.
;P
The point is that until they make cd's a reasonable price compared to their production and distribution costs (please start your rant engines now ladies and gentlemen) and stop trying to make them more attractive with all sorts of cr@p on them that stops them working in most players then the invitation is not there to buy CD's in the numbers that i used to (maybe 30 vinyl ablums and maybe 20 cd's a month)
I know that this sounds like a rant but its what i feel
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
I've long had a theory that the RIAA/MPAA aren't really against piracy, but they are really against a peer-to-peer economy that is coming up. I believe that they are threatened, not by illegal piracy activities, but by the market becoming splintered, and people listenening to a larger variety of music. People on the Internet might stop listening to a few Pop stars, and start listening to a larger variety of music, possibly each other's music.
If my theory holds good, this news item will not prevent them from using legal strong-arm tactics - they will fight to retain their market share.
The Slashdot spin on this through the years has been quite outrageous.
First we have situation (a), where the total CD sales increase, as in this article. Slashdot routinely cliams this as very strong evidence that copying of music actually helps sales. (References: [1], [2], [3]).
But in situation (b), when CD sales fall, the Slashdot editors suddenly forget the strong casual link that they'd earlier claimed, and declare that this must be due to a poor economy or other non-file-sharing factors.
My question is: how can you rely on a poor economy to explain case (b), while blatantly ignoring the positive effects of a booming economy on case (a)?
Don't get me wrong... I download mp3s all the time, and quite a few of them are not legit. I think copyright is royally screwed up.
But I'm not going to play with the facts to try to claim that my downloading activities actually help the recording industry. That's just bullshit.
About Austin, TX's South by Southwest musician's convention, where the attendees were saying about the same thing - that the Internet is the least of the industry's problems. That big-box retailers and cowardly radio conglomerate execs are much bigger problems. IMHO, suck-ass music by canned pop thuglings and diva princesses are the reason people aren't buying overpriced major-label CD's - but the local and underground music scenes are doing fine. My brother works in a record store, and he said that their sales are doing okay - in the old catalog stuff, but not in the mew releases.
All I can say is I would love to have you give a guided tour of your collection. At 20 to 30 titles a month, you're practically an historian. And then there are probably the things that aren't bought but traded for.
Wow.
In particular, I remember /. screaming that just because CD sales went down while sharing went up, didn't mean that the sharing was causing it. I believe the argument was that quality of music was dropping, and that was why sales had gone down.
Maybe music quality has improved? Or at least, more people like the music being created...
After getting a credit card, I regularly buy their records over the net. Their music has also made me interested in other Irish music, which I buy (Dubliners, Clancy brothers, Christy Moore, etc. etc), most of which is unavailable in my country.
The bottom line is that i have spent a whole lot more money *because* of p2p, than had I bought all the songs I've downloaded, which I wouldn't have anyhow, because most of it isn't good enough to be worth my money.
Lemon curry???
Every time a song gets played on the radio, that's the loss of a potential sale. Why on earth would I buy a popular album when I hear all the best songs from it every morning on the radio on the way into work.
As long as I can listen to the radio for free (cost to end user) I'll just assume that music is free - after all - they give it away over the airwaves!
P2P is the new radio - it's advertising - get used to it! Adapt to it - make money off concerts perhaps, or writing music for films, or TV? Or why not be a true artist and not make a dime off your music, but work for a living to pay for your expensive hobby and idulgence.
There's more than enough recorded music created so that you could listent to new stuff all you life and not hear something repeated. Why should we pay for something "new" which is just old and recycled?
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
That doesn't quite make up for it though. I see plenty of things I'd like, but not enough to buy them. Taking them anyway, regardless of whether or not I would hypothetically have paid for them, were I required to do so (that is, were theft not so easy,) is still theft, as far as law is concerned. The difference here is that we -see- that they can make unlimited copies of an item, "at no cost." However, increasing the number of copies reduces the value of each copy; they have an interest in keeping the number of available copies down, and as copyright holders have the law-given right to refuse to make such copies, and control their distribution. The potential sales aren't directed at the people getting the music for free -- they're directed at other customers who, in the business model where music is artificially rare, would want to buy the music from the labels, and would need to so out of the limited available inventory. They're counting it as if they had N units in the warehouse, and each illegal download takes a copy from the warehouse, depriving some poor citizen of the opportunity to buy something. It's odd, but ... yeah. Scarcity creates value, and they control the scarcity.
is this not the way to go? i mean responsible downloading would be downloading unavailable tracks (like some live stuff or remixes)or downloading a couple of tracks off the album, and then buying it if you liked it, and wanted more.
in fact, i have 'discovered' several bands by simply typing their name into KaZaA and subsequently bought their cds.
if the BPI/RIAA/whoever get upset at people downloading whole albums, i an understand it, particularly if they would have bought the album. and that is the problem, they need to work out who is stealing by downloading an album they would otherwise be prepared to buy, and those exploring music by downloading something random they have never heard of before.
last year, i downloaded some Fountains of Wayne tracks, because one of my mates was wearing an FoW t-shirt, and i liked their name. i liked the music. so did my girlfriend, and some of my housemates. i bought a couple of their albums, as did a house mate, and we saw them on tour.
we would never have done any of this if i hadn't downloaded the original tracks.
can someone please explain how (at least in the long-run) i/we damaged the music industry by this horrific infringement of copyright?
Anyway, seriously, I find it disgusting that *they* can project sales and then complain when 50 Cents new CD doesn't sell 500,000 copies in half a year without *any* agency either government run or consumer run etc being able to find out if it was remotely possible that 500k copies of said example album would sell. On another topic, it really is ridiculous to pretend that if they project 500,000 people would be *interested* in *owning* a copy, to claim that if only 383,666 people buy the other 116,334 guys have pirate copies *and* all the 116,334 would buy original copies if no pirate copies were available.
The price here really is the issue. Not only the fact that it's GBP15+ per album, it's the fact that within 6-12 months it's often dipped to just below the GPB10 mark.
I don't think the companies realise quite how much the high prices are hated. The post-Christmas sales bring prices down to what most people are generally prepared to pay. if this wasn't true, the places wouldn't be quite so damn packed at the time.
With prices that high, the only way you're going to buy the album is either if you're a die-hard fan of the band or artist, or if you've already heard the album. 'Cos there's no way I'm spending over a tenner on a blind music purchase.
And currently the only cheap way of previewing music is by downloading from the internet. Certianly it's the only way to find out if a band's non-radio-played tracks are any good.
And even then, so many times I've held off on buying an album (whether I have it on MP3 or not...) until the price has dropped. if the price doesn't go down, I spend my money on a different artist instead.
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
...culling humankind of the genetically weak and infirm will probably strengthen the species as a whole.
But that doesn't make murder any more right or palatable, does it?
The ends do not justify copyright violation - although it may make the recording industry think twice about cracking down too hard on it.
Nah, that would mean they'd be thinking intelligently.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Conversly, the decline in sales over the last few years, especially in the US, could be attributed to a global downturn? Mmmm?
I started listening to Pink Floyd about a year ago, and now I have several albums and I like them so much that I listen to them almost all the time.
The first CD I got was "Echoes" - a double CD best of album. It was 20 pounds, and I was quite dubious about spending that much on it. I am glad that I did, but there have been other artists where I have liked a few songs but decided not to buy the album.
More recently I noticed that the Pink Floyd website actually has the entire album available to sample online, plus a few music videos. It's probably possible to rip the music, but it's so much easier to download it by P2P that it would be a pointless exercise. If the rest of the music industry got in on the act, they'd make more profit and have some easy statistics on who is popular too.
The point of all this is, not only do I have more respect for the band for making their music available to sample, but also that had I not bought their album when I did, then I would have bought it after listening on the website. I have also pointed other people to that site, and they've gotten into Pink Floyd too.
(It's also nice to possess a nicely boxed CD, and to be able to rip the music to a higher quality to listen to on my PC. And to support the band, of course!)
-- Eddie
I use P2P do download and evaluate various tracks. If I don't like them I delete them. If I like them and can find them in a store, I buy them. If I can't find them through any retail (internet or brick and mortar) outlet, I keep the P2P file until I can.
Who am I hurting?
Originally, radio broadcasters were not supposed to play records, because record companies thought that if people could hear the songs over the air for free, they wouldn't buy records. It's a stupid argument, and it's the same thing with file sharing. RIAA is upset because they can't drive up sales just by marketing, etc... the music actually has to be good now.
stuff |
The thing is that you can't prove a causal relationship between file sharing and record sales. Your local franchise of the RIAA will be inclined to state that actually a 12% increase was expected and the hence file sharing harms business.
I vaguely recollect:
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't.
Ernest (1st Baron) Rutherford (1871-1937)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Not quite. Radio stations pay for the music they send. I run a radio station, and we got about 20.000 potential listeners. For sending music we pay roughly a $2 per hour of music. If everyone who listened to p2p aquired music would pay something like this, i have no doubt they'd run napster themselves... 2 dollar might not sound much, but this is a small town, and if we were to send 24/7, we'd pay roughly $17.600 in royalties. Think about how many radio stations there are, and you will see how much money they earn on us :-)
For that reason, we've been toying with the idea of sending non-riaa'ed music on air. Letting "indie" musicians have their music braodcast for free, and we don't pay them either. Mutually beneficient. The local norwegian "riaa" was extremely sceptical when i asked them about this, and they didn't really beleive me that there are in fact musicians out there that don't register their music to RIAA etc for royalties. I've had a couple of dealings with these people as it's part of my job, and to be honest, they scare me a bit when it comes to their views on copyright.
Rest in peace Malin "looxn" Kristiansen. We miss you...
When iTunes first came out there was no iTMS (iTunes Music Store), I said to myself "Well this is a great program to manage music, now I need to get me some" It was begging me to fill it up.
Since I never used P2P services, I naturally started subscribing to cd clubs, buying them in large shipments at a time. Ripping became a nightly chore.
Then the iTMS came out and that Really got me going.
So I believe there are millions of Mac and PC folks like myself that got started buying music, just because of iTunes.
Apple hit the nail on the head with this new market. And they did it right the first time.
My own opinion on what the recording industry should do is this: Give Up Selling Singles.
Treat the single as an advertisement for the album. That's why you want it to be played on the radio and MTV and on TotP, right? You want people to hear the song, to like it and to want more - and then buy the album. So: release high-quality mp3s onto the net with no restrictions whatever (except maybe 'No Commercial Use') and positively encourage their trading. Make the rest of the tracks available from the same site on payment.
You'd lose some revenue from singles sales, but that revenue stream is dying anyway; this could help strengthen the real cash cow, the album.
It worked for iD Software - why shouldn't it work for EMI?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I don't believe record companies are afraid of decreased sales. I think they're afraid of us listening to what we really want to. I can think of many bands that i would've never heard of if i hadn't downloaded some of their music. I can definately not find any of it in the record stores i know. If record companies cannot make us listen to what they want us to listen to, their market planning won't work and they won't earn as much money.
I couldn't come up with any better sign....
btw, anyone else get the feeling that one or two AC posts (especially "Very Insightful") in this thread are actually the grandparent poster? I'm not saying it is, but moderators, please beware...