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."

Comments

Peer to Peer Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slashdot spin

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Personal experience makes me say "Damn straight!"

[Mjlner]

Some years ago, I accidentally heard about an Irish band called The Wolfe Tones. I live in a country where they are totally unknown, so their records can't be bought in the store. P2P made it possible for me to download samples of their music. I was sold, and so was my girlfriend. We made a trip to Ireland just to attend their concert and, of course, buy their records. Turned out be a wonderful trip and a wonderful concert. Also turned out I spent a whole lot of money on that trip.

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.

Re:RIAA will counter....

[zokum]

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.

Re:Specific to Australia?

[meringuoid]

The singles market is held up by children, hence the dominance of manufactured pop acts, while the market for albums is older - Fifty Quid Man, as that article says.

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?