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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."
Is there any reason to think that this trend might be specific to the Australian music industry (for example because P2P music sharing could help with making making Australian music more well-known internationally), or is it reasonable to take this as an indication that P2P music sharing does not really undermine the commercial viability of the recording industry, worldwide?
-RIAA
But correlation is not equivelent to causation.. Maybe people are buying more albums for a different reason.. Economies around the world upturned in 2003.. Maybe that's important factor too..
Simon.
that each download is a loss of a "potential sale". That's why they always talk to congress about "loss of potential sales dollars".
The fact they won't admit that there are millions of casual listeners who may like a piece of music, but not like it enough to buy it.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
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
maybe the explanation is as simple as that: artists creating better music
Consumers are not just mindless fools who dumbly follow economic up and downturns: they are downloading more AND buying more CDs
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
I have purchased more CD's because of file sharing. I get to preview artists I have not heard, and dont get much airplay. With the high prices of disks in the UK its the only way to go!
The other reason for more sales would be online music shops that keep prices low. However as soon as you go into a high street shop the prices are rediculous for none chart stuff! You looking at 16GBP - 18GBP for a single studio album - this is the record industrys problem else where in the world OTT prices!
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.
Maybe the quality of music got better!
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???
The argument that p2p influences music sales either way misses the point. Consumers spend their money, one way or another. When times are hard, they spend less. When times are good, they spend more. If albums represent a good deal they will buy them. When music all feels shit, they won't.
The anti-piracy argument assumes that consumers have elastic wallets but this is simply wrong, and trying to say that p2p increases appetite for music is just entering into a falacious discussion.
The music industry should take an example from the movie industry, which is making record profits from DVD sales. Product, product, product. Make it amazing. Make it collectible. Make it rich. People _will_ buy it, when they can't.
Australia is a boom market for music most probably because the boom in house prices makes everyone feel afluent. Wait until the house market collapses, and wow! the music market will follow.
No news for Kazaa! at all, I'd say.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
But HTF can anyone claim that p2p is the cause?
I think the entire point is that to claim that P2P is causing increased sales is at least as defensible a position as the record industry's continual complaints over the last few years that P2P was the cause of decreasing sales.
It's actually pretty obvious from reading the article that the reason for increased sales was a decrease in prices, and a less pessimistic economy. People felt they were getting more value for money, and thus bought 8% more units (resuitling in a 2% higher gross after the price reduction was taken into account). But given that the record industry has been ignoring the fact that they were selling an overpriced product in a depressed economy, and have been blaming their downturn on file-sharing instead, it is perfectly justifiable to turn that argument around and assume that any increase in sales is attributable to the same force.
The world makes a great deal more sense if you don't go around taking everything you read literally.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
It actually refers to albums that have left the warehouses, not actually cash money sales.
An album could technically go platinum in its first week if they do a run at the factory of 50,000 (or whatever) and put them straight on a truck.
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 |
I believe the argument was that quality of music was dropping, and that was why sales had gone down.
You can't argue over taste.
I think a better way to express this is that the normal ways of marketing music don't promote enough product diversity. This is especially so here in the good ole USA, where unless you are lucky enough to live in a town with a plethora of college stations, the radio stations are own by a tiny handful of companies and have virtually the same format.
If most people aren't particularly interested in what is played on those stations, then most people aren't going to go out and buy music.
So, how are we, the silent majority, going to find music we like, and more importantly from the industry's point of view, are willing to shell out money for?
The problem for the recording industry is that they don't know how to market to the vast majority of people. Probably if you segmented their business, they make a tiny bit of money out of a fair number of songs, and a huge amount of money out of a small number of hits. They're focused on the hits, but the long term growth potential is in expanding the customer base for music. That's a lot harder.
P2p is a double edged sword. It really increases the market for music, but it undermines the revenues. Most importantly it kills the hit revenue model that's the industry cash cow. If I were to put together a solution for the industry to survive and grow, I'd get it out of the business of attacking its customers and do something like this: promote convenient online retail models like iTunes, and promote a healthy webcasting environment with a low cost of entry for webcasters. In other words, you want some college student in his dorm to be able create a hit webcasting service that will promote tons of your music, then you want his listeners to be able to buy that music easily.
This would be an overall win-win. Prices would drop, but volumes would increas so there was a lot more money entering the system.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When the economy is good, fileswapping increases the sale of CDs.
When the economy is bad, fileswapping decreases the sale of CDs.
Of course, you could substitute "herding unicorns" for "fileswapping" in the two sentences above and still arrive at the same conclusion.
But in every single one of those cases, the copyright holder made the CHOICE to release their products in that manner.
The problem with the most common, widespread P2P use is that people are distributing products without the consent of the rights holders, removing that choice from whoever holds the copyright on that work.
By all means, support those who make this choice as much as you can, but do not then turn around and TAKE other peoples work, who have not made this choice, and demand that they do, or you'll just keep taking it.
The record companies have a monopoly. They illegally collude to fix prices and control the market. Whenever that happens, people work extra hard to find a way around it. There is no sense calling these people criminals for wanting the music industry to be reasonable. That's the kettle calling the sugar black.
I'm sure p2p does cut down on the sales of some artists.
Those artists you hear on the radio or a club in passing, and think "hey, that seems cool." In earlier days you would have to buy the album to discover it is total crap and the artist is a talentless hack. But now p2p gets the word out before you get robbed. The record companies are all upset, because their whole business is putting blind people in fields of shit and asking them to find a rose. That is to say, they intentionally pump up one hit wonders to sell as many records as possible, but don't put as much effort into the whole album, and do even worse by most second albums.
It is in their interest to make money on talentless hacks, because while a talentless hack may be capable of producing a one hit wonder (usually with a longtime producer working with them on the track), they won't be able to achieve long-term success or the power that comes with it to demand reasonable percentages from the record company and creative control. Hence by having ten artists sell 10 million records a piece, they make more money than on a talented band with staying power who sells 100 million records.
It is a pump and dump but for music instead of the stock market. And just when they get the scheme nearly perfected, p2p comes along and lets people preview what they'll be getting in advance. At which point reasonable people pinch their noses and walk away from what the record companies would prefer that they buy.
Furthermore, those in the record industry that bitch and moan about the artists being robbed are a bunch of liars and hypocrites. They steal from their artists in numbers that p2p can never touch. They make it almost impossible for an artist to audit independently how many records they've sold, but inevitably when artists do audit (usually in a very limited area), they discover they are being paid even less than the lousy terms in their contracts. No part of this argument is about the artists: that is just a smokescreen for what's really going on.
It is the record companies' feces trade that they are worried about: they want to continue getting you to trade the money earned with the sweat of your back for fertilizer, meanwhile all their cows are starving in the field and they claim it is your fault for not buying enough sewage.
That business model, like all pump and dump schemes, eventually has to fail. Right now they are just trying to legislate a delay for the day of reckoning, while they can try to come up with a new scheme to sell us formulaic shit we don't want.
Notice that creative, independent, offbeat, artists invariably seem to make up the examples people use when they need to point to somebody who successfully leverages the Internet and p2p. Artists, in the grandest sense of the word, often can do very well in that environment.
When people can sample music freely, and be picky about the artists they will support, the music industry can no longer control the market. And that is what they are afraid of. So stop calling it stealing or copyright infringement. The only thing being stolen is the RI's ability to sell stuff people don't really want to hear (not after they've heard the good music out there).
If you took away this monopoly, instead of 5 gigantic record companies that fix prices and control the market together illegally, you would see 500 small record companies become medium sized. Smaller record companies benefit the consumer, because now there is competition. The cost of producing, promoting, and distributing has fallen way down thanks to technology, but the big record companies keep taking more and more for this service, both from their artists and the consumers.
own sites? A LOT Of bands these days have music samples, and videos on their websites, they let you sample the music on the CD's all you want, without violating their copyright and downloading the entire CD.
If you can't find samples provided by people who own the rights to distribute them, don't buy the music, and let them know that you didn't buy the music because they had no samples available.
Maybe that'll lead to more positive change than using a P2P app to commit wholesale piracy, which only fuels their perception that people just want their music for free.
There are constructive ways to seek change, and destructive ways to seek change. Wholesale P2P fuelled piracy is a destructive avenue to the change you, and all of us are seeking.