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Australian Record Industry Has Best Year Ever
Hecatonchires writes "ARIA (Australian Record Industry Assoc.) had their best year ever, but are fudging the figures because they run counter to their anti-filesharing arguments."
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It's nice to see this. What the fuck is wrong with the large record labels that they can't see past their own fat asses and USE the new technology? With the popularity of iTunes and other online music services you'd think these labels would be clamoring over each other to offer up something similar. Buy the album at the store for $14, or buy it online for $9 and burn the damn thing yourself?
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the post said that file sharing is helping sales. OTOH, it does suggest that file sharing can't be hurting sales that much. Like the white crow, this proves nothing, but disproves (or at least weakens) the ARIA's arguements.
#define DRM chmod 000
AFAIK no-one has ever argued that file-sharing helps record sales.
However it somewhat invalidates the common media point of filesharing HURTING sales. If sales are in their best year ever, then they're not being hurt too greatly by the sharing that IS going on.
This is kinda obvisous... the total music industry growth p.y. is like 10% (extrapolating numbers from 1988-1998 to now), but CD sales is up only 5% world wide. Of course file sharing is hurting them. Not that I care...
In my regular newspaper column I recently wrote about the phenomenon that is the bargain-bin music browser.
These are the people who spend hours pawing through the big bins of massively discounted CDs you see in the corner of many music stores.
These discs are often compilations or recordings that, for one reason or another, simply never sold at the full retail price.
Although the bargain-bin browsers will happily pay $1, or even $10 for these discounted albums, they'd never ever consider paying full price.
The only way the stores can clear them is to virtually give them away.
Well the arrival of P2P filesharing networks has produced the ultimate extrapolation of the bargain-bin browser.
These are the people who will download a track or an entire album -- but only because it's free.
They would likely never buy the album or tracks in question -- even if they did turn up at $5 in the local bargain-bin.
So do these people really represent lost sales to the recording industry?
No they don't.
A huge percentage of those who download a large proportion of the music found on P2P networks simply would never buy the music they copy to their PC's hard drive or CD writer.
For the recording industry to claim otherwise is, to use the politest term that springs to mind, disingenuous.
Yes, filesharing probably does have some negative effect on disc sales, but the recording industry have brought that on themselves by overstating their case to the extent that nobody actually believes them any more.
If it seems that way to you it's simply because crap music tends to be forgotten with time so you don't remember the older crap.
Stumble accross someones old record collection in a loft sometime and it will no doubt be quite craptacular.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Even the FBI has become involved. It says music piracy has become its third priority behind terrorism and counter-intelligence. A number of US Congress members who rely on the entertainment industry for campaign funds lobbied the FBI to spend more money hunting file-sharers and CD burners. So now CDs in the US carry FBI stickers warning of fines of $250,000 or five years in prison.
I sincerely hope they aren't expending much effort on chasing down teenagers with cablemodems. Given the fuckups at the FBI in the past several years, I would think that they have their hands full just trying to keep the citizens of this country from being killed. Unfortunately, I am never surprised at what money can buy these days.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Well, home taping obviously didn't kill music, Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman did. But that aside, the difference between then and now is simply that the record companies are taking a tougher line and are being allowed to do so by their tame politicians. The problem isn't a new one, but the "solution" is.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
If people are going to insist on analogizing it to something else, I would suggest TRESPASSING. If I put my foot in your yard, I've trespassed. But you still have your yard; you just aren't enjoying it exclusively.
I don't wonna stop here. I think, it's more like they build towers and then insist on charging money for looking at them. We are not even trespassing on their property, just enjoying it, because they've made it so wildly accessible. Their only argument is "if you don't pay us, who will build these beautiful towers for you too look at?" We are consumers, after all; what happened to our right to chose?
And there's a huge difficulty of a different sort here. The pirate is now an individual, and the "theft" is happening in the privacy of our houses. The whole idea of p2p is that there's no middle man (except the ISP, and they alredy washed their hands). To fight piracy effectively, they will need to tap our wires, to know what we are doing behind the closed doors. I hope you'll agree, they shouldn't succeed at that. I believe, the change is coming.
Pure and simple.
This is about spin and control. The record industry's profit/distribution/business model has been turned on its ear. They don't know how to respond, so they sue everyone in sight, bribe (oops! - "LOBBY") lawmakers. etc. All to keep the status quo while they figure it out. So far they haven't been able to. After all, digital distribution (MP3's etc.) have only been around for OVER FIVE YEARS ALREADY!! Besides, we wouldn't want the MARKETPLACE to decide, would we? God forbid another company be allowed to take business from them!See, the RIAA is sleazy and corrupt. They are a cartel. Five companies (soon to be four if they have their way) control something like 90% of the recorded music available for sale in the world. They like their monopoly. They want to keep their monopoly. Wouldn't you?
So, they lie cheat, bribe and do whatever they have to in order to keep the cash cow giving milk. If that means telling Congress that CD sales are down 10% due to downloading when the real reason is that they MANUFACTURED LESS CD's in order to keep the prices up, so be it. After all, the way they see it, you're not really lying, you're just SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH by witholding information.Besides, don't you think that Congress KNOWS what they're doing??!! After all, the politicians INVENTED SPIN!. Don't you think they know whan they're being spun? It's just that the spin comes with a nice bribe attached.
We have the best Government that $$ can buy and until they're voted out, nothing will change!... And don't hold your breath for THAT to happen! :(
But trespassing doesn't work as a decent analogy either. Because when you put your foot in my yard and then walk away, are you walking away with a perfect copy of my yard?
:-P
That's where this analogy gets sticky. Granted, yes I still have my original property, but now you have a copy of my property now too. While in this case it may not hurt me (since I'm not selling my yard), you are still walking away with something that isn't really yours.
Except in the case of music, the copy you are walking away with is something you should have payed for to get, regardless of whether there was an exchange of property or not. That is where this whole issue gets really sticky.
So it does border on actually stealing in my humble opinion. Copyright doesn't even have anything to do with it really. You're taking something that you can only get (legally) if you had paid for it.
Mostly playing devil's advocate here, because I personally don't like paying > $14 USD for 2 good songs and 13 filler tracks. If you want to call me a thief, so be it. But it's amazing how far people will go to justify stealing music. Just say you steal and move on. There's nothing to argue about and no one will judge you any different.
I mean no harm in breaking laws right? We've all gone slightly over the speed limit as well as jay walked.
An decent article, albeit with a lot of the same yakkety-yak -- but then suddenly, you hit the money quote:
Maybe it's the record industry that's getting a free ride from file-sharing - a massive marketing system that allows music lovers to get exposed to all kinds of music without the record industry having to pay a cent.
That describes my experience EXACTLY. If you're like me, you remember not too long ago when anytime you met someone in a band, you couldn't wait to ask them what they'd been listening to lately. When everytime you were at the book store, you rifled through the back of music mags looking at the What's Hot list. When you watched MTV late at night (when the format went off tight rotation) hoping to pick up some first-hand "insider" knowledge of whose star was poised for imminent ascendence. You'd go to the record store, buy a few CDs from the list you'd put together, buy a few more that you hoped would pan out, and go home. I considered myself lucky if, after all the advance work, I ended up with one out of three that actually made it into regular play.
Then, everything changed. In my case it started with Hotline. I noticed that in addition to warez, there were sporadic postings of music...and suddenly, a veritable flood. Mostly, it was bands I'd never heard of before. After a brief period of being annoyed at having to look harder for Bryce plugins or KPT add-ons or whatever the hell I was cruising for, I decided to check out some of these MP3s. It was like taking a starving Ethiopian to Royal Fork Buffet. I tried entire genres of music I'd never heard before. Electronic music suddenly made sense. Soon, I was arranging lists of sites that specialized in types of music I couldn't have even named a year before. As James Burke might say, it was The Day The Universe Changed.
Within six months, I ran across the early version of Napster. It was buggy as hell, but the idea of looking on someone else's hard disk to see what they were listening to was like the gift of Promethian fire. It empowered me. Instead of being a remora fish picking among musical scraps left over by people who "knew" what was happening in music, I started becoming someone who knew what was happening. My listening habits started diverging from, and then absolutely veering away from, the Top 100. For the first time, it became transparently obvious that mass music is a processed, focus-group-derived product like mass food or mass clothing or mass anything else. It's not that I felt snooty, just awakened...and for the first time ever, in command of what I listened to. I entered a golden age of enjoying music like never before. Now, I could go to the record store and buy CDs with a 90% or even 100% success rate, compared to maybe 30% in the old days. I no longer felt ripped off. The more I downloaded, the more CDs I felt like buying.
Bottom line: P2P is the greatest marketing tool ever devised for music. I have hit my forehead and said 'Doh!' about a thousand times over the last few years as I've watched the ham-fisted tactics of the RIAA, and their utter inability to change with, and exploit, the revolution in music. They should be getting fatter and happier than ever by seizing new technologies, and surging forward with the explosive push of free, ubiquitous marketing and feedback provided by P2P.
Instead, they are suing 12-year-olds and college students, and selling "secure" DRM CDs that won't play on your computer. They are flunking Business 101 not only by alienating an entire generation of customers, but BY TRYING TO DISMANTLE ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING FREE MARKETING GIFTS EVER BESTOWED ON AN INDUSTRY.
Nuff said.
Hmmm... I was just struck with a thought; what if the record industries are being rabid about piracy because they want to shift to a more advanced sales strategy?
I mean, if piracy increases sales of physical CDs, then it might be reasonable to assume that the first step in getting away from the physical-media-based distribution system would be to stop that which drives those sales. If the record industries are trying to impliment a download-based distribution system, it'd make sense for them to [persecute|prosecute] online piracy. After all, which is more appealing to the average consumer, downloading a song for free or downloading a song for a dollar/pound/yen/whatever?
If this is the case (and I make no claims that it is), then I can't say that I like the methods that have been taken (suing ISPs, suing impoverished little girls, etc.), but it would at least make the whole thing a bit more sensical/sane/intelligent, in my opinion.
(FYI, I have not read the article... yet, and it should under no circumstances be construed that I'm making excuses for the recording industries of the world and their lawyers. Quite frankly, I think I hate the bastards.)
~UP
Eat the Path.
From ARIA's own research But what about our research, I hear the record companies scream. ARIA paid a research company to survey music consumers. The survey results suggest there's been a 12 per cent decrease in CD purchases by people who are into file-sharing. The greatest percentage is with the under-17s - people who don't have much money. But the research suggests those with the money, the 45 and overs, are buying more CDs after file-sharing. Now that's a statistic we never hear quoted. It shows that thoes who can affored to buy CD's do buy more whilst those that don't have much money tend to buy less, Lesson to be learn't sell CD's at price all can affored. The Record industry doesn't seem to realise that for most people 15 is alot to spend on something that could be rubbish.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
My listening habits started diverging from, and then absolutely veering away from, the Top 100. For the first time, it became transparently obvious that mass music is a processed, focus-group-derived product like mass food or mass clothing or mass anything else.
So tell me again why the record industry crushing P2P is stupid? It's wrong and evil, but not stupid per se.
Freedom: "I won't!"