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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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Is it in any way related to the recent broadband deployments and the legislative changes in Australia? Could any Australian posts some statistics of P2P networks traffic in Australian backbones? It could be interesting if that could be used as an argument that file sharing (or "piracy" if you will) might be actually good to artists all over the world. Very interesting indeed.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Seems like the record industry has hedged it's bets here.
It figures that it can make the most money by selling CDs, riding the P2P wave of free marketing, and then making money out of suing file traders.
It would make no sense from the perspective of their bottom line to endorse piracy... to them it's a free marketing & settlement cash cow!
Maybe they figure that there's more money to be had in doing things that way, as opposed to embracing the new technology? Worth a thought....... especially if they're making more money than ever.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
What the RIAA and the MPAA and their foreign counterparts don't understand is that people are less willing to spend their money on crap. Look at Gigli, where the movie industry blamed movie go-ers who text messaged their friends that the movie was bad. Or the latest Tomb Raider movie, where they tried to blame the latest Tomb Raider video game. Consumers are simply not willing to waste their money on things that suck.
The same is true with music. I for one prefer to download the entire CD to listen to all the tracks. Most online music sites have the first 30 seconds of each song. I really don't feel like I know enough from those 30 seconds to decide if I like the CD. I can usually decide that I don't like the CD. Think of how many people get upset because there's the won good single on the radio and the other tracks are all crap? I will happily go out and buy a CD if I feel it is worth the cost. I have bought more CDs because I listen to the whole CD and decide if I like it enough to buy it.
I'll argue it.
On Saturday I bought two albums solely because I encountered songs on Kazaa. Wouldn't have looked for them otherwise.
One point does not a curve make, I know, but hey, it's a valid datum nonetheless.
....I haven't found any music really worth buying in the last couple of years. I have even stopped downloading music now. What's the point? It's all the same - stamped out of the same studio - with the same sound.
I am still listening to U2's The Joshua Tree (which I bought years ago) and Crowded House. The only thing lately I have heard that was interesting was Ben Harper - even then, only a couple of songs were good.
I mean, sure....Post Modernism is ok - but the same Hip Hop crap about some American cultural "issue" is getting really boring.
It's all the same, but I am supposed to keep forking out AU$30 per album. I don't think so.
The cynical answer is that P2P is never about artist royalties or piracy it's about the fact that one P can be the artist and the other P can be the customer with no sign of ARIA or RIAA anywhere between the two. These big music industries are not fighting for the survival of music and musicians, they're fighting for their own survival at the cost of artists and consumers.
Want a music example? The singles taken from Evanescene's recent album are good, but not brilliant. Once I heard the whole CD though I bought it. No ads, no video clips, no radio play was enough. Until I could enjoy it on my own terms I didn't know if I would like it enough to justify the purchase.
You can't just look at the volume of stuff downloaded and say that because every track that's downloaded isn't subsequently purchased that there's something immoral going on. I don't download commerical music off the P2P nets, but if they're anything like the rest of the world, there's a hell of a lot of crap out there that isn't worth the time it takes you to workout how crap it is.
Could you please explain how this proves that file sharing is hurting them?
Firstly, you'd need to define exactly what you mean by "growth". Amount of revenue, profits, people employed? None of those imply that the growth should be equal to the number of CD sales. For example, the profits might well be increasing by 10%, while the CD sales increase by 5%. All this means is that the industry has been able to increase their profit margins. Not that piracy is hurting them.
In fact, the logical conclusion to draw from your data (if it is correct) would be that the music industry is finding alternative revenue streams apart from CD sales to drive its growth. Either that or they're cutting their costs or increasing the price.
To get a more accurate picture, you should look at the development of the CD sales over time, and preferably compare it with the development of the customer base. If you see that the sales growth is going down as file sharing increases, you might postulate that file sharing is hurting the industry. But of course that would not prove it, there could be other reasons for it, such as the fact that most of the "music" sold these days is utter crap.
-Sunny
Well, a $20M increase would be substantial, and would require that to be explained to be plausible. Thus, by Occam's Razor, though both X + $10M and X + $20M - $10M are plausible, there is no reason for me to assume the second scenario. The $10M is easier to attribute to inflation, normal fluxations of the market and to marketing than $20M is.
#define DRM chmod 000
This is pretty impressive considering that Australians pay more for CDs than most people. A$30 which is about $22 US. File sharing just stops people being sucked in by hype, you don't have to rely on the word of journalist, who can't write a bad review, for fear of losing freebies, and the one radio friendly unit pusher that's on an album full of crap.
How are you *ever* going to determine the effect of P2P on record industry revenues, using an unassailable and repeatable methodology? No one has even tried to demonstate the marketing difference between on demand download of 128k mp3 content and analog recording of radio broadcasts. How would you construct such a study? In the end it is all hand waving and opinion, and the only thing that matters is record industry profits.
Chances are industry profits will follow the economy. The more disposible income there is, the more people will "vote" for their favorite bands. All I have to work with is anecdotal evidence: my sister bought 15 copies of the Elvis Costello CD for her friends for Christmans because she "wanted to support him." But my sister has money.
My own anecdotal experience is that the only time I bought any CDs at all was during the heyday of Napster. I bought all kinds of stuff because I was reminded of and found what was good. (Also I had money during the heyday.) I also had money before Napster, but I did not buy CDs because I got burned too often.
What if it turns out that P2P actually stokes interest in music and ultimately increases record sales more than radio broadcast does? It is ENTIRELY possible that this is the case. All of a sudden the industries are going to do this huge spin....
This is a similar analogy to how some bars in the area around Wrigley field were charging patrons to watch the ball game from their roofs where they could see it. The MLB/Cubs sued them claiming that they were somehow stealing baseball from them. In the end the bars were forced (mainly by the expected cost of the litigation) to settle and pay some kind of licensing fees to the MLB/Cubs. I don't think this analogy applies to music but it definitely shows the extent that entertainment companies have turned "intellectual property" into something almost indistringuishable from real property in terms of end result of all these laws and the cost of defending against frivolous actions by entertainment giants/monopolies like the RIAA and MLB.
If indeed it is illegal. Here in Canada, we can copy CDs all you want - we pay a tax on every blank CD that's distributed to record labels, and in exchange we have the legal right to copy CDs. Not that anyone seems to make a distinction around here, the "it's theft" people still call it theft...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Posting anon for obvious reasons:
My friend used to work for one of the big 2 record companies. He wasnt particularly senior, but he wasnt a complete chump either, think middle sales [ie keep the stores happy] kinda role.
Every friday his boss would give him about $100 AUD from petty cash to go into the bigger record stores in the City [the way the charts work is that the more popular a store, the more weight each sale has in the charts].
He would be instructed to buy maybe 10 singles of the cheesy artist said large record company was trying to plug to bring them up the charts.
The funny thing is, when I had this conversation, its one thing to assume it happens, but its another entirely for it to be completely confirmed. And its not just 1 guy, his entire department was in a similar chart-pumping scam paid for by said record company.
I always asked him what the 18year old behind the counter would say when a mid 20's guy would walk in and buy 10 of "Cheesy teen pop star latest single".
"oh its for my daughters gift bag for her birthday"
Look, anybody can spin of any bs to prove or diprove a correlation between piracy and music sales. Some might even try to use economic theories and models to prove something. But, think about it for a second. If you didn't buy music before the proliferation of mp3s, and if you pirate mp3s, you not impacting on sales. If you did buy music before the proliferation of mp3s, and if you pirate mp3s, you will probably still buy music. The factors that really impact on sales are the percieved quality of mnew usic and the income the groups of people who buy music earn.
It is worth noting that Copyright is not an intrinsic right, but rather, a government granted privilege. Arguments which focus on how "piracy" is a violation of an author's rights are typically trying to push their point via pathos persuasion (i.e. invoking pity or sympathy). These are colloquially referred to as "crap arguments."
Of course, the definition of "intrinsic rights" is debatable; I believe they include the right to private property and freedom from coercion, and nothing else.