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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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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.
Listen now, ye yellow-livered one-eyed pirate scum ! Ye thought ye had em down, didn't ye ? Bu they're still rising, ain't them ? Ye can't keep them Music Empire down, can ye ?!?
Look at these numbers and despair, ye pirate scum !
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.
He's not neccessarily defending copyright infringement, he's just saying that falling into the habit of equating it with "theft" is worth avoiding. There's a good reason we have different laws for theft and copyright infringement.
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
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.
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.
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! :(
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.
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"
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.