Slashdot Mirror
2003 CD Sales Officially Down 7.6 Percent
Lust writes "CNN is reporting that global CD sales for 2003 are down 7.6 percent, and points to 'rampant piracy, poor economic conditions and competition from video games and DVDs.' More grist for the RIAA mill on P2P? I just haven't heard anything new I'd like to buy... how about you?" It's also mentioned that "a strong second-half recovery in the United States, Britain and Australia... has raised hopes that the worst is behind the beleaguered industry", although "evidence of a full-fledged recovery is flimsy."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I don't mind pay 15 bucks for a new full feature movie release but I'm not buying another 1 hit wonder that has only one song that I like for something around 18 bucks and listen to it only once.
No there isn't going to be a recovery until their business model is revised.
rampant piracy, poor economic conditions and competition from video games and DVDs.
Hmm.. they seem to have missed "boring bands, unoriginal music and inflated CD prices."
Here's a free tip from me to the music industry lurkers:
Shrink-wrapping dog shit does not create a market for shrink-wrapped dog shit.
Think about that, act on it, then give me 0.5% of the net.
Trolling is a art,
Itunes is selling 2.5 million songs a week. The declining sale of CDs does not necessarily mean the music piracy is going up; it means there are also new means of selling music, digitally, and very legally.
I hate it when declining CD sales is automatically attributed to piracy. The way music is sold is evolving too (and the labels are getting their share don't worry).
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
> More grist for the RIAA mill on P2P
Not really. 7.6% is not that much, considering how many companies have moved to an online sales model. If anything this refutes the RIAA's claim that P2P has any significant effect at all. What kinda depresses me was the point in the article that the reduction of top acts helps to boost sales; that the reduction of variety means more concentrated gains in that particular market, is actually bad for the market in the long run, IMHO.
...the Clearchannel effect - the drivel gets all the radio airtime
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
In a new report issued this week, eight-track and Atari 2600 game sales are down. Industry leaders blame rampant piracy and MAME.
Riiiight. And the introduction of the Compact Disc had absolutely no effect on the sales of cassettes and vinyl. It was clearly completely due to the "file-sharing and CD-burning craze". Uh-huh.
In the US, a new CD is now $17.99, sometimes even $18.99 or $21.99. When I was in college 3-4 years ago a new CD was usually $13.99 or $14.99 at my local bookstore. I was at Borders the other day wanting to buy a new album (that I couldn't download!) and was blown away that they wanted $19.99 for ONE CD. Screw that, I'll search harder and find it online somewhere...
When iTunes first came out I thought $9.99 for a CD was silly, but now 50% off is starting to make sense... (Speaking of iTunes this study doesn't seem to take online sales into account...)
I think it's directly related to the fact that music QUALITY went down another 20% or so. Think Janet Jackson's breast will help sales, or will Justin Timberlake's musical talents sway yet another generation of gum snapping teens?
God, 'music' is the suck today! Either that, or I'm just too old.
Hey, you kids and your damn rap music! Shaddup!!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
- Lame new music
- Increased prices of CDs
I keep waiting for a law firm somewhere to offer "RIAA insurance": pay $5/month and they offer to defend you if you ever get sued by them.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It should be interesting to see if the DVD sales rose up. If Ive to choose between a live CD concert and a live DVD concert, I get the DVD. Dont you?
How an industry that makes so much profit can be considered a "beleaguered industry"? I'm sure the gas and cable industries are suffering heavily as well these days, huh?
I haven't killed a man since 1984.
Just not sold by the RIAA.
There are some great artists. I buy their albums whenever they appear in concert, at the concert. Then I know that at least a fraction of the money will actually go to the artist.
For example, check out Vienna Teng. Great music and even better live!
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
You know, I bet if you did a study looking at the increase of air play of songs compared to the CD sales you would see a decrease.
I for one may like a song at first, but when radio stations are forced to play it over and over (every hour...) I get sick of it. I'm not going to buy that CD anymore - thanks radio...
That would be an interesting study...
My sig left me for a younger user id.
An industry that has started a warpath suing children, the elderly, and many more of its potential customers is suffering from poor sales. Shocking!
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
If you go to the CRIA web page, you'll see that CD sales (and gross revenue, though not revenue from CDs) were up over the same month in the preceding year in both January and February. The CRIA is the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA.
DVD sales are way up in all of the months I looked at. VHS and cassette tape sales are down, which isn't too surprising.
Amen about there being nothing you want to hear available. I have 40 credits in itunes I need to use before the end of the month, and I haven't found anything good to use it for yet -- FOR FREE.
The other factor bringing down my music purchases, other than higher prices and a lower paycheck, is lack of quality. Most of what I listen too, you would never find in Best Buy or FYE. You're too concerned with "golden money makers" than with providing us with interesting original music. I understand the business principles behind trying to make a profit, but when you minimize your risk, you potentially minimize your return. Think of all the CDs in the past 2 years that you (RIAA) have released? I can't really name any that I've liked the entire CD, except for Coldplay's A Rush of Blood To the Head. One. Oh well, you may learn someday, and someday may be too late.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
I'm a big indie rock fan and I find this site to be a good break down of non-RIAA bands:
RIAA Safe Top 100
RIAA Safe Top 10 Alternative Rock
all based on Amazon Sales
With the increased high prices I have almost completed resorted to buying used. I can usually find great buys at amazon, ebay, or half. I seldom pay more than $5.
There is so much good music from the past that I haven't heard yet, why do I need to pay full price for the new stuff.
When I do buy new I try to do so directly from the artist.
Dear RIAA,
HAHAHA! RIAA, the music industry has changed! Technology has allowed greater sharing and therefore we don't need to go to a brick and mortar store to buy your crap!! Information wants to be free, it's everywhere!!! No laws will stop this!!! YOU are the thieves!
Yours truly,
Slashdot Crowd
Dear Congressman,
Due to recent changes in technology, American businesses are now looking overseas to cheap labor to perform what used to be my job. This is economical for them because of increased ability to communicate cheaply and ubiquitously over the Internet.
THIS HAS TO STOP. You MUST do SOMETHING to protect my job. EVIL corporations are taking advantage of Americans by using new methods and technology to their advantage. This is not fair.
Yours truly,
Slashdot Crowd
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Hilary Rosen, head of the Powerful Trade Organization for the $15 billion recording industry, is full of contrasts...*snip*
Fifteen billion?? May I please be next in line to be beleaguered???
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
How about a list of every other industry that's down 7.6% or more for 2003? I'm guessing music is far from the only one.
On second thoughts, never mind. The only conclusion the RIAA will reach by seeing such a list is that P2P hurts those industries too! AIEEE!!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
The rate of sales for music has been increasing considerably faster than the rate of population increase for many years now. It's entirely reasonable that their last sales values exceeded the amount of money that people really felt comfortable spending on music and that, as a country, we've cut back.
One of the things that a lot of people have been incorrectly assuming is that music sales should react proportially to the economy. This theory doesn't hold true because (even at $15/CD), CD's are something that people can afford one or two of in order to nurse themselves through the disappointment of (for instance) not being able to replace their failing appliances, or remodel their kitchen. It's a small enough expense that people use it as "brain candy", or as consolation spending.
The drop in music spending may just be because more of us are back at work now, and don't have as much time to moon over the music that we don't have time to purchase.
P2P trading continues to be a non-issue (and possible a net positive) in the music industrie's income balance, they're just too greedy to realize it.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
A look at the Billboard Top 200 is an easy way to figure out, at least on an anecdotal level, that popular music sucks right now. For the most part, it's the same old artists, singing the same old things within their same old already-established genres. It's the same problem with the video game industry that everyone always complains about -- it's a lot easier to go with established acts (or artists or licenses) than to risk capital on something new that has the potential to either suck or be incredible.
This general trend of homogeneity has really been brought to bear over the last decade, from what I can tell. Companies really like sustained sources of revenue...ok, yeah, that's a given and has been since the beginning. Companies need it to survive and to grow. But isn't it good to create some nice challenges so that the companies can grow?
Challenges, like, say, the removal of perpetual copyright? If, for example, Disney couldn't keep making money off of old cartoons, wouldn't they have to seriously start making up some new stories or at least go back to the children's section at public library and read some Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson?
In the end, it's all about how we the people want corporations to act in the context of our republic (both the United States and in the larger sense of the collective of industrialized nations). Do we want to give them carte blanche to not innovate? Or do we want to help them along by pushing them a little? Folks, from what I can tell, will almost always take the road that's easiest and offers the most return for the least amount of risk or investment. Sometimes you have to guide them down that road, or at least show 'em where it starts.
My 2 cents, anyhow...
Eventually, on-line music distribution will increase quality, as artists will focus on making a couple excellent songs instead of many lame ones.
The Raven
The 7.6% figure is for Global music sales. The article states that "Global compact disc sales -- the most often cited figure in discussing the health of the industry -- fell 9.1 percent in value in 2003, the IFPI said."
(Of personal interest to me, since I've <shameless plug>just released single on vinyl</shameless plug>: "Total sales of singles, including cassettes and vinyl, which have dipped significantly since the Internet file-sharing and CD-burning craze began in the late 1990s, fell 18.7 percent in value terms between 2002 and 2003." It should be noted, though, that quite probably the majority of independent record labels ' sales aren't included in these numbers: IFPI-related releases compete, possibly increasingly, with small independent labels.)
But the fact remains that everyone else likes the music coming out, especially young kids. You guys sound like old fogies--actually, you sound like my parents when I was growing up and they heard my music. Meanwhile, a lot of people DO like today's music, from the Strokes to Clay Aiken to Norah Jones to so on and so forth. But downloading is so easy and convenient now, today's youth don't give a second thought about it anymore. And that doesn't make what they're doing suddenly a-okay.
Yet, you people don't seem to care because you've grown accustomed to the convenience as well, and in order to remove the label of criminality, you've tried to brush it off on to the record label lobbying group that just so happens to be doing the *exact thing Slashdotters said they should be doing* a few years ago--suing individual copyright infringers.
This is silly. There are online stores now. There are services like iTunes. How many knocked-down excuses will people keep using to justify that they've got eMule down there in their system tray right now?
Artists willingly sign their contracts, and I find it hard to feel sorry for them when they shit on gold toilets, have antique car collections, and do movies all the time. Yet, Slashdot pretends they're fighting for the artist by ripping them off and not paying for their music.
What's amusing is that there is somewhat of a stigma when it comes to pirating games and apps simply because a lot of people here are programmers. Are you guys going to talk about "sampling games" when Doom 3 gets leaked a month early (as they all are now) and kids, college students, and people on high-bandwith connections pirate the fuck out of it?
If everyone here at Slashdot was a musician, the message would be completely different. What I find most amusing, however, is the double-standard pointed out in my sig.
But go ahead and play the "b-but the RIAA is *evil*!!! That gives me the right to pretend their copyright was magicaly transferred over to me to illegally distribute all over the place" game.
99% of the users on Kazaa aren't "sampling" those albums. Hell, on eMule they're just RARing up entire discographies now and sticking them online. I'd respect pro-piracy people more if they just admitted what was going on and that it was legally and morally wrong. At least I can debate your position logically because you know where you stand. But this bullshit "it's the RIAA's fault we're illegally sharing all their copyrighted materials!" mindset will never, ever fly.
I just read in McPaper (USA Today) that Americans, on average, are listening to less music. Something like 198 hours (down from 216). This is especially suspicious since the decrease is similar to the reduced CD sales number.
Maybe people *just don't like* the music that is being put out, and as a consequence, aren't buying and/or listening to CDs. Maybe they're out having lives. Maybe they are listening to live music.
Every time I see something like this from the RIAA, it sounds like, "our business plan isn't working! It must be a conspiracy! Piracy on the high seas!"
Whatever.
Maybe you should produce some music that we want to listen to?
Maybe you should make it easier to find music we *like*?
But you're missing the point. You and I aren't the ones the industry cares about. It's all about the kids and disposable income.
Kids want to listen to what's 'cool'. To them, MTV and the radio shows/tells them what is cool and then they share this information with each other to reinforce it. Why is this so important? Peer acceptance - something some Slashdotters who had trouble getting dates will not understand.
I can look back at them and say, "What sheep! Back tatoos, piercings all over your bodies, wearing pants that would clothe 3 or 4 immigrants do NOT make you an individual!" But all of them will invaribly tell you that they are being 'different.'
You know what a joke THAT is, don't you? Or do you? Think back in school. What did you do to be different and how different were you really than anyone else?
Personally, I listened to Black Flag and the B52's (ok, I was a bit eclectic), but did that make me different? No, it put me in a strange minority, but MILLIONS of kids listened to them!
Those that are truly different - the true innovators and pioneers of our time are shunned or ignored, plain and simple. You can't be too different after all, then you're 'wierd', right? If it could happen to a guy like Tesla, you know it could happen to anyone.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
For starters 250m/32B = .78%.
.4% of 32 billion.
Second, 2.5 million songs per week times 52 weeks = 130 million songs at $.99 each, or about
Third, $130 million spent on I-Tunes could be 130 million CD's not purchased at $15/hit (especially for the one-hit wonders they're publishing these days). Even after adding back the money for the itunes themselves, that's $1.82 billion in CD purchases, which is 5.6875%, which is pretty close to the entire decrease.
Although it is impossible to precisely determine how much effect iTunes has had on this number, it is really poor math (and thinking) to think that it had no significant effect.
Careful about criticizing other's nerdliness, for you bring your own failings to light.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
... of times that the music on a CD may be listened to? Is the listening supposed to be only the person who actually purchased the CD? Where's the line on using this stuff? How much more money do you want for copies of work that was done in the past?
I have a solution for the artists and distributiors, stop distributing completely. don't try to pawn off copies of work as something it isn't. Don't keep forcing people to believe that a copy is somehow all that valuable. In the olden days, ya, copies of anything were ridicvulously expensive in termsd of time and effort and materials to make, but today? GET REAL. Make your loot from day to day *working* live concerts ONLY,stop milking technology and BSing the people by recording and copying, and make all recordings illegal, then there won't be any conflicts or confusion, would there be? I say, put up or shutup. I will pay to enjoy being in the presence of someone WORKING, I WON'T pay for some vaporus copy of that experience. That's where I draw the line now. Any human on earth can make their own copies now with a pittance worth of gear, so that is where I draw the line, a copy is worth a PITTANCE. Same with movies, make those sorts of fictional representations be done completely live on stage, don't copy them to any media for redistribution. Same with television. Radio re broadcast. If the artist want to dilute their work by copying and distributing, then they can be happy with smaller amounts for a larger wider audience, by doing less work. Right now they want it both ways,sweet deal fopr them if they can manipulate the laws and media brainwashing mind control, big bucks for live honest work, big bucks for trivially copied media and the means to redistribute. sorry, it ain't worth it to more and more people because they can see reality.
When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the food and service, do you EXPECT to keep paying for the service, forever? I don't think so. Do some actual work, bring me some chow, and I'll pay you again. Virtual representations of real live work are COPIES and as such not "worth" what a live experience is, and never will be from here on out given our level of technology now. that's reality. too bad, expensive copies are the buggywhips of the 21st century, un needed, un wanted, and they WILL be ignored, more and more, except as curiosities for museums.
As long as they make up their minds I don't care, I don't download any music or videos, zip, nada, nothing, I could care less about it so I don't got a dog in this fight, but I can reason a little, and there ain't a hardly piece of this "official copy of work long done awhiles ago" stuff worth more than 2 cents to me. I've enjoyed live performances in the past,paid for it, that's cool, but reproduced fictitios representational copies... really... is just..so so, I could care less, it's not even worth unfilled hard drive space to me.
I think artists (and sports stars and movie stars) are tremendously over valued except during live performances, and with the new ways of copying, they are seeing what their non-live performances are really worth, about zilch. Live performance, equals work, day to day w.o.r.k like everyone else does, reproduced is a dilution,a chimera, it's attempting to get a lot of expensive somethings (everyones money) for the same labor, and in todays world, tough noogies. You can't keep pulling that trick.
That's my opinion anyway. And I'm sorry if that is semi offensive to anyone, but really. This is the year 2004, making copies of anything audio or visual is EXTREMELY easy to do, it's just not worth that much money, it's not even worth a bucka song. It's worth maybe a buck a cd, and that to someone to lazy to make their own copy for a dime.
I know I can't keep making "royalties" off the work I did last week, work as in "sweat outside doing heavy nasty dangerous stuff", if I want another check, I need to do the same amount of work. That's how 99.99% of the planet earth makes their living, too bad most "artists" and their le
"b-but the RIAA is *evil*!!!
Yeah, it is. So? I never said anything about copyright, but you bring up a good point.
How long should a copyright be good for? You know there's this Elvis revival going on in Germany right now - know why? They have a reasonable 50 year copyright law. All of his works are starting to come out in compilations and it's free and legal to do so.
I'm not suggesting that breaking the law is the answer. I'm suggesting that CHANGING A BROKEN LAW is. The 55 MPH speed limit was broken by many (were you a nasty-wasty law breaker yourself?) That law was found to be stupid and fairly unenforceable (especially out West), and so it was changed.
I'm a musician myself. I've personally watched the struggles of others who have tried to make it. I also know that 99.5% of anyone who signs a contract with these music company bastards commit themselves to being BOHICA'd.
With the self-serving record labels and the RIAA re-writing copyright law every decade it will be a miracle if ANY music ever again sees the public domain in this country. Don't think that you can take a superior tone with me or anyone else just because we don't agree with that fact and want to 'fight the power', so to speak.
If you can't see how one-sided the whole industry is, I would suggest that you report back to your corporate overloads and request more instructions on how to deal with people like me.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I do believe that slashdotters are from all earth citizens... the bunch who are nearer to understanding the problem.
That is however a problem in itself. Do the average Joe or heck.. do even RIAA or the firms they represent, understand the problem? not at all...
I am currently a postgraduate student in Economics, and I am writing my dissertation (Thesis) on all of this. Several top schools (Chicago/Harvard) can't even agree by using postgraduate economic measurements if there has been ANY impact of P2P on CD sales.
What are we to do then? The problem is, as I said, a monstrous amount of misinformation. The all time cliche that we fear what we don't understand is specially true now. Two centuries ago Luddites smashed machines in England to *prevent* technological progress from displacing artisans... and of course, the government supported them... until they needed the machines to combat famine and other economic shocks...
Is piracy wrong? of course. Are we, users of kazaa and bit torrent, to blame? partly... the other persons responsible to that are the record labels themselves that didn't provide a business model before Napster came along. Had they understood the market.. they would have invested on it ages before and we would be enjoying new technological progress on music.. and later movies and software...But no.. they decided to sit on their comfortable sofas and watch the eternal kingdom of CDs.
But businesses that forget to watch technological trends are just too many. And we never learn. Of course a natural answer is to use the law or some other means to savage whatever is left of what they don't want to believe, but definately is, a sinking ship... I can safely bet that if Kodak could sue digital camera users they surely would.. that is certainly less expensive than investing tons on R&D and assesing the new tech threat.
Our children will still be complaining of how a company should stop protecting its old business model instead of promoting innovation. It always happens.
The answer lies in the record labels themselves.. the CD market is a gonner... they have to provide new ways to entice users to buy content... Did anyone care to buy the same CD even if they had an old vynil record? of course not... Did anyone complain in buying the same DVDs again in order to update your VHS libraries.. of course not... and that is because there is extra value on the new technology... (nonlinear search and extra features anyone?)
Come up with a new idea to sell content, *that is your job* spend on Research.. and customers wil surely come in droves... just see the i-pod...
Just my 2 cents...
I am never buying a CD again. Ever.
The RIAA regularly insults my intelligence, and if I want music, then from now on I'll just make it myself.
- Internet Sales
- Cassette Sales
- Total Sales
- Number of new CDs produced
- The Economy
I think that once you add all those up, you'll find that there was an actual INCREASE in profits.CDs is a medium that is slowly being replaced by mp3s & other digital music players. I would fully expect the sales to drop. Soon, it will be the same as vinyl records.
Get over it. Move on. The world keeps turning even if you refuse to come along.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
I have purchased more CDs this year than in all other years of my life combined. I attribute that to three things:
sig != null
Well, almost no impact. According to a new study, "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero". Monday's NYTimes (free registration) describes the study, in which two economists analyzed file-sharing and sales data over a 17-week period in 2002, using "complex mathematical formulas" to determine that "spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales", and estimating that "it would take 5000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy". Naturally, some organizations disagree. Also, according to the RIAA's 2003 year end numbers [PDF], sales of CD singles were up 84% from 2002, while overall revenue shrunk from $11.55 to $11.05 billion... which makes perfect sense when you consider economic tendencies since 9/11.
"Timberlake helped boost the business in the second half of 2003."
Is that a fucking joke? That's the problem right there!
Here are the reasons I'm not buying as much:
1. Um, the economy is in a slump, stupid. I'm not spending as much on anything I don't need because I don't want to be caught flat-footed in a layoff the way I was after the crash.
2. There hasn't been much new music in the last year that I've liked. What I have liked, I actually have bought.
3. I'm so disgusted by the RIAA that I've made a conscious effort to spend my spare change elsewhere. Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Borders have been the primary beneficiaries of this shift. They have these neat-o products called books that provide days and days of quality entertainment for less than the cost of a 74-minute CD. (Lately, for example, I've been rocking out to Ursula K. LeGuin in the cross-platform paperback format.)
4. CDs are still too expensive. For $15-$20, I expect to see the band live. In fact, I've been patronizing a lot more of the relatively unknown bands that roll through town because they're not regurgitating the same focus-group schlock as the big-name "artists".
Since four items is a bit much for the RIAA to absorb, let me summarize: "I don't have much money these days, your products suck, and I don't like you."
Please note that I did not say, "I am downloading MP3s happily," though that's what they will surely hear.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Why are these numbers reported year after year without taking into account the shift amongst comsumer dollars between DVD, CD, video games, etc?
So if CD sales are down 7% and DVD sales are up 10% is it a crisis due to file sharing or is it just consumers spending their money where the find more value for the dollar?