Slashdot Mirror
The File Sharing Report
An anonymous reader writes "In July, Slashdot posted an article about the file sharing experiment, which was a database where users could report items they've purchased as a result of file sharing. The author has completed the experiment and written a report outlining the results. He offers the philosophy that file sharing is a result of the industry's failure to meet the business models demanded by today's consumer, and provides many suggestions to the various industries on how to take advantage of the market emerging from file sharing to generate revenue."
Study incase of slashdotting
What about all of the files that these people continue to listen to, but don't delete or buy legit copies of? How much of their music do they actually own? My friends like to tell me that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so downloading it doesn't hurt anybody. This may be true in some cases, but I think most of the time people just decide that they wouldn't have bought it post download.
...and the reason that I'd, uh, consider downloading a movie - ADS. I *HATE* going to the theatre, paying $10 to see a movie, and having to sit through three or four commercials before I can watch a movie. I just paid $10 to see the movie (which will be full of enough "product placement" as it is) - I don't want to see ADS too! It becomes so much more tempting to download since the movie industry is making it obvious that they're trying to squeeze out every last dime.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
I almost never purchased music before file sharing--in a typical year I would buy one album (and that was because I would get a gift certificate to a music store on Christmas.) Because of filesharing, I was up to trying out allofmp3.com when I heard about it--and since then I've purchased 10 albums in the last few months.
But how are you supposed to make an educated decision without downloading it? ;-)
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
my problem with an experiement like this is that only people who actually bought stuff after veiwing/listening to it through file sharing are recorded here. What about all of those people who don't buy their movies after they download them, even though they enjoy them? Not that I'm supporting the RIAA or MPAA in any way, but people are still getting a free lunch at their expense. I suppose that their revenue does go up from file sharing, but will it be that way forever? If file sharing became more accepted, would people still go out and buy their CDs and DVDs after downloading them off of various file sharing programs?
Theory of flight?! I'll teach you the theory of fist!!
"file sharing is a result of the industry's failure to meet the business models demanded by today's consumer"
This is true, but the music/movie/computer software industries are unable to grasp that concept. They are so consumed with greed, so consumed with an unquenchable thrist for more money -- even when they are already taking in record profits -- that they believe there is only one way to do business:
An iron-fisted, totalitarian control of everything, in a world where there is no such thing as "fair use".
Their thinking is so clouded by a fog of greed that they can't even begin to grasp the idea that selling a good product at a fair price will bring in more money than all the lawsuits and copy protection schemes combined.
There is demand, and demand creates market.
And when there is complete disregard for the investments of the companies that worked to make the supply, there is bankruptcy and mass unemployment.
The television industry is obviously benefiting from the consumer's ability to download a few episodes online.
It is doubtful the industry would complain about "a few episodes."
Making the media available in a much more timely fashion may increase revenue.
Agreed. Entertainment companies in particular are the undisputed champions of foot-dragging when it comes to the requests of their markets.
There is a significant market of users who would download software should they find it useful to them, however these same users refuse to pay for software that won't run on their system, is poor quality, or misrepresented.
There is also a very large group of users who refuse to pay for software at all, no matter the price or the quality. Oh, they'll download it and make full use of it, but they will also categorically refuse to contribute a single dollar to the purchase price.
Quality must be paid for. This is no less a fact than any of the other statements in this argument. The economy depends on the ability for artists, producers, retailers and all of their vendors, suppliers, etc. to invest time and money and make a profit on these products.
If there is no demand (demand requires sales) there will be no supply. If there is no money, there will be no products.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
* For better quality recordings
* For a medium they can easily watch on their TV
* To avoid lengthy downloads
* To own the complete set
* The medium became available
This will not apply with the advent of savvier customers who own a DVD burner (for ripping and creation), the spread of digital tv, and increases in bandwidth. It is feasible to download a high quality episode or two now, but full seasons at high quality are still too large -- but not so out of reach once your connection speed is quadrupled in coming years.
- * Allows them to preview high-quality, full length songs in the privacy of their homes
People make these demans about $15 cds, but there are software packages out that that cost $500 plus where the same demand applies.* Gives them time to let the music grow on them
Alias has understood these demands and released the PLE (personal learning edition) where people can use an impressive (slightly crippled) version of their $2,000 + software package.
If Adobe would get the message it would be great to have decent learning versions of their software for free.
Sure, maybe I should cut him some slack, since he's just one guy collating the data. But maybe he could cut me some slack by gathering resources commensurate to the size and nature of the sample.
I'm not sure I look at it as a failure on ANYONE's part. In general terms, the problem is simply this: in the past, Intellectual Property of any form (be it books, music, etc.) at least still had SOME natural element of "scarcity" about it, since its distribution was still limited by natural factors, such as printing expenses, logistics and transport expenses, etc. These factors made it nearly impossible for information consumers to re-distribute intellectual works.
Nowadays, however, the Internet has finally broken down even this barrier completely, to the point where we can now distribute intellectual property to the entire world with only a few clicks of a mouse, at virtually ZERO cost. At this point, the ONLY way we can now make intellectual property "scarce" or have any real economic value, is by trying to limit or deprive people of "natural rights" that they otherwise would have.
There are STILL two classes of people in intellectual pursuits: those who create information, and those who consume it. The sooner people realize this, the better. It is high time that we start accepting the idea that we MUST limit the "rights" of consumers if intellectual property is to retain any value at all. Information is may be easy to distribute, but anything that is truly valuable to people is NOT by any means easy to create or find. If we are to make it worth people's while to create music, art, databases, or any other kind of intellectual pursuit, we MUST come up with a way to limit the ability of information consumers to re-distribute such things on their own without payment to the person to created the information.
Well, I do think the music industry needs to find the online equivalant to the listening station at the record store. Find a way that people can listen to a an album once, so they can see if they like it. This is dificult to impliment, obviously. I don't have a technical solution myself, but I know it needs to be done because the market demands it.
Without that side of the situation also investigated, this "research" is pretty much a bunch of useless self-selected self-reported anecdotes from people who - let's face it - have plenty of motivation to exaggerate how commerce-friendly their activities are.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Interesting report, and after reading it it seems to me that it was well done and the result may be valid, but the RIAA doesn't care. It's not just about the money, it's about control. Consider that the **AAs are organizations that produce nothing.
They do however control everything they get their greedy little hands on. File sharing isn't just a threat to them because of copyright violations, it's a threat because the media is distributed beyond their control. I'm sure the idea of any piece of content flowing from the artists to the eyes and ears of the public without first passing through their gates is a nightmare for them. After all, with today's technologies, who needs a **AA ?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
... and the more popular songs ...
That's not true, it may have taken me a long time to find it but I found a copy of Nasty Magnus (a count basie tune that almost no-one has) when the song is impossible to find anywhere else.
That's all it is... we used Napster because we were cheapskates, not because of some failure by the entertainment industry. If you want legitimate and convenient music downloading, go use ITunes. The solutions exist... you have no more excuses.
So please, be honest with yourselves... there's no moral high-ground in filesharing.
Yeah and once they find that perfect way of making it so you can only listen to it once that's how they'll start selling things...
/whines make all those albums that have been recording in very high quality analog or digital available as 192kbps/24bit surround sound dvd-a stuff? There's like no dvd-a's out there. If alkaline trio's record label put out re-releases of their best stuff on really high quality dvd-audio discs I'd be in my car right now to buy them... Give me something cool to buy!!! Something I can't just download for free!
now for a little redundant ranting...Tapes, cd's, minidiscs, vinyl albums... its all THE SAME thing.. a little different in quality or size or portability... But very similar to each other.
And on that note why dont they at the very, very least
Has there ever been a time when you were listening to something and you were like wow, I wish I could turn the other instruments off and just listen to the piano here, or just listen to the singing there, or just listen to the background vocals there... Why dont they make some dvd-a discs that let you do that? That'd be *COOL*!!!
Or make it so that when you buy a disc it includes a code that lets you go to the web and...guarantees that since your a buyer of this disc the band will let you ask them a couple questions which they promise to respond to.. Or they will grab their digital camera, take a pic *just for you* and send it. I'd pay a few extra dollars on top of a cd's usual cost for that, and I think any big fan of a band would too...
Even better would be that you dont *hafta* pay, but if you go to their web site and enter the code, you get the ability to pay the band a few dollars directly, for that one time specialty (that way the band gets the money instead of it being filtered through retailer, distributor, label, etc).. I'D BE ALL OVER THAT SHIT!!!
Instead we just get some cd-audio disc thats the same exact thing as I can just have in my hands without having to move in 5mins by using bit-torrent...It's not a moral issue here people.. Its a common-sense issue.
If mcdonalds sold a pasta dish that was as good as the olive garden, and was an exact copy... Yet offered it for half the price and delivered it to you for free... well shit... it might be a copy but damn.. thats some convenience... If corporations are allowed to make decisions based on economics not morals.. then I get to make decisions based on economics not morals when I'm dealing with corporations... fair.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
What about it? Unless they stole the CDs to get those rips, it costs no one a penny except the guy who bought the hard drive and the bandwidth.
How much of their music do they actually own?
Unless they are a music publisher, none of it. You think those CDs you bought means you "own" that music?
You bought a CD. You can sell the CD. The CD only happens to contain the music - scratch it so it doesn't play, then see how much you can get for it.
Now, where there is no tangible good, there is no "loss" and no ability to deprive others - and, therefore, no ownership. As someone who just lost about 40GB of music to the brain-dead mandrake partition manager, I can personally attest to this - the "loss" was entirely my own.
My friends like to tell me that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so downloading it doesn't hurt anybody. This may be true in some cases, but I think most of the time people just decide that they wouldn't have bought it post download.
I'm sorry you missed this, because that's the whole freaking point!.
Think about that part again...
It seems to me the RIAA/MPAA/ETCAA need to come to some sort of compromise now on how they're going to accept and compromise with P2P. For all of its plusses, P2P technology is not great yet. The downloads are usually very slow. It's hard to find everything you want and so many items use Windows Media Player and its ability to take you to websites that automagically download spyware. In other words, it's not perfect for users.
Yet.
When this technology becomes rock-solid -- that is, when P2P means fast, good, non-malware-downloads -- THAT'S when the *AA will realize their nightmares.
This _is_ coming. They should really stop putting their fingers in the dyke and work out a compromise.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
No tangable loss my ass. The recording and production cost a LOT of money. Studios, equiptment fees, producers and engineers salaries, insturments. Actually, the biggest part of what you pay for a CD goes to all the acts that fail miserably. Big hits have to pay for all the big flops. They decide they wouldn't have bought it, but continue to listen to it. I said that sevral times. If you listen to it, decide not to buy it, then never listen again it's different.
Something I feel a lot of people have forgotten is that, before copyright, authors wrote books and songs, poems and music and never got paid. Then, the printing press came along, as did publishers. Copyright came into being to help out authors, and publishers faught that, but then jested that they owned works (that were previously public, just not easily copyable).
Nowadays, I go onto Suprnova.org or shareaza, and I can find millions of different works, and I always wonder how many of them are still under copyright, of if this vast library of data will ever be opened up to everyone. Sure, it's illegal, but not necissarily immoral. Everyone seems to think corporations have a right to profit, but nobody ever wonders why corporations have an such an insatiable thirst for money that they'd work to digitally, or physically, enslave people.
Frankly, if mickey mouse wasn't still under copyright, as well as nearly every other single great american book, novel, movie, ect, I'd change my tune some. Companies have a stranglehold on information nowadays, one that the design of the internet is facilitating the destruction of. The MPAA and RIAA are about control, they are cults worshipping the false god of money. What is the best way to make money? Enslavement. If they were to innovate and change their business models and be constructive to society, would they then be worshipping money and making as much as they might be able to if something like the Induce act passed, or copyright was indeed extended forever?
I look on P2P apps, and I wonder what they'd be like without infinite copyright but a more logical system in place. Can any of you greedy idiots imagine that? Every single movie ever made, home video's, pictures, games. Bands from 50 years ago could become top hits today. Want to learn calculus? There are already over 20 titles on p2p apps, but there could be 100. Convert a schools book budget into the computer budget; every student gets a laptop (not even a new one, an older P2 with 386 megs of memory running win2k or linux).
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I have avoided making purchases in spite of the fact I used to spend - literally - thousands of dollars a year on records, tapes, CDs and DVDs. Through most of my life, in fact, because I'm one of those "artsy" types who likes to have lots of the good stuff around. You think I don't miss my Smashing Pumpkins collection? My Alice Cooper discography? Sgt. Peppers?
You think it doesn't suck boycotting these motherfuckers? You really think none of us are making sacrifices? You think I can't tell the difference in sound between the MP3 rips available most places and the CD? I wish these motherfuckers would pull their heads out of their asses and get it together to the point I didn't feel like a traitor to my ethics (not to mention my Constitution) when I entertain the notion of giving them my money to replace the tangible items I have lost.
Most of the time you can find 30 second clips on Amazon or CDUniverse, even for small bands. I can see downloading copies of songs from bands that you cannot find any legit means to sample, but stop using this bullshit excuse of "oh they're just sampling" to justify most peoples' use. They don't delete the music and they keep listening to it in most cases. One of those little inconvenient logical twists is that you can also argue that many people wouldn't have bought the album anyway, because with Kazaa, et al. they don't have to.
The reaction of the people I lived with at my dorm when they saw that my music collection was not only legit, but that I had almost as many MP3s from my used CDs as they had taken off of AudioGalaxy was just... shock. I'm not rich, by any stretch of the imagination.
And you know what the irony of it is? Many of these "kids who couldn't buy them anyway" were driving much nicer cars than my 11 year old Honda Accord. It's nothing more than a bunch of rich brats who don't want to spend $10-$15 on a CD so that they can upgrade their beamer, at least around here. I just got Draconian Times by Paradise Lost in the mail today from Amazon's used products market. It cost me $5 before shipping and handling for a total of ~$7.50.
I have even more contempt for the RIAA than most of my geek peers because unlike them, I actually own all of my music that the RIAA wants to control. I didn't get it off of a file sharing network, I bought it either from a store or from the iTMS. That is also why when I bitch about those bastards that older people will actually listen to me. File sharers are free loaders, people like me have paid our dues to the RIAA and are getting shafted anyway.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
You know, I accidentally hear music all the time. The radio plays, and my neighbors play their stereos loud. In the office, people play their cds and mp3s.
I also feel really bad for the RIAA. They are just losing so much money to my unauthorized listening. So I send them money. First, I tried to count the songs and send them $0.10 per listening, but it got overwhelming.
So, I started just sending my pay check directly to them. But then I got kicked out of my apartment and lost my job because I never washed my clothes.
But now I get an unemployment check and a welfare check, and I just send these directly to the RIAA. The poor guys, they're really hurting these days.
It's getting colder outside now, but I'm warmed on the inside knowing that the executives at the RIAA are getting their due and are no longer being harmed by my illicit listening activities.
And here's the cool part, we can all do it!
Here's the address to send the checks. I always include a note apologizing for taking out the cost of postage. I know I'm hurting an artists, but I can only do so much.
RIAA
1330 Connecticut Ave N.W., Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036
Or make it so that when you buy a disc it includes a code that lets you go to the web and...the band will let you ask them a couple questions which they promise to respond to.. Or they will grab their digital camera, take a pic *just for you* and send it.
Even better would be that you dont *hafta* pay, but if you go to their web site and enter the code, you get the ability to pay the band a few dollars directly, for that one time specialty (that way the band gets the money instead of it being filtered through retailer, distributor, label, etc)
Bands that self-promote already do this kind of thing. At least one band with a pretty large following (Einstuerzende Neubauten) has a website with a reasonably active message board, and when you pay your 30 euros or whatever it was, you get access to the parts of the board where the bandmembers will answer questions. Despite being a band with a reputation for strange, noisy music, the members are all pretty nice and do answer questions pretty regularly. You also get access to live video feeds of their rehearsal sessions, archives of the rehearsals, and a CD or DVD (or both depending on how much $$ you want to fork over) sent only to people who paid for that phase of their music (effectively a year or two membership). At live shows the people who support the web site can get camera passes, and they've been nice enough to set aside someplace after the shows where you can hang with the band and other supporters (they play places that hold a few K people, and there are maybe 50 "backstage").
Most indie bands that play small places are fairly accessible, too. They usually have a merch table set up and you can buy their stuff (sometimes at negotiable prices). It's usually run by a friend of the band, or they just sell the stuff at the front of the stage themselves after a show, and you can talk to them a bit. I think most people I know would feel a little weird asking you to just donate a couple bucks online without giving you at least a download, but plenty of indie bands offer complete tracks for free download. They then hope that you'll shell out the $10-15 for the CD, and then come see them when they play your town.
Fairplay to the author - that admission of bias was early on, and upfront. However:
Without the author giving stricter criteria here, one is left wondering if data that did not fit with the authors thesis was 'questionable' - it certianally would fly against his expectations, but that does not make it nesecerally invalid. Granted, given it was on here, there was probably a crapflood from the trolls that was justifiably deleted - but a reader cannot be certain it was just crap that was deleted.
There is also a serious flaw in premise with the study.
The latter quote is somewhat opposed to the former. If the value of a film is ephemeral, as the former implies, why do people purchase it? Both cannot be literly true.
The discussion of TV shows suggests there there needs to be a way for people to preview the shows, before purchasing, in order to drive sales. Doesn't the broadcasting of these shows on TV count?
From my reading of the report, the only thing I can draw from it reliably is: that some section of the people who download media later go on to purchase it.
That's not a strong conclusion, and skirts around some far more interesting (although much harder to answear) questions, such as: What proportion of illegal downloads lead to a sale? How many people would have puchased something if they could not have downloaded it, and how does that vary? [0]
In short, I don't feel anymore informed about anything after reading this report.
[0] For example, I think that highly marketed items (e.g. blockbuster films) and essentially not-marketed items (e.g. music from some unknown band) would show a difference here.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
...should take a look at web comics.
Seriously, there are literally hundreds now, and quite a few are well drawn, intricately plotted, creative and imaginative. They publish weekly or more, for free or for "busking" style donations, on the open internet, with no DRM. Some artists make a living that way. Many more do it as a hobby. The number of comics out there just keeps on rising.
Surely this is a strong enough counter-example? Even with zero "business model", art would flourish.
If corporations are allowed to make decisions based on economics not morals.. then I get to make decisions based on economics not morals when I'm dealing with corporations... fair.
wow, I just wanted to re-iterate this. If i wasn't busy whoring my project I would make this my sig. Really, it is one of those things you read that kinda give you the shivers becaue they are so friggin right.
P.S. check out Crackpot They are really good, on an independent label and give away songs for free hehehe.
No tangable loss my ass.
No. See, loss means something that you once had, and now don't. For instance, if you had a pony, and it died at some point, you lost that pony.If you sung a little song that you thought might bring you the cash to buy a pony in the future, but everyone "stole" your song before you could buy the horsemeat, well, you didn't "lose" the pony - you never had it. As for the song, well, you were gambling a bit. It is hard to say that me and my buddy flickering flashlights at someone else is equivalent to stealing from you, and fucked if I know what you wanted with a pony in the first place.
Learn to make money from your "IP". The trick is, it isn't what you think it is - you make money by sharing it. I have. It rocks. If you can't, well, there's a long, well worn history of people who can't. Try starting with "Gutenburg" at the Wikipedia, and if it doesn't sink in, try "buggy whip".
I forget what 8 was for.
You don't get a house built and then just pay the workers for the material. That would be stealing.
This is a singularly bad comparison when dealing with IP. To build a house, you need to hire workers and buy materials FOR EACH HOUSE. When selling copies of a book or record, you pay the author or songwriter/artist to create the work, and then per unit for duplication costs.
In the case of the house, once you get paid, that's the end of the contract between the workers and you. In the case of IP, once the initial costs of paying off the author/artist are recouped, YOU CAN STILL PROFIT FROM THE MATERIAL, assuming that there is still a market for it.
So why are the publishers and recording studios (not to mention the movie studios) complaining, and what exactly are they complaining about? They're complaining because they can no longer recoup their costs in the same amount of time that they used to, and that running up their advertising and promotion tab does not deliver the corresponding boost in sales that it once did.
To illustrate, in the movie industry, the rule of thumb is that a movie must gross 3 times its production cost at the box office, IN ORDER TO BREAK EVEN. If your movie cost $100 to make (not uncommon, if it is a large production with stars and directors pulling in $10-$15 million a piece, with special effects), P&A (prints and advertising) at $40-60 million, it will need to take in AT LEAST $300 at the box office to be considered a success (because the studios only get half of the box office - the theatres get the other half, nominally anyways.) Break-even is good because there's always the ancillary markets (paytv/cable/satellite/DVD/syndication) to deliver future profits.
So what is the solution to this? The model needs to change - either the market for their product isn't as big as they think it is (meaning they need to scale back promotions, increase per-unit pricing), or they need to relax their timeframe on ROI (return on investment) - something that is hard to do in cases where the producers are using borrowed money to to push an act, or sell a movie, they need to lower per-unit pricing in order to expand the market (I have no idea what the demand and supply curves are like for music/movies/books), and compete against alternatives, OR they need to find new ways of repackaging and reselling content to different markets.
To illustrate one way of selling old material, look at Baen Books. There's a lot of old paperbacks that came out years ago that Baen is repackaging into "Mega Book" or omnibus editions. Not only is Baen filling a market need (because a lot of this material has long since gone out of print), but they are providing e-book editions in addition to the dead-tree hardcover editions. The authors of these works got paid a long time ago, and now, they're getting paid again.
Contrast this to record companies, who agressively push new acts (which are expensive, bland, and short-lived), when they're sitting on a gold mine of existing material that can be repackaged (compilations, licensing), for both CD, radio (I cannot, for the life of me, understand why record companies didn't jump on the idea of broadcasting theme stations using streaming media, and start cutting the radio stations out of the loop), and digital (ie, iTunes.) This is bizzare, because record companies made money hand over fist repackaging their libraries first for tape during the transition from 33rpms to LP records, LPs to cassette tape, and cassette tape to CDs. Why stop now?
Going back to the house labor vs. materials argument, hiring somebody to build a house for you is completely different from buying a mass-produced good. You're not dealing on a one-to-one basis with the laborer, but buying something someone produced in mass quantities, speculatively relying on the market to buy them. If more goods are produced than there is want, is it stealing when people decide not to buy those goods at the same prices that the prior buyers
Not even close. The longer a theater runs a particular movie the more of the box office they get to keep but even after weeks the studios still get over 90%. Movies are loss leaders, for the theater, that they use to get people into what is really a popcorn store.
"...repackaging their libraries first for tape during the transition from 33rpms to LP records, LPs to cassette tape, and cassette tape to CDs..."
Actually 33s and LPs are the same thing, but you're right about them selling the same thing over and over on different media.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
wow, I just wanted to re-iterate this. If i wasn't busy whoring my project I would make this my sig. Really, it is one of those things you read that kinda give you the shivers becaue they are so friggin right.
Yeah, it had the same effect on me too. It kind of summed up some vague thought that's been lurking at the back of my mind, and gave it form to rampage through my conciousness.
In fact, as I don't have a project to whore, I will make it my sig.
You through? The tell me what makes it "their music" - and who "they" be? The record execs? Surely you aren't arguing that - those guys couldn't invent their way out of an inflatable pool.
Here's a sub-120 character version: *Ahem*
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
HELLO! Anyone home, there? Haven't you heard about the 10,000 plus live concerts on www.archive.org? What about commoncontent.org, or our site, SONG STORM? What about using gnomoradio.org to get at a world of legal music? And, believe it or not, you get to do all of the above stuff you mentioned, right now, today. Those Independent Artists are all out there on the web. Go Get 'EM! . . . .
and stop whining.
Tom