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South Korean Music Retailers Dying
terrymaster69 writes "According to this Reuters feature, 95% of South Korean music retail businesses have failed in the last year. 'While South Korea is not alone in seeing a downturn, the drop has been greatly accentuated and particularly deep because of the country's high-speed Internet access and a youth culture that uses some of the most sophisticated gadgets available.' Is this really a problem or just a natural progression?"
the industry chose litigation over innovation...
i think we know how this one ends...
All the torrents you could want.
Music retailers are middlemen. They add exactly no value to the merchandise they sell. So when you make distribution cheap and easy (like buying direct on Amazon, or Itunes, etc), OF COURSE the middlemen are going to suffer. Thus is the nature of structure unemployment.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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in my town, the old horse & cart transports have died out too. Is this because of high-speed road access and a youth culture that uses some of the most sophisticated automobiles available?
Or is it just because there is a better way of doing things?
Old industries die and new ones come along. Of course the dying industries aren't happy about it, but the only way is forward...
Here is South Korea artist still make a good living, I guess they just have to get there money from somewhere else.
Concerts, performances, etc. etc.
Mozart never sold a single record in his lifetime, nor did Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, etc. etc.
if your pants fit well, it's not only because of the pants
"About 95 percent of music retail businesses in the country have failed in the last five years."
"Since the launch of these sites, domestic CD sales have nose-dived by nearly 50 percent."
And they come from a credible unbiased source.
"It was two years ago when Seoul music store owner Jang Kyung-hee"
Personally, I'd like to see percentages of CD sales broken down by speciality music stores, big box stores (whatever is their equivalent of Walmart), local online shopping malls, and foreign shopping malls (such as iTunes). There are many factors that could be affecting these stats.
Let's see I can:
1. Get in my car, drive through traffic to get to the mall, find parking, and then go to my retail music store.
2. Once there, I can manually browse the racks for a while in hopes that the cd I want is there.
3. If there, I can now buy it for $14
4. If not there, I can ask the salesman to order it for me, or just come back next week.
5. Drive back home, through traffic, and put said CD in my player. Hopefully it will work also on my computer without any DRM scheme in the way.
OR....
I can
1. Not leave the house, and sit at my computer in my bathrobe.
2. Search for a song online, from as many bands as I want and know that they're there. And only get the songs I want, not being forced to buy the whole album.
3. Download said music, in a fraction of the time it would take to drive anywhere.
4. Listen to it on every one of my music devices
5. Pay or not pay for it as I see fit.
Hmmm... I'm thinking this new-fangled music download thing goes in the "trend" category.
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The
sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into
account, the sooner people will start making money again."
-- Bruce Schneier
From TFA: "These days, cellphone handset sales are the biggest source of profit for us," Jang said.
So they have realized.
But then: ``the future of music retailers looks particularly bleak since they also face cut-throat competition from online shopping malls.''
Well, looks like their business model is too last century. That's how the cookie crumbles. Innovate or degrade.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
People listen more and more music through small portable [mp3|ogg|wma|whatever]players, and not directly from a cd player anymore. Thus cds need to be converted to a format that can be listened to. With copy protected cds that is impossible, or at least harder than downloading. The cds aren't usable anymore, so they're not bought.
In high tech countries like Korea and Japan, this is felt first. In more countries this effect will be noticed soon, I expect.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Although the Korean retail business is miniture in comparison to Japan's (page 13 of this document), you've got to consider things like the ring-back, or caller-tune market (explained here and here) which have quickly grown into a $100 million market, showing that if you move in tune with technology you can make profits...
I mean that seriously too. Pretty much all the studies that have shown that downloaders don't buy more music were sponsored by the RIAA or the companies doing them had it in their best interest to get results that would make the RIAA member companies happy. Whether the results are accurate or not is irrelevant, when there's potential for bias you have to look at them as possibly incorrect. On the other side many of the folks who have found the opposite are sometimes motivated to want that result, or at least the RIAA will claim so. In some cases they're right, in others they're not but it's hard to always know which are which so you have to treat most of those as possibly incorrect.
What's that leave us? I bunch of wasted time to produce studies that we have to be skeptical of. Frankly we'll never really know the answer, we'd need alternate universes/timelines to experiment in to really come anywhere near proving it either way. Even then I wouldn't be surprised if we could prove both camps right, but it'd only apply in those alternate universes/timelines.
What IS definite is that music sales are down, downloading is at least steady if not growing and lawsuits flying right and left have had no real effect on those download numbers. Frankly it should be obvious to everyone that something is going to have to change to fix this. Perhaps compulsury licensing is the answer, perhaps something new we've not heard of is (DRM isn't going to stop it though), but whatever the answer is pointing fingers and trying to place blame (on both sides) will not help find it. Granted the RIAA seems to be the worst offender here, but /. alone has its share of "information wants to be free, no one should pay for music" supporters.
It'd be nice to see everyone to just sit down and find a solution, unfortunately the RIAA is probably the least likely to take part so a solution is likely still far away.
Good god, how awful of our loyal customers to abandon our stores for the same product sold cheaper and with less hassle elsewhere. Let's hope the government bails out our failing model of selling.
So the answer is simple, make it easier and cheaper for people to buy in your store than online...or face bankruptcy.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
- in a store, where they might not carry what I am looking for, or the CD I want is out of stock, where I have to ask the store clerk for every single CD I'd like to listen to, and where those same clerks often are distinctly un-knowledgable about music.
- or, on the Internet, where I can buy music legally by the song (and at a better price as well), where they pretty much carry everything on-line, and where I can browse to my heart's content without leaving my house?
It was bound to happen, and it's only natural that the first business to be affected is the one dealing in stuff that is essentially non-physical. I think other retailers must be beginning to feel the on-line competition as well... on line purchasing is way up for physical goods suchs as toys, clothes and electronics, and these are all purchases taken away from physical shops.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Mozart never sold a single record in his lifetime, nor did Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, etc. etc.
If you want to go back to the patronage model, please, feel free to stump up the money to do so yourself.
You might want to learn how classical musicians were paid. Although it sounds like you might be surprised to find out that yes, indeed, they were paid.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
If thats natural progression, then outsourcing is a natural progression too...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
People want music to be free as in speech. I don't think that there are many people who are opposed to paying people the cost of developing some form of information + reasonable profits. The problem is that it is forced upon them. The cost, hassle, and risk of paying, and of restricting freedom afterwards, exceeds the value the creator gets.
Unlike material assets, which have value by themselves, copyright is a government imposed monopoly, created to ensure that creators of works get an incentive to create above those who merely distribute. However, now there are also too many greedy middlemen(RIAA et. al. members), and the total cost paid by the users of the information is far in excess of the costs of production, plus reasonable profit. Governments should therefore be stepping in to ensure most of the money goes to the creators, and that copyright monopoly only lasts until the creator receives the cost of production plus reasonable profit.
X-Has-Sig: yes
Follow up: a better link to Coutaz's comments. Basically he says that concert audiences are growing, a large number of them are young people, they buy CDs at concerts, yet sales at stores are falling; this is because the big guys are not interested in marketing classical music. I'd say, let the big guys die. Except that they're sitting on warehouses of classic, irreplaceable recordings by departed and living icons of the 20th century, and if they die, a large fraction of world culture dies with them... The same is true with jazz. Harmonia Mundi stores in France (which stock other independent labels than their own too) have some excellent jazz, but unfortunately a very large fraction of the most important jazz recordings of the 1950s and 1960s are controlled by four or five big companies, even though a lot of today's best players are under small, independent (often European) labels.
What "value" do you get from a record store except for touching the plastic? You can see the art, hear samples (can't always do this at a record store), get poignant recommendations (I haven't seen a record store in years with more than one knowledgeable employee outside of college genres), and a cheaper price online. The only thing I haven't seen replicated online is the arrogant hipster at the counter scoffing at you because you're not buying some obscure Pavement bootleg. Oh wait, that's called a message board.
It's great that you like shops, but when it comes to music, "shops" are an anachronism.
Yes, it sucks for them. However, the problem with all this "sympathy" that's going around is that people start believing that they somehow deserve to be saved from their failure and start supporting the kind of laws (e.g. INDUCE) that turn a free society into a police state. The reality is that market forces (i.e. supply and demand) will prevail, regardless of regulation to prevent it, but that it's very possible to destroy society in the process.
In other words, sympathy is dangerous.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and not just gloating? The RIAA what this guy's saying loud and clear. They know what they are (middleman) and they know they're largely unecesary now. But so what? It's 2004 and us here in the US still have an Electoral College, right? Those of us in the US know those middlemen are busy figuring out how to screw us, and so far they're doing a damn fine job. They bought up mp3.com, and shut down successful bands that weren't in a hurry to sign nasty contracts (way too lazy to look that up right now, and I'm sure it's all 'alleged' and crap, but there where several band that got taken off mp3.com w/o reason around the time of the buyout).
Oh, and they do nasty stuff like witholding support from Rob Halford's solo career so he'll team back up with Priest (and make them lots more money). Then there's King Diamond, who's got a successful album but can't get money to tour. He's blaming mp3s, meanwhile not notice who's really fscking him over.
So you'll forgive me if I don't cry a river for these guys. Maybe I'm mistaken, and the South Korean industry are all music loving saints (dountful, but stranger things have happended). Meanwhile, I'd say good riddence, but I'm a pessimist and I don't think they're going anywhere.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Something a lot of the rich techno geeks on this forum forget is that not everyone has a PC (I'm speaking generally , not just about Korea), never mind broadband. Just because YOU can download a whole album in 5 minutes onto your top of range PC then download it into the iPod mummy and daddy bought for your birthday doesn't mean everyone has that option. For some people a cheap CD ghetto blaster is as good as it gets and I know some people who still listen to tapes.
So how about some people move out of this bleedin edge mindset and realise that not everyone on this planet is part of the wired generation.
While this may be true, are you seriously suggesting that a digital copy of music recording (a string of zeros and ones) is a thing ?
I don't know. Are you serously suggesting that anything which can be represented digitally is NOT a thing?
I'm not sure what's more frightening: DRM and copy controls, or the public attitudes that make them necessary.
Governments should therefore be stepping in to ensure most of the money goes to the creators, and that copyright monopoly only lasts until the creator receives the cost of production plus reasonable profit.
Just wondering... what do you earn?
Whatever figure you reply with, I'm willing to bet that it's not "reasonable" profit. I'm, in fact, sure that you're overpaid. The government should step in and make sure that you're paid less - after all, I certainly don't consider what you get paid to be reasonable.
The "they're making more money than I want them to" argument is really really stupidly lame.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
You must be living in a dream world. South Korea is widely known to be the world's leader in p2p filesharing. It only makes sense that the content middleman industries would suffer as a result of that, copy protection or not. Why pay for what you can get for free, especially when the practice is so commonplace that it's not considered "bad"?
Unless you can show that a higher percentage of South Korean CDs are copy protected compared with North America or Europe, you've got no argument.
501 Not Implemented
People want music to be free as in speech. I don't think that there are many people who are opposed to paying people the cost of developing some form of information + reasonable profits.
Hell no.
None of the guys who I know who are downloading music from internet is doing it as an expression of the desire for the free speech.
They do it because they don't want to pay for it.
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We can go back to the patronage model. In fact, unsigned bands already use it! Their patrons are the fans who pay to see their concerts, buy their T-shirts, and/or donate to them via their website. It's distributed patronage, but patronage nonetheless. Which makes sense, really, considering that back in the day there were no free distribution methods to get music to the masses like there are now.
Besides, there's also folk music and street performers -- it's not as if we'll somehow be deprived of culture, even if every professional musician on the planet never made another cent.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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Why? There is nothing inherently wrong with patronage model, its merely different and more appropriate for arts then the "assembly line/distributor/widget sales" model. Unlike the latter, the former does not require treating information as it were physical property with all of the logic/legal nonsense that approach produces (all the way down to ownership of DNA sequences). Instead, artists/scientists get paid and the resulting art/science/information is for all to share. The only thing to work out is the mechanisms for patronage. Remember, art is not business or "industry" (a most annoying lie). It is a way for an artists to express himself/herself. The commercial side-effects are just that, and might not occur at all in many cases, it is no accident that many artists before this kitsch-mass-production nonsense were indeed working at other jobs. Ever heard of a "starving artiste"? I cant believe people have become so brainwashed by the media moguls to believe otherwise.
That's a great succinct response to "information wants to be free". I'm gonna remember that one.
Its a stupid answer to a stupid statement. Information cannot want anything because it is an abstract, inanimate concept. By responding that people want "things" for free to this nonsensical statement you add additional layer of stupidity by assuming that information is a "thing" (implying an object that can be bought/sold).
This is more insightful than it is funny. As long as I'm not directly hurt by X, X is an innovation and A Good Thing(tm). When X becomes harmful it quickly becomes a problem.
/awaits to be modded troll/flamebait
A fun exercise left to the reader:
1. Substitute X = filesharing
2. Substitute X = outsourcing
The business model is only failing currently because moral standards are failing. Show me when copyright infringement is near zero AND sales are still falling, THEN I will agree that the business model is failing because of its own merits.
I have a feeling that my feelings are likely felt by many Koreans and people just about everywhere. That feeling is that I just ain't paying $18 for a CD. It isn't WORTH $18 to me to listen to the VAST majority of music out there. It's simply overpriced. Instead I'll listen to the digital music channel I get as part of my cable subscription, the radio, or I may even soon get Sirius or XM radio as well.
I love music, I listen to lots of it, but I just can't bring myself to believe that $15 - $18 is a fair price for a CD of music, by ANYONE, I can count on one hand, maybe both, the number of CDs or cassettes (or records) that I own that I would listen to and think "hell yeah this is WORTH $18" and the rest are simply worth less and most if I had to buy them AGAIN for the retail price (that I paid for OH so many of them) I wouldn't repurchase them, no way.
I can go buy "most" new movies for $14.99 a few go $19.99 but as a rule of thumb I can pick up a movie for about $15 or I can rent it for $2 (actually I use Netflix religiously). This, to me, is a good enough deal that I buy quite a few movies, and rent quite a few more (via Netflix). Pirating movies to me is an absurd thought, why spend hours and hours downloading a crappy copy when I can just Netflix it? The same for music, if I could pick up a CD for $7-$9 I wouldn't bother pirating it it'd be WORTH it to me to get the pretty insert and a "real copy" of it. Alternatively I feel like 99 cents per track of music is a bit high too, your average CD is around 10-15 tracks and that makes some CDs more expensive to buy online than in the store, I've yet to buy a single song of online music, and probably won't unless it gets cheaper. When it hits about a quarter per song, maybe 50 cents, then I'll probably buy into it. Hey it probably never will, and I won't buy any music online, life goes on I suppose.
I put a "personal price point" on music at about $8 per cd. I hop on Amazon.com and pick up used CDs for $2-$7 all the time, I've bought dozens and dozens. I'll PAY that for a CD rather than pirate it, gladly. I support the artists by going to their concerts, and by listening to their music and by telling others "hey check out..." but I'm growing increasingly pissed off at the price of CDs and I haven't bought a CD off the shelf in... hmm 2 years now? Maybe more.
I for one will shed nary a tear to hear that the RIAA and the "big music" companies are hurting, evolution happens to us all. Better things come along, new ways of doing things, faster, cheaper, ways of doing things, and you adapt or die. Hello RIAA, meet the Dodo.
--- www.f-theocean.com
This statement is not only irrelevant (information is not a "thing" and thus cannot be private property and thus being "owned" and thus gotten for "free") but also quite revealing of your attitude towards the universe: everything in yours has its price. Libertarian, are you?
But the problem lies elsewhere.
There is a fundamental problem with copyright law applied to digital media. Copyright law is supposed to promote the arts, and in doing so, increase value for everybody -- artists and the public alike. It does this by granting a limited monopoly to the right of replication of the art. This encourages people to be creative.
(Note - IANAL, but I believe it should not allow artists or labels to "own" the music, just the right to copy and distribute the music. This is an important distinction; in the former case, the "owner" has many rights in addition to distribution.)
The problem is this: with modern technology distribution and replication are essentially free, but copyright law requires compensation for every copy, and publishers have kept that per-copy compensation relatively high. This generic problem applies to all kinds of information -- books, music, software, etc. It artificially restricts the amount of wealth produced.
In pre-internet days, there was substantial value in the physical product of books and CDs. The physical manifestation of the information is no longer necessary. That should have made prices decline, but mostly they haven't. Sure, buying an album through iTunes is cheaper than buying the CD, but the price difference is relatively small. And a lot of things (books, especially) simply are not available, or are only available in crippled DRM-encumbered formats.
Since media duplication and distribution is now cheap, it is easy to "create" a huge amount of wealth by giving everyone cheap (i.e. free) digital copies of any book or album they want. The drawback is that the artists and authors not compensated for these copies.
But really, should they be paid for every copy? If copyright is meant to benefit the public by promoting the arts, there must be a balance between compensating the artist and promoting dissemination of the art. In the past, the cost of physical media was at least comparable to the compensation, so this wasn't an issue. Now, the compensation is the only cost, and the balance is gone.
One possibility is to make digital copies "fair use." People will still buy CDs and books, and the authors can be compensated from sales of physical media. It obviously isn't a perfect solution, and I'm sure better schemes can be devised, but I think that the general idea has merit.
Copyright should benefit the public. Its purpose is to do so by granting limited compensation to artists and authors. However, the public can also benefit from cheap, free information flow. That was not technically possible before the internet, but it is possible now. Current copyright prevents that free flow and reproduction of data, and that does not benefit the public.
Copying information doesn't interfere with anybody, it doesn't destroy anything, it doesn't take anything away from anything.
That's why [ /me puts asbestos suit on ] capitalism is the best system for most "normal" goods and communism is the best system for most types of information.
Yeah, I said it, the "c"-word.
BTW, there are many things that are public or "communistic" in almost any country. Take the road net for instance - those goddamn communists allow just anybody to use them and they use taxes to build and maintain them. Wouldn't it be much better to have private road owners collect fees for using roads?
Or take police or military. Also public or "communistic".
There is no one-size-fits-all economic system. For most entities, the capitalistic system fits best, but there are a couple of entities where puplic just works better than private.
The Soviet Union failed because they tried to force the communistic system on everything. The USA better watch out that they don't make the same mistake in reverse.
Ideologists are morons. No matter if they are blind communists or blind capitalists.
Pedantry is the only modus operendi in dealing with legal scams like that of "Intellectual Property" or music "industry". Their entire base is a maze of skillfully crafted mis-directions, false definitions and lies.
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Either you agree with the notion of property rights or you don't, but it's ridiculous to think that there's any difference between "intellectual" property and "physical" property. Programmers think that the latter is harder to steal, but most street criminals (who don't know who to use a computer) would think the former...
---
If, due to government regulation, I was the only person in the country allowed to write software, you might have a point. But my employment is controlled by market economics.
---
And so is the music industry. Prices go all over the place. The government protection that you're complaining about isn't the same as saying that no one else can compete with you. It's the equivilant of saying that your boss can't take your work and then say, "I only feel that you're worth half of what you're supposed to get paid." You're free to buy music from people who sell it cheaply (if you live anywhere near an urban area, there's plenty of talented local musicians who'll sell you their CD for $5) or even give it away for free via mp3 or what-have-you. But if you want someone specific's music, pay what they ask for it. It's that simple.
Which is why radio stations do so well.
People get that music as a 128kbps quality mp3 for free over the radio waves from their favorite radio station. Another reason why sattelite radio is failing miserably. (Yes, it is, both providers are hurting bad right now.) And why P2P music is thriving.
I love mp3's but I PAY to get them as high quality by buying the CD used and ripping it with lame with a -q0 setting at 192 fixed bitrate and normalized or even higher VBR if I will not be using it in my portable.(I did not jump on the ipod bandwagon)
if I could download high quality mp3's and pay for them I certianly would. (magnatune!) but what is availabe from itunes and the others is low quality compared to what I am making myself from the CD recording.
All the kids at my daughter's junior high all laugh and make fun of the RIAA piracy is E-V-I-L posters and talks they get with the remark, "If it
's on the radio for free why do they care?". So their attemts to brainwash the kids in the schools is failing as well as are the software people. I see kids borrowing each other's "sims" modules every day.
Until the companies start educating people and telling them in PLAIN LANGUAGE that the CD's they "own" they do not own, or print on the package and in advertising "SIGN A LEASE CONTRACT TODAY" instead of "OWN IT TODAY" people will continue to feel they "OWN" that music, game, or movie.
It is their fault by telling people to go out and buy it so they can OWN their copy right away.
I personally wish they would start pressing that non-ownership concept on the public. It would DEVISTATE sales overnight and wake up the public to the reality that they un-aware of.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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From the first entry, notice in particular:
Also see the idiomatic usage found after that entry.
This no longer applies if you do record your performance and attempt to get machinery (owned by someone else) perform (based on a plastic disk owned by someone else) your performance (using energy, delivery of which someone else paid for) for you and you get paid anyways. Often expecting to get paid orders of magnitude compared to actually performing the labour. There is a name for this: a scam.
So you're saying the creative effort in composing and mastering music is absolutely worthless and can't be sold? Well, in that case, writers are scammers as well -- attempting to get machinery (printers, owned by the publisher) perform (based on bound leaves of paper owned by someone else) your performance (requiring a source of ambient light, which often costs energy to deliver) for you and you get paid anyways. You're right, bookwriters should only get paid for telling their stories live...because that's *such* an economical way to provide the service.
Get real, the only way you could be arguing this point is if you were playing devil's advocate (which is fine by me, but considered trolling in some circles), because if you honestly believe in it, you're just not putting enough thought into it.
You know you've lost it when you begin signing physical documents with =^_^=
If they thought there was value in it, they'd be extracting that value right now. Yes, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk will survive, but lots of lesser artists won't. Last I checked, I couldn't even find Don Pullen's "Ode to life" or his last, posthumous album, "Sacred common ground", both released by Blue Note in the 1990s to excellent reviews.
I listen to my music on a non-linear device that doesn't get bigger when my music collection does.
I store my music on my computer and/or iPod.
I'm supposed to buy my music on a linear medium, find physical storage space for all of the albums I own, and manually transfer every CD I own or will want to own to my computer?
Something about this model seems fundamentally wrong. The RIAA needs to make a paradigm shift that acknowledges that you can sell non physical goods and make a profit.
If I'm going to rip my CD to MP3 anyway, why should they bother selling me the CD, it's no less copyable than an MP3, and after a lifetime of collecting music, I won't have to worry about replacing my old CD's with whatever the next generation medium is, like we did with LP's in the mid 80's.
The movie industry will face this same challenge in another 10 years when technology makes DVD's obsolete, and I can download an HD quality movie in minutes and burn it to whatever medium is popular, or upload it to my media center in seconds.
Even without any P2P or illeagal copying, retailers of music will be the first to go.
People will buy mp3's or CD's though the net.
And when they start to really get fed up with the price of it all, they will start buying music from cheaper unsigned artists or will look for artist who are just giving it away.
This industry will crash.
When I look at the current litagation by RIAA, I see a man trapped in a swamp. Stuggeling makes it worse.
The only type of contract that could be drawn is one obligating one party to maintain information in one of its fundamental states: known or unknown.
That's untrue.
You and I can draw a legal contract based only on common law that says you shall not replay to an audience greater than one my works.
Unfortunately this is entirely impossible to apply to enterntainment because the objective of a broadcaster/distributor is to disseminate information and thus break the secrecy.
Wrong. Exclusivity contracts are rampant, everyday, regular old things. You may share this information with X and ONLY X people. All kinds of online databases use this premise.
The consumer cannot be required to work for the music company in guarding the secrecy, even if one ignores the fact that the very medium on which the information is disseminated (air vibrations) is not conducive to secrecy.
That's absurd, and you just made that up.
If you believe that two people can make a legal agreement that is not in-itself illegal on the face, then you must by extension believe that fundamentally individuals ought to have dominion over thier creative works. That's the bottom line. They are linked, permanently.
The quote in the submission contains a statement that directly blame it on high-speed internet and gadgets... where is the evidence here? where's the primary data of the research that would prove that those with high-speed internet access and gadgets would buy less music than those without, in a way that would explain this drop?
Your comparison would only hold some sway if all the music stores in South Korea had opened within the last five years.
To put it in slightly different terms, if the country of Fictionalistan had an 80% infant mortality rate, then it's still really big news if 95% of the people named Pete died in a five year period. Same thing as with the South Korean music stores.
But the record companies AREN'T paying the price, only retailers. The record companies are making record (no pun intended) profits from online sales (as someone mentioned from mail-order physical media like Amazon or pure-digital purchases like iTunes); more sophisticated than ever music-concert-advertising-movie-product marketing tie-ins; the most agressive royalty-seeking efforts ever; etc. The RECORD COMPANIES are not hurting... yet.
The reason they scream over the loss of physical retails or new technologies is that they fear loss of control that comes with change. They are afraid that someday soon the bubble they have created will burst and poeple will listen to the music they want to instead of the music they've been told to. They're concerned that ready access to any music from anywhere around the world will lead to such a variety of tastes and interests that the market will become too watered down to support their top-heavy marketting operations. They know it's coming, but they thing they can put it off for just a few more years....
I hope they're wrong. Go to a local club and listen to some music. Buy their CD on the spot. It's good for the industry, even if it hurts the giants.
Piracy isn't theft, as you aren't taking anything. It is, however, akin to fare dodging (off peak). If you dont buy a train ticket, the train will still run. It doesn't cost anyone anything extra (the added fuel needed because of your addedmass is negligable).
Trouble is, if everyone does it, the train doesnt make any money and then it wont run. Everyone loses.
Of course, some trains will still run out peaoples love of driving trains, but theres no guarentee it wil go when and where you need it.