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UK Music Industry Sees Record Sales
ardmhacha writes "Despite the claims of gloom and doom from the BPI (the UK equivalent of the RIAA) the BBC is reporting that 'UK record companies are celebrating their best ever year for album sales, with a record 237 million sold in the 12 months to September. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade body said albums by the likes of Keane and The Streets had helped drive a 3% rise compared with last year. It also said sales of single tracks were up thanks to the availability of legal download services.' It looks like music sales will continue to climb if the customers get something they like. The article also discusses adding music downloads to the charts."
A) Cracking down on P2P apps is driving sales again
B) Good new music is driving sales
C) The economy is picking up so people are spending money on things like music again
D) P2P apps have exposed people to enough new music and now they are all out buying it
Agile Artisans
I swear this happens to alot more people as well. Where are we expected to learn about new music without P2P? Radio is so repetitive, how does the recording industry expect to sell different music?
...and see better record sales. Go figure.
This might just be a better business strategy than suing your customers!
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade body said albums by the likes of Keane and The Streets had helped drive a 3% rise
I'd be impressed if the BPI said that they had a 3% increase due to the sales of new, smaller artists.
But the BPI accounts the 3% rise in sales based on a few large pop acts. Undoubtably there was a reduction for all other artists. This isn't a success - this is a long-term failure in the making.
The average pop act has a very short life. If you bet the bank on one or two hugely successful acts, then you're committing yourself to financial chaos.
It is best to have a large number of stable, repeatable acts with long-term purchases that you can depend on.
This article is just some of what I think should be common business sense shining through:
Forcing customers to do business on your terms (buy the CD @ the producer-price-fixed $18 or break the law) while simultaneously feeding them no talent hacks (most anyway) is just begging for them to "steal" the few decent songs produced. Maybe I'm just messed in the head in thinking that suing your customers because you (the producer) won't listen to what they (the consumer) want is just FUBAR'ed.
Note to the entertainment industry: we computer scientists have jumped into the 21st century by getting through the Y2K bug, I suggest you push your business model to the 21st century as well and reap the benefits be earning my money instead of coercing me. iTunes started it, now embrace it.
PS: I'm not the only one waiting for you to do so.
:wq
Considering how much of the industry has been locked down due to vertical and horizontal integration and oligopolistic market practices it is no suprise that they can sell so much. Just don't believe the lies they tout about how hard their lives are.
I still think that downloading has exciting possibilities for creativity and a line of flight from traditional music channels - especially through the potential of peer2peer networks and so on. But unfortunately there is a real danger of colonisation from the majors who have deep pockets and sharp lawyers.
The Internet offer the possibility of difference and a reterritorialisation of music creativity which is at essence a collective (networked) endeavour. If we allow the major's (few and fewer as they are) to close down this space with DRM and monopolisation of the distribution channels then it will be a very sad day for alternative music.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
The recent music to come out of the UK hasn't been the usual global tripe.
... White, Welsh comedy rap)
Looking pretty and being able to sing won't sell records anymore, posters maybe but not records.
The fact that bands are back is why sales are up, seeing the guys and gals with the instruments is a good thing, more so when it comes to live performances like V or Glastonbury.
There is still room in the UK for gimic groups, take GLC for example, it put Aberdare on the map! (if you don't know of GLC (or Goldie Looking Chain ) its like a cross between Eminem, Weird Al and Tom Jones
The future is bright, the future is turned up to Whut-ohh!
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
If you could now download your Mars Bar recipe and create it using your own chocolate and caramel, but they still charged 25p then you would be questioning what you were paying for.
Not quite the same thing but my analogy of your post is closer than your analogy of my post.
99p per track is how much I pay when I get my CDs from CD-WOW. The last one I ordered was flown over from the Far East. When I download an album they dont send me the CD and they dont send it on a plane. Now tell me that we're not being ripped off.
Auto-check your UK lottery lines
$20 says you have never listened to a full song by The Streets.
Okay, from what I can gather in the article, all they said is that "sales" went up 3% compared to last year. But did they take into account things like the increase in the number of people in the UK? If there were more people who can afford and want music, then obviously more people will buy music. What about the total production of the music industry? No matter how good a band is most people would only buy one copy of any of their given CDs. It feels like of like the industry saying "look we're selling a whole lot more because we rock" while in reality people are only buying the same amount of music as they did last year. Though the singles download thing is actually pretty cool. Maybe companies would realize that unless they pack shiny things and gimmicks into their singles people aren't willing to shell out the price of half a full album for one song--but they will pay a bit more than A/n (where A is cost of an album and n is how many songs they have) for a song that they like.
read the bunni comic
No offense intended, but you sound like the sort of person that, if the tracks were 25p each, would complain that they're still too expensive and that you'd pay for them if only they were 10p each instead.
I buy plenty of music, mostly from CD Wow, Play.com, or Virgin Megastores, when they're having one of their 5 CDs/DVDs for £30 sales. I never pay more than £9 for any CD I want, and I get most of the music that I want for less than that.
The other week I bought a bunch of stuff from Virgin, including the Black Eyed Peas Elephunk and the Ramones Anthology for £6 each. Other artists whose albums I've bought recently at that price include (in no particular order) the Sex Pistols, Jamie Cullum, Blur, Travis and Air.
There are 57 tracks on my new Ramones double CD (32 on disc one, 25 on disc two). 57 tracks for £6. Now, I don't know about you, but that seems like a steal to me.
Are CDs too expensive? Well, they're cheaper now than at any other time. When you factor in things like inflation, the CDs I'm buying now can't be costing me more than half what the CDs I was buying 15 years ago were.
Same thing for DVD movies. I have over 100 DVDs - many of them 2-disc collectors' editions, director's cuts, etc - and not one of them cost me more than £10. In fact, I'd say 70 percent of them cost me £6 or less.
Bottom line: CDs and DVDs on physical media can be had at damn good prices. Sure, legal downloads aren't as competitively priced as they could be, but you forget that, not only is legal downloading in its infancy, it's designed to provide a legitimate alternative to P2P downloading rather than compete with traditional music retailing from a price point of view.
If you're expecting legal downloads - and legal downloads without any DRM at that - at a quarter of the price of discounted CDs then, sorry, but you're living in a dreamworld.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"Doubtful. I would venture to guess that a lot of people who pirate music wouldn't pay for it anyway."
Alternatively, some people use 'piracy' to broaden their music tastes. $15-$20 is a lot to spend on an experiment. I doubt I would have ever downloaded music if I could have returned CDs I didn't like. Thankfully, services like Rhapsody and iTunes have made a huge step in the right direction for making the business fair for both the industry and its customers.
"Derp de derp."
Complaining about the existence of a post rather than commenting on its content, though, strangely enough does not.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
So much easier than blaming the decline in the quality in movies. I've noticed that I'm downloading more and more, despite the fact that it's far easier to go down to my cheap local video rental place than spend over a day downloading over the Internet. Why? Two reasons. First, the quality of films normally 'safe' (big names, major brand) have fallen to an APPALLING low. Eg I downloaded and watched Solaris with George Clooney. I would have felt sick if I'd paid 1c to watch that. Second, I cannot find the great films I want to watch for hire (examples: Project A with Jackie Chan, or Hard Boiled with Chow Yun Fat).
I wait and read Rotten Tomato, and if it's got a good review then I'll watch it in the cinema (and if I miss it then DVD). Some I'll wait the fscking x months between it coming out in US and poor cousin 'Europe'. Otherwise I'll just download it and watch the first 15 mins. If it's good then I'll stop and hire the DVD (eg The Circle). If not I'll probably watch to the end, in the same way you can't help but watch a car crash, and then later wonder why I just lost a couple of hours of my life.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Despite the claims of gloom and doom from the BPI (the UK equivalent of the RIAA) the BBC is reporting that 'UK record companies are celebrating their best ever year for album sales
What the recording industry hates is the fact record sales are so fragmented. Sure, more albums are being sold than ever, but it's from a wildly diverse range of artists. With consumers now able to download and listen/sample the music before buying, these monolithic labels are finding it more difficult to manufacture pop artists that can sell 10 million copies. Now they sell half a mill of one artist and 25,000 of another artist... it's more work. The consumer isn't manipulated and decieved as easy.
Why do you think Britney Spears isn't rushing out with a new album? Because sales will be bitterly disapointing. Calculated successes of mindless garbage ala Ricky Martin is less likely now that the consumer has p2p.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
And they were just crying a few days ago on TV about how they were losing all this money to piracy...
CRIA can fuck themselves. Especially since I don't download any of their shitty Canadian pop crap anyway.