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US CD Sales Increase in 2004
Lindsay Lohan writes "BBC is reporting that CD sales rose by 2.3% in the U.S. in the year 2004 despite the growing popularity of legal digital music downloads through services such as iTunes. On the other hand, a BBC report from last July noted that pirated CD sales have hit a record high. Sounds like the RIAA should be going after the real pirates, not little Susie or Grandma."
Hasn't the Music industry recorded record profits during the years when it CLAIMED that they lost MILLIONS to illegal downloads? It seems like the rise of p2p has coincided with profit increases for the music industry. I won't say it's a cause and an effect. But it's a drop in a bucket to them. Apple's success shows people are willing to pay, just not the inflated, over-hyped prices of the crap cds the RIAA has been coming out with.
1) If you think that the RIAA is sitting on its hands and just letting the largescale music pirates get away with ripping them off while only targetting "Susie and grandma" for litigation, you're quite mistaken. They spend quite a bit of money to seek out and take down these largescale pirates. Unfortunately, some Asian countries are more hospitable to the pirates than others, so policing it is a difficult job.
2) It seems to me that the year-long push by the RIAA to associate P2P filesharing with stealing is paying off, though only to the tune of 2% or so. If they can convince enough people that piracy is a crime, then it is guaranteed to boost actual sales of CDs at the expense of filesharing.
People are generally good and are willing to follow the law. The RIAA's push to make people aware of copyright law has finally made some progress, but also consider that music artists have also become generally better lately than they were in say the mid-late 90's. Of course, the increase in sales corresponds more to the anti-piracy push than to the improvement in music quality (Good music can still be pirated as easily as bad music).
"Little Susy or grandma" might not be the crux of the problem, but "real pirates" are just as likely to be the guy living next door nowdays. They may not be running processing plants like the mob, but I've seen plenty of "village geeks" selling downloaded movies and CDs. At the call center where last I 9-5'd there were several people with fast home connections and DVD burners who regularly sold downloads to other employees on the floor.
This was not just onesy-twosey stuff. Any given week I'm sure one fellow sold 20 or 30 CDs at five bucks a pop. Multiply this by 1000's of businesses across the country and it's easy to see how it can really add up.
What amazes me is people really cannot tell the difference (or don't care) between a real CD and a POS CDR burnded from MP3s. I would be indignant about the pirates SELLING this stuff, but given these people are buying something akin to a cassette tape all you can really say is "it's their money to waste."
Those numbers don't look so good if you compare the growth in CD sales to the sales of video (VHS/DVD's) software, or to the economy as a whole:
Video: Consumer Electronics Association: DVD Software Sales Benefit: Although movie-ticket sales fell one percent to $9.2 billion in 2003, consumer spending on the purchase or rental of video software (VHS tape and DVD) rose 18.2 percent to $22.5 billion, according to DEG. DVD accounted for 72 percent of total home video spending.
Overall Economy: CNN The economy has expanded at rates exceeding 3 percent for the past six quarters and seems poised to keep growing. The White House last Friday estimated GDP will expand 3-1/2 percent in 2005.
The RIAA's members can always lean heavily on their customers' consciences to go legit when they download a 128k mp3 from Kazaa, but if they buy a perfect replica of the album they have no reason to suspect that they will buy a legit copy. Almost every pirated copy that is sold is a sale that has to be totally written off. Few customers would probably even know the difference. With file sharing, there is always the hope that the user will go legit.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Part of the goal of the RIAA and MPAA is, naturally, to instill fear in those who might KNOWINGLY accept, purchase, download, etc. pirated materials. This creates stigma towards those that do (sort of like anti-smoking ads in the past couple decades).
This affects the demand for pirated materials which in turns lowers the economic viability for pirates.
The real issue for the RIAA / MPAA is getting all the "not sure if it's really wrong, I do it sometimes, I still buy occasional CDs and DVDs but like to try them" crowd over to the "It's wrong." view. Until they can do that, no amount of efforts will slow piracy down because so many people are doing it, and OK with doing it, that there is a serious strength in numbers.
The crux of the matter is, and will always be, people give their money to companies for often irrational reasons. If more people contributed to artists and things they liked and enjoyed directly, we wouldn't need oppressive middle-men grasping at straws to retain their distribution powers.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Exactly, the RIAA is going to take this data and use it as PROOF that their legal assautls are working and that P2P piracy is 100% of the reason that sales took a dive to begin with.
I remember a few years ago when the labels were bitching about declining sales and Napster, someone did a study and determined that if even the most ridiculously high estimates of P2P usage were true and counting that every downloaded song as a lost CD sale that P2P only accounted for like 20% of the drop in CD sales since the 90s economy bubble.
In reality it was the economy that caused sales to drop, after all buying CDs is just about the most optional thing and the first thing to go when the .com that was overpaying you ran out of funding.
Now the economy is on the upswing, and surprisingly people are spending more on leisure items like music.
But by going after little Susie or gramma they can make the claim that they're doing something about piracy...
The real question is what are they doing about music quality. Inundation of Britany Spears and the Backstreet boys have made me care much than less.
I have not bought a CD in 2 years. I HAVE, however, downloaded iTunes entire albums and countless singles. There's no point when I'm just going to put it in my mp3 collection anyway so that it's portable.
The REAL question(s) is (are) 1)what are record companies doing about the QUALITY of music such that we'd actually care about purchasing them in the first place? 2) The only "CDs" I've recently bought are Dvd-audios. Am not sure of any current way to rip 5.1 surround sound to mp3 or any other compression format, so how does piracy apply here?
I know that if I would ever actually want to own a hard copy of anything, it would be a Dvd-audio or maybe an SACD. What's the RIAA have to say about that?
*cricket*
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
I have been thinking a bit about the economics of piracy lately. Anyone who knows a bit/lot ;) about economics, please comment.
:)
Now, when were talking about digital media, the price to reproduce the good is very close to 0. So we can think of the song/movie/whatever information as being free to reporduce. Now, the RIAA/whoever sets the price of the song/movie to something that is much higher than 0, causing a price floor. If I remember correctly, in my micro-economics class, the teacher said that when you introduce a price floor, black markets emerge. Does this "justify" the online piracy or at least explain in economic terms why it exists?
Of course, I could be confused and have it all wrong
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
The recording industry cut production by 20%, hacked away all their low-volume artists, yet saw an 11% gain in sales during the HEIGHT of the Napster boom.
We never heard an explanation for that. Hmmm.
No one questions the RIAA on these issues. The big labels cut all their dead weight, low-volume artists, cut production, yet saw an increase in sales?
I have a friend that works for a niche label, and he saw the changes coming, and was happy to sign some of these lower-volume artists as it strengthened their catalog. Some of these artists were considered out-of-reach for the niche labels. And many of these labels saw their sales skyrocket, compared to what they had been before. Admitted, they weren't going to compete with Sony or the other big labels.
Yet the RIAA claims that they were losing billions due to pirates... when the worker bees at the labels tell us that they use the P2P info to see what's interesting to the listeners, and they report increased sales on those artists? Smells like serious smoke and mirrors by the RIAA. Face it. The RIAA is using this situation to try and dictate legislation rather than adapt.
I think that, more than anything, we've seen a lull in "talent". Face it. We've not seen a Michael Jackson or a Nirvana. No blockbusters out there... and it's been awhile. Justin Timberlake? Britney Spears? Ashlee Simpson? Forget it. No talent hacks with fantastic marketing juggernauts behind them. That's it. They are products of technology. Lip-sync and auto-tuners. Fancy dancing with a lot of costumes. There's so little that's interesting music. REM and Dave Matthews haven't had knockout material in a few years. U2 is ok, but not what they were in the late '80s until the mid '90s. Name a rapper that's tearing up the charts? Hmmm. Still thinking...