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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."
stop buying them for christ's sake! now these idiots will believe that the frivolous lawsuits against 15-year-olds were successful.
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.
And they prove that any drop in CD sales was purely because of the economic slump, when non-essential things like CDs and DVDs are the first things to leave the on-the-spot purchase habits of people.
Or maybe the prices have dropped, making the product more desirable to the consumer.
However, they'll just say that it is the result of their "anti online piracy" actions.
hat would be so un-american
Considering this was reported by the BBC, you are probably right.
You say pirate CD sales have hit a record high... and thus the RIAA should be going after them. Umm. That's the same flawed logic that had the RIAA attacking Napster.
What if it is the Pirate CD sales that are the primary motivator behind the 2.4% increase? Come on guys... be consistent. All methods of piracy can have some beneficial network effects on sales. All methods of piracy can ALSO cause lower sales under different circumstances.
It is, in a word, wrong to deify music swapping online, but demonise pirate CD sales. They're both illegal... the only real difference is that one has a profit motive, and the other doesn't. But the actual level of illegality, under current law, is about equal. It's illogical to praise one and not the other, don't succumb to the same stupidity that is rife within the **AA.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Time for a revolution!
That's not the sort of editorial comment I would have expected from Lindsay Lohan.
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).
The RIAA should just sell their CDs for $5 through shady looking guys on the street.
"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!
If sales slump, **AA will blame it on piracy, and use it as justification to enact even more legislation to protect their profits.
And if sales rise, they'll use it as justification that their methods are starting to work against piracy, and consequently we need to make them even stronger.
How much higher would the increase have been had piracy not been a problem? No one can say for sure. But you can't state that file sharing has not had a negative effect as a result of a positive increas in sales.
A blog like any other.
Hi Lindsay!! I luv u!!!
I went to your site and "rocked out" to the intro, and then i saw nothing but PINK! My eyes actually screamed in pain. I heard them. I shit you not.
Please Lindsay. Redesign your site... for me?
And show me your knockers. :-)
Electric Monkey Pants
The report, for the country's National Bureau of Economic Research, studied the habits of 412 students.
Hmmmm.... they studied the habits of students. Aren't students usually short on money but have broadband on campus? This is hardly a realistic "sampling" of the population, so therefore cannot be taken seriously.
So which is it?
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
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!
I would mod your article -1 Redundant. We've been saying that for two years plus.
I love these articles because they are so misleading. I don't believe there is a strong correllation between sales and piracy. Sales are higher because the economy is doing better. Could they be even higher if there were no pirating? Perhaps, but I would consider it a small subset of people who would have bought something but didn't. Most people downloading stuff would never have bought it in the first place. If the record label lowered their prices that would also increase sales. Thus lower prices == piracy. ;)
The fundamental flaw is that in order to exaggerate their losses they come up with absurd calculations like loss = num_files_shared_last_year * retail_price. That is absurd.
I was watching C-SPAN last night and saw the confirmation hearing of U.S. President Bush's new Commerce Secretary. He was asked by Sen Gordon Smith (R-OR) how he would handle the copyright violations and IP issues that are crippling our innovative entrepreneurial spirit. I believe thre new Commerce Sec nominee has been CEO of Kellogg company. Wasn't that the company who was price-fixing cereal some time ago? Does anyone remember?
Does Lindsay run a Linux box?
Are there more hot girls like her running linux?
Maybe it's time to finally try that new pickup line of mine: "What's your distro, baby?"
"She got some big ass titties"
MY SECRET DIARIES
I just got back from a trip to South-East Asia, and in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos it was rediculous how every single music store sold bootleg CDs. Mostly stuff downloaded from the net (lots of 'best of' with tons of typos), but in high-end/high-quality cases. Especially the stuff I saw in Louang-Prabang (Laos). They were dirt cheap, $2-$5, and I heard they were even cheaper in VietNam, although I didn't make it out there. If you want even more flagrant copyright violations, when I had satelite tv in Cambodia they were playing Swordfish on one of the channels and it was the exact same DivX screener that I'd downloaded when it first came out in theatres...with the same animated logo scrolling across the top right and everything. How crazy is that?
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
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?
Did you pay for it? No.
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
So anything you get for free is stealing. I can think of a lot of examples where this is not the case. Say I recorded a show off CBS. I would still answer the same to all three of your questions.
Hate you break you out of your little black and white world there, but when you talk about copyright it is just as infringing to forward an email without permission as it is to download a song, singing "Happy Birthday" in public is legally actionable and girl scouts pay a fee every year to sing campfire songs together. In the real copyright world it is just as infringing for me to make duplicates of my parents wedding pictures or to copy a photo out of my high school year book. In the real copyright world my four year olds scribbles are instantly copyrighted and her preschool teacher better have permission before she duplicates them. I bet you personally have infringed copyright hundreds of times in 2004, but because you disapprove of the way I do it, I'm a theif and a pirate.
Tell you what. If they come up with a copyright system that makes any sense, then I'll respect it.
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
Did you see the sign? Yes.
Did you understand the sign? Yes.
Did you drink from the "Whites Only" water fountain? Yes.
It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
Yeah, that's called civil disobedience. Happy Birthday to You should be public domain by now. Sharing copyrighted files without making a profit only became illegal seven years ago when the No Electronic Theft Act was signed into law. By comparison, prohibition lasted 14 years.
Don your Elliot Ness attire. Keep busting those average Joes. Personally, I hope your kind stays the course. I hope RIAA legal activity mushrooms. Once you piss off enough regular people, this becomes a campaign issue and the majority is clearly not on your side. Go RIAA GO! :-)
It's now clear and obvious (as it always was in spite of the FUD), that the intent of the music and motion picture industry (and the larger media conglomerates that own and manage them) has never been to prevent piracy. In fact it's not even about maximizing profits.
The behavior is perfectly consistent with the abuses against all IP being waged by corporate entities and their legal minions, in the pitched battle to own, control, restrict, and monopolize all human knowlege, invention, and the freedom to create. In a world that has substantively shifted to an information economy, the owner and controller of all IP is king.
We're all quick becoming pawns in a war between human freedom and self determination, and corporate design. The science of shaping opinion, controlling the masses, and disinforming entire nations for fun and profit is run riot directly over the ethical and social designs of our forefathers. We are confronted with the conundrum of the successful operation that kills the patient, and in this scenario, you and I are the patient. Either, collectively as a people, we get some backbone, and a whole lot more intelligence, or we can expect to obsolete ourselves in the next several decades.
This is simply one more expression of our own ignorance, the worst of our animal nature, run amock. The beast that blindly grabs for the reins of all human enterprise is without foresight, mind numbingly stupid, infinitely self absorbed, and manned by men with the conscience of politicians. It's up to us (that would be not only the person writing these words, but also the people reading these words), to lay down new laws, build new barriers to barbarism, and set the stage for the next 200 years of human development. The alternative, is a furture shaped a lot like the fossil record for all of us naked apes.
Genda
Pirates of the Carribean DVD... $18.
Pirates of the Carribean Soundtrack... $18.
That is why few purchase CDs anymore.
The copyright infringement we're talking about here is not civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is not just the act of non-violently disobeying unjust laws. True civil disobedience also requires that you break the law publicly and accept the resulting legal consequences. People who practice civil disobedience usually call attention to themselves breaking the law and insist that law enforcement arrest them and enforce the unjust law. When people are punished for breaking an obviously immoral law, the theory goes, the government and/or society will be shamed into changing it.
If the law is broken secretly or the lawbreaker attempts to get out of the punishment, the powerful moral logic of civil disobedience breaks down. It becomes easy to accuse the protester of breaking the law just for personal gain rather than for the greater good. If he or she breaks the law openly from the beginning and requests enforcement of the unjust law, he or she is immunized from this line of attack.
If you want to practice civil disobedience against current copyright law, you should copy some tracks (like Happy Birthday) that you believe you have a moral right to own and you should alert the authorities and the media. Force the RIAA and the FBI to arrest you. Accept the ridiculous fines and jail terms that come with the crime, and thereby show everyone the ludicrous and immoral nature of the law.
Don't, however, copy 100GB of songs off of P2P networks secretly and call it civil disobedience. It's not. It's just lawbreaking.