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Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week
An anonymous reader writes to tell us Yahoo News is reporting that the last week of December turned out to be a golden week for music downloads. From the article: 'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports. In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm's one-week record for download sales.'"
Looks like the music/movie industry is really hurting now. You would think they would let up on crushing the little guy Nah!
With all this, how can the RIAA still say they're losing money? I don't see how their argument works anymore.
But how many downloads were there on Kazaa?
Let's see... We forecast forty million dollars of sales, so we've lost twenty million because of illegal pirating!
The RIAA's "evidence" has always been that sales haven't hit expectations, even if the actual sales are larger than they ever were.
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
They're being handed money but I guess they'll still want to jack up prices due to 'high demand'.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
I found this even more interesting:
And for the first time, sales of MP3 players are surpassing sales of personal CD players and CD shelf systems
Something for the music industry to think about.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
If the RIAA had not angered so many customers, they would have sold alot more songs. Unfortunately, I know alot of people who won't buy any music at all until the middleman is removed.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
Those damm P2P users. They are stealing from the mouth of children musicians. The only reason for having MP3 players, computers, P2P software is to steal from the poor musician that ends up on the street begging for change in the train station.
Why else would anyone want to record music except to make illegal copies. Why would anyone sing except to
perform copyrighted music instead of buying the CD, except to take illegal advantage of it. I think the RIAA should sue anyone who sings music.
Fight Spammers!
At this point in time RIAA would complain about how much more music was being pirated. And I for one would be getting out my little violin to play them a sad song -- though I am unable to because reading the sheet music and playing would be converting between two formats (like analogue to digital).
So I am stuck here asking how many of those 20 Million downloads are from the poor suckers who's DRM'd music turned against them? I would really like to know, I have had enough bad experiences with DRM'd music to stop me from ever buying it again.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
I personally downloaded 10 songs from ITunes this week using up most of a xmas gift card. And I have another $15 gift card that I haven't redeemed yet. Please don't rob my house and steal the card tonight.
3.3 million players bought in the run-up to Christmas and only 30 million songs sold to be put on them? Unless everyone bought a $200+ player to listen to the same 10 songs over and over, they're getting songs from elsewhere, which must be illegally.
That's what they'll say, anyways.
You would think that if it wasn't the RIAA we are talking about
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
It really is all about visions. To many of us, the intnernet envisions a future with the uninhibited unrestricted free flow of information - where all knowledge and creative works will be birthed into the world thru creative collaberation, or thru services, or thru just plain giving for free as a side effect of private interests. To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future where every piece of content is tagged and charged for with the promise of unlimited profit and royality and the prospect of endlessly being able to nickel and dime the consumer to the highest order - but to inpose this vision requires that they coerce upon people and technology companies, an infrastructure of controll - where no piece of information can leak out and risk becomming free.
Moral: This is like an ALL or NOTHING game
People who want to play half hearted, and allow some room for copyrights in this age are only going to continue to feed the beast that is trying to enslave them. Copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off peoples freedom until we cut it off at the root. One of these days people are going to realise that copyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control. Controll, even if that means the loss of privacy, free speech, and controll over our PC's.
i suspect for 9/10 cats it's off to the bittorrent shop with the infinite credits cheats
Well, apparently a lot of people are also getting their music from KaZaa et al. MSNBC says, "Some analysts expect Apple to have shipped 37 million iPods worldwide by the year-end, with about 10 million sold in the key Christmas quarter."
That would mean everyone who just got their new iPods have loaded a whopping 2 songs onto it. Who said 30GB wouldn't come in handy?
Assuming people are listening to 128Kbps mp3s on their digital audio players and assuming each song is approximately 4 minutes long it would require 8416 music tracks to fill up a 30GB iPod. This means that KaZaa also enjoyed brisk success with 42,000,000,000 downloads (assuming everyone filled up half their iPod with videos (no, I won't go into the videos right now))
their industry lost $7.8 billion the last week of 2005
Pretty shortly Apple has to re-negotiate the contracts with the studios - at which point they will push for higher song prices.
These record sales will help Apple maintain the current pricing, as the more money flowing into the studios through ITMS the harder it will be for all or most of them to pull away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So I'm sure that that revenue will be seen as cutting money from CD sales, and a great representation of piracy by the RIAA, won't it.
Most people still buy, as well as own large collection of, these things called "compact discs." These discs hold music, typically a single album by a particular artist, and can be placed into a computer and "ripped" - the process of reading the digital data on the disc and storing it as a file on the computer.
Kidding aside, I don't buy music online, because I consider a rip-off. CDs have better quality, do not have DRM*, comes with liner notes, and is itself a physical backup. I know many people who feel the same way. IMO, online music needs to be much cheaper to make up for these shortcomings; the only benefit it has is immediate delivery.
*I have yet to run across any CD with DRM, and I would definitely return any CD I got that had DRM on it (or not buy it in the first place).
The space unintentionally left unblank.
How can the very first post be REDUNDANT?
This space available.
No, it doesn't... you're forgetting that one of the appeals of iTunes and the iPod is that iTunes makes it very easy to rip and import music from your CDs. I don't know about you, but the people in my family have pretty extensive music collections on CDs that they have accumulated over the last ten years. When my sister got her iPod for Christmas, the first thing she did was dig out her binder, rip, and import.
http://www.tenjou.net/
And this is why Apple announces new products/services a couple of months before Christmas.
Microsoft, on the other hand, does it after the holiday season at CES.
Go figure.
-ch
"In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes."
Somehow they forgot the period here.
It's high time for the music industry to wake up. Digital music delivery systems are the new media of choice. They need to stop fighting it and embrace it... before it passes them by. The music industry needs to stop thinking "We're in the CD business."
They are a lot like the Railroad Industry of old, whose narrow vision is what led to their rapid demise... They were thinking "We are in the RAILROAD business". If they had thought "We're in the TRANSPORTATION business", instead, things would have been different for them.
New dance, same old song.
Willie...
So, who are these other, miscellaneous download retailers? How do their figures break down as a part of the 20 million?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I wonder if the booming number of sales will have an impact on the prices, they could either lower the prices to encourage sales or increase prices to try to increase their profits... Or keep the prices the same... Hopefully it will be the former.
How come, when we're talking about Apple, no one brings up the idea that in the next round of negotiations, Apple might try to get a bigger cut?
It would kinda be like Disney and Pixar. Sure Disney can make their own money, but Pixar has been generating crazy amounts of money for them.
I have a tough time seeing how the RIAA's music companies can walk away from iTunes without having to deal with some kind of shareholder lawsuit.
I can understand that they have to make a good faith effort to get more cash out of Apple, but what are they going to say if Apple refuses? "Apple wouldn't give us more money, so we decided to cut off this money maker entirely."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually, many people feel prices won't be raised for some time due to recent antitrust investigations into digital music. Story here
I have to say that it doesn't seem out of character for the RIAA to just go ahead and demand higher prices despite the investigation. Personally I think it's rather obvious the RIAA is rolling in the dough, and even if antitrust practices are found the slap on the wrist they get will probably not even begin to make a dent in the money they made from inflated prices.
I can understand that they have to make a good faith effort to get more cash out of Apple, but what are they going to say if Apple refuses? "Apple wouldn't give us more money, so we decided to cut off this money maker entirely."
Actually I can see Sony doing exactly that, just like in Japan... remember these are not rational folk we are dealing with. The very phrase "cut off his own nose to spite his face" may as well have been invented for these people.
So while it's an intersting idea to have Apple seek a higher cut, I don't think they are quite there yet. The next contract rounds I could see that happening; just not now.
Disney would have acted just as irrationally is Eisner were still at the helm - they were prepared to before he left.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, many people feel prices won't be raised for some time due to recent antitrust investigations into digital music.
.99 - or lower? The studios would have to say "if you give us the higher price we'll force the other sellers to also raise prices" - and that has anti-trust written all over it.
I was kind of wondering about that aspect; how can music studios demand higher prices from Apple when all the other stores are priced at
I sure hope Jobs is secretly taping the contract negotiations to release after he's dead sometime - we'd all get a big laugh I'm sure from how the music industry negotiates I'm thinking it's a Balmeresque Chair-fest kind of affair.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They know what they are doing and it's being done by DRM and stupid laws. The music industry knows CDs are dead and hates them but will take full propaganda advantage of the demise of the retail store. Record stores have always been shaky and shaken down business and it's very difficult to find an independent one today in the face of Virgin, Walmart and other RIAA dump sites. You could say the fix was already in but they will cry and blame it on the "pirates". The RIAA wants to own digital distribution the same way they owned physical media and radio broadcast. They will get there by making it impossible or illegal to listen to their music on a non-DRM encumbered system. Attempts to close "the analog hole" will make sure you can't even enjoy the public airwaves unless you submit to their will. The FCC and your government seem to be going along with this madness.
So, in the end, what are you going to chose - a free system without popular culture or a non free system with commercial crap? With Apple and M$ help, you won't have a choice on new hardware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future [...] with the promise of unlimited profit"
Jinkies. The internet makes publishing music (or almost anything) cheaper than the traditional method of putting a CD in a store. As bandwidth and computing costs continue to fall, this will become even cheaper, putting online publishing into the grasp of more and more people. Given time, this Radiant Future will inevitably lead to competition with the oligopoly that is the RIAA. If they push copy protection to the extremes you suggest, someone will realize the millions that a non-DRM alternative would provide - and that alternative is getting cheaper to create with every passing day.
[C]opyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control
I would've believed any of those, minus "control." I sincerely doubt the idea that an entire industry is out for enslaving people to iTunes instead of $money. The industry's interest in "control" is limited to how it can increase their profits - the one and only legitimate goal of any business.
The truth is that copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual property protection, when properly implemented, can be great incentives for innovation. The debate should be on whether or not these artificial burdens on the consumer are worth the extra innovation of the producer.
DATABASE WOW WOW
They are stealing from the mouth of children musicians.
Musicians who protest the closure of OLGA and other tablature sites? Musicians who are afraid to compose their own songs for fear of running into a subconscious infringement lawsuit?
it's a layer that makes you look less like an asshole when you give cash or an inappropriate gift.
What is wrong with cash or a check again? Seriously, I don't see the connection between cash and anus.
"You are essentially paying for a product and receiving nothing in return. The files don't even fully belong to you (DRM) and the quality on the ITMS sucks compared to other sources."
Although I haven't used the "other sources," the iTunes music is at least passable. No music "fully belongs to you" or even "belongs to you." The artists own their music, grants rights to the record industry to publish it, and you, in turn, buy a license to listen to one (1) copy of the music for personal, non-profit use. DRM simply enforces the licensing.
Oh, and by the way, you can burn any of the songs you buy in iTunes to a CD, and then rip them again to remove the DRM. If you rip to a lossless/high-quality MP3 format, the quality degredation is negligible - so it's really a moot point anyway.
DATABASE WOW WOW
CDs have better quality, do not have DRM*, comes with liner notes, and is itself a physical backup
I'll give you that CDs have prettier packaging, but the rest isn't really true. Whether or not CDs have "better" quality depends on what service you use. The CD format in and of itself is pretty low quality compared to some other digital formats available.
online music needs to be much cheaper to make up for these shortcomings
$1 a song may seem pricey, up until the fact that you consider the average $10-$15 CD has around ten songs on it - meaning you pay $1 (or more) for each song on the CD anyway.
the only benefit it has is immediate delivery
Nope. With iTunes and other services, you can listen to clips (or on Yahoo, you can "rent" as many songs as you want and listen to them in their entirety) before you buy the full song. Or - here's the biggest benefit - if you don't like the entire CD and only want a few of the songs on it, you end up paying $15 for your one song and the privilege of owning garbage. With online services, you buy only the songs you want and don't get railroaded into paying extra for the rest of the trash on the disc.
DATABASE WOW WOW
That's the best summary of the clash between information freedom and Big Media that I've possibly ever read.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
It is really so great to be right all the time.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Right now the only way to compensate an artist at the moment is to go to a concert and buy a t-shirt, not by buying a CD.
No sig today...
"Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week"
"RIAA Executives Enjoy Golden Shower From Customers"
They can complain all they want but there isn't anything in the mainstream that I want to buy. Most of the recent releases have just been the same old mush with differnet singers. Give me something decent and I will buy it.
Cheap UK and US VPS
What is to stop Apple from "agreeing" to tiered pricing while embedding more profit into the sale of each song for themselves? It would be the perfect opportunity for them to do so, raise prices and let the industry take all the blame.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers' (Emphasis mine)
/. hordes, but I don't expect it from so-called professional companies (yeah, yeah, Slashdot is a professional company, OSTG and all that, but this is a news aggregator, it's not supposed to be their speciality to do the sort of reporting Nielsen has done here).
Bad Nielsen Soundscan! Your fanboyism is showing! Precisely what was the point of mentioning that the MP3 player most bought was the iPod? The one I bought myself certainly wasn't; the one I bought my girlfriend certainly wasnt; who cares? Not everyone is painfully in love with the iPod and it's line of bastard cousins.
I'm used to this sort of Apple/iPod namedropping from the
Am I the only one left who can't bear to go one story without some reference to how superior I am to everyone else for having the sense to buy a particular brand of pocket MP3 player?
-1, Flamebait, sure, but this is really getting rediculous.
(For the record, I am a happy Mac user on the desktop)
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Lossless formats can easily need 30MB a minute.
In that case it wouldn't be compression, it would be expansion. CD-quality = 150kb/s. 150 kb/s * 60 s/m = 9MB/m. That's raw, uncompressed CD-quality audio.
I know this is slashdot, but can't you at least keep your trolling within reasonable limits?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
New dance, same old song.
:-)
Yep, thats the music industry.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Rap group D4L's "Laffy Taffy" took the top spot with 175,000 tracks sold
GOOD FREAKING LORD ARE YOU KIDDING ME... That song is horrible! It makes me want to die a horrible death, immediately!
Joseph?
I know plenty of people who do artistic things for free or at a personal loss. They do it in order to share things with the people around them. The truth is that most good art is underground and most corporate "art" is not worth anything, much less the exorbitant price tags it carries. You're trying to equate artistry with employment. Most of the world's artists make very little money through their avocations. Even the "art" or entertainment that is being mass-marketed provides very little benefit to most of the artists involved. So basically, the most elite (re: popular) of musicians and actors, and the label/studio bigwigs - a small percentage of the entertainment industry - have much to lose, while people serious about their art, who do it for personal reasons and will likely never see significant profit, are either unaffected, hurt very little, or *helped* by the kinds of things that seem to bother a few rich people who really don't care the least bit about the people who consume their products. It would be nice if everyone were compensated according to the combination of his/her talent and the amount of work he/she puts into a product, but that isn't the case anymore, and so the artists of the future will be poor but committed idealists who will pour their hearts and souls into their work, and the art/entertainment world, and the consumer, will benefit as a result.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
You're right, this is tremendously advantageous to the consumer - no risk, relatively small price to pay for the product - but $100 million action movies with huge casts of players are kind of exceptional in the entertainment realm. People should realise that if they fail to go to the theatre or buy DVDs of Spiderman, Braveheart, etc., those types of movies might no longer be made. For musicians, though, it is different. They can sell music personally to fans. They can charge a fee for performing live music. They can even retain full ownership of the things they produce (or if you don't believe in IP, they can claim originality or authorship, which is just as good). The same goes for independent filmmakers. Also for painters, sculptors, writers. Charles Dickens, for example, did readings of his work, thereby providing a unique service that people were willing to pay to see and hear. His name still appears on the cover of his works.
Why are big-budget, large-cast movies unique? They can't be made by individuals or small groups of people, and they don't provide for an alternative medium that involves personal interaction between the fans and the people involved in their productions. The consumer can only choose whether to watch a DVD on a home TV or projection screen or watch a projection on a big screen at a theatre. The big problem may be that people feel even less obligated to support that type of venture and don't mind sharing/downloading it for free because of its impersonal nature and because they perceive that their individual actions will not affect the profitability (After all, what's $20.00 split 5,000 ways? Not much.). I don't agree with that view, and i see the need to support such movies if we want them for our entertainment. I've never downloaded a DVD movie. The last 2 movies i watched in theatres were Batman Begins and Spiderman II, because i know that not supporting big budget movies will be their downfall.
But when it comes to music, it doesn't take a huge budget to produce something good. Just talent, commitment, and a modicum of equipment.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
Here's a clip of someone that got video to work on his Nano using Linux.
I'm sorry for all the nay-saying Slashdot Geeks: But consumers just don't care about DRM. Everyone I know who buys music from an online music service is getting secure WMA or FairPlay music files, copying them to their MP3 players, and whistling with happiness. I have yet to hear one of them go "Oh My Gosh! You mean, I can't copy those files to another MP3 player? Or to my friend's MP3 player"
Now, maybe in 3 years when they go to buy new MP3 players they will complain that their music collection is useless. But more likely, they will burn those music files to CD, then MP3 them again and be fine with it. I can hear the screams of anguish from the audiophiles talking about the loss of quality from the MP3->CD->MP3 conversions. It won't matter since most of those MP3 players come with cheezy earbuds anyway.
Right now, DRM is winning. This is really bad news for those of us who don't want to hack their BIOSs to install Linux in a few years...
So, you think that "artists" should develop their ideas and put them into a form that can be seen and shared, but for free? And you think that all artists should have a "day job", perhaps working at McDonanld's, in order to live (food, shelter, etc.). Is there any room in your vision for artists that want to focus exclusively on their art and can do so because people find it worthwhile and are willing to pay for it? These, mind you, are not artists that do their work because they love money. I am talking about artists that can do their art because of money.
Please. Go on the wiki*. Read up about movies from 1995, 1985, and 1975. This year beats all of those years, except possibly 1985, in best films in the top 10. And if you count Serenity, which didn't fare so well, it shatters 1985.
Movies have always been this bad. There is one, real, true reason that sales have stopped growing, and yes, it is a product of the digital age.
World of Warcraft. MSN. Online interactions between people are taking up more of our free time, so we're less inclined to search for new creative media.
*I posted actual results before, but it died in obscurity.
Why is it that so many take it as a mantra of faith, it seems, that without a copyright imposed monopoly - all artists will just be starving fools on the streets looking for patronage. In fact, it kills me that everyone is supposedly justifying all this controll in the name of artists, but when you look at the facts - copyrights provide a decent living for maybe 1% of 1% of artists, whilt the 99.9% are locked into paying for any other song they want to perform live or copy. Fod God's sake, give a live concert, offer live artistic services, charge by the hour - if they're creative enough to make content that isn't trash, then surely they are creative enough to figure out a way to gain an income without a universally coerced distribution monopoly. Getting rid of copyrights will not destroy artists, most the entire renassance happened without them and today there are far more resources and needs for artists then there were back then. But getting rid of copyrights will get rid of the distribution cartell that holds so many artists back.
> Just because something is being abused, that doesn't make it inherently bad.
> They don't hurt anyone until somebody with bad intentions come along.
Good thing there aren't very many people in this world with those.
Doubly good that they don't seek, horde, and exploit inordinate amounts of power, political and otherwise.
- X
This post's captcha: stupid
Golden week... that's what a friend calls the time of the month that falls outside his girlfriend's week before, week of, and week after. He's a big fan of that week.
Made me wonder whose week Digital Music was enjoying.
But back on topic, I wonder how closely the rate of gift-download redemption follows the rate of gift-card redemtption.