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.'"

Comments

RIAA will spin it differently

[lar3ry]

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.

They are stealing from the mouth

[www.sorehands.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.

Re:They are stealing from the mouth

[chris_eineke]

Yep, and so it goes.

Yesterday you were a conservative artist making music for children about jesus and evil terrorists and today you find yourself being a juppy-pinko-lefty liberal, worshipping the flying spaghetti monster and at the altar of the church of sub-genius, downloading Metallica albums from soulseek, chatting in the evil depths of what is the so-called internet relay chat, downloading free porn, and posting comments on Slashdot*.

Won't someone please think of the starving child artists?

*Hyperlinks suppressed - IANAKW

Wait a second.

[slashbob22]

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.

20 million revenue, eh?

[AndreiK]

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.