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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.'"
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?
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.
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...
Of course, with how much Podcasting is taking off, your entertainment doesn't necessarily have to be music, and certainly doesn't have to cost anything.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Of course it's about control. And of course it's about artists, writers, developers, etc.
Just because something is being abused, that doesn't make it inherently bad. copyrights & patents are like guns. They don't hurt anyone until somebody with bad intentions come along.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I agree on your view of the two conflicting visions, but I disagree on the possible outcomes. Copyrights MUST continue to exist and artists MUST be compensated. Hollywood and the RIAA are right when they say that if sales stop, so will the product. That does NOT mean we have to be saddled with DRM laden crap. Buy the CD and rip it yourself. Buy a DVD or DVR and timeshift/placeshift to your heart's content. Fair use is not piracy and please don't confuse the two. I envision a future where the corporations provide a product I want at a fair price in a manner that is convenient for me... but my kind of vision is nothing but a dream.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
With movies, we don't even want to see most of them, so their blaming things on piracy will just get worse when no one goes to see movies again in 2006.
It's a good point.
All the BS about piracy impacting sales at the box office for the 2005 year were a complete joke. Take a look at a list of box office revenues by year.
The movie industry was all up in arms just because the trend showing up to yearly 10% increase in sales wasn't continued. While the increase streak came close to ending in 2003, it is interesting to note that 2005 will be the first year since 1991 that movie sales haven't increased.
Damnable pirates! It's just not possible that rising ticket prices and poor movies have anything to do with it! The public is stupid. We tell them to go see movies and they do. It must be pirates, and draconian DRM is the only thing that can save us!
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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"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
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.
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...