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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?
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?"
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.
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.
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))
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.
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...
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!
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?
"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
Your statement describes my situation...
;-)... Even so, I have 167 items currently in my library. How is this possible? _All_ of the rest are rips of my CDs (basically all the CDs I've bought in the last 2 years... I haven't gotten around to ripping the old stuff).
I got an ipod nano for christmas (well, and a combined birthday present since my birthday is around christmas) and I have bought a total of 1 song and 1 video (yes, I know the nano can't play video... but I go to UT and _had_ to buy the highlights for the rose bowl
I have not a _single_ illegal song in my collection but haven't bought many either.
Further, my brother in law also got an ipod (shuffle) and got a $10 gift certificate from itunes (from me)... by the time I had left his house 4 days after christmas... he _still_ hadn't spent it all (he had bought about 8 songs). He was also filling up his collection with CDs....
So I think the 10 songs per 1 ipod sounds about right. Despite what _we_ make think here on slashdot, there are an awful lot of consumers out there who got ipods for christmas and don't know a damn thing about any P2P networks or how to get "illegal" songs.... all of these people just install itunes and enjoy how easy it is to buy music (unless you like Evanescence...).
Friedmud
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...