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Digital Music Sales Skyrocket in 2005
Luke PiWalker writes "The market for digital music hit $1.1 billion in 2005, more than triple 2004 sales. But the industry, wanting to wring the maximum profit out of the consumer, remains fixated on piracy." From the article: "The IFPI also called on ISPs to join the fight against music piracy, which it claims severely erodes the profits of its 1,450 member record companies across the globe. The IFPI added that the legitimate music business was gradually gaining ground on digital piracy. It said research showed that in Europe's two biggest digital markets -- Britain and Germany -- more music fans are now legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping."
Be careful folks, if it's too good to be true, it is.
My work here is dung.
They simply take the magic "projected sales if internet didn't exist and we were still in the 80's" number, subtract actual sales, divide that by average CD price and then multiply it with their gut feeling.
Absolutely, and you say:
> doesn't it seem kinda fair if the creator asks to get paid?
Yes definitely, but having spent the last few weeks working on a music website for a singer who used to have a music career, had a song that went platinum, and then ended up doing painting and decorating because she never saw any of the money, as did the recording studio who were recording her tracks, I think you are being very naiive if you think that the creators actually get paid most of the time. As her horror story showed me, as well as others I know about from being involved, the money does not go to the artistes, it generally goes to corrupt music industry executives who try and blackmail female artistes into sex for career advancement, and who seem to pocket the money only to spend it on shovelling coke up their noses. Seemingly they spread their fun to their lawyers too. So putting your comments in context, i don't think you really understand the nature of the music business.
> I am an IP lawyer, so I may be slightly biased,
Well I guess you're definitely missing out on the fun the music industry lawyers have.
Can you sleep at night with your views? Knowing that the genuine creators are not compensated, but all the middle men, the leeches like the lawyers etc are essentially stealing the money the creators make ?
> I have trouble understanding why so many people seem to condone simply *taking* it...
Simple. If the creator gets the lion share of the money, then I would pay without a second thought. As long as people who do not add value get the majority of the money, and defend their behaviour through suing everyone else, then I will have no part of it, and will actively seek the middlemen's economic demise.
> and then playing the 'Evil industry' card on the rightholders to boot!
> Seems a bit incongruous to me.
Seems you're a bit naiive for a lawyer.
People like John Kennedy and the IFPI and the RIAA are real scum. Instead of developing a credible business model that fairly compensates the artistes, they are more concerned with preserving their own financial gravy train which keeps the artistes under their thumb.
Well, at the basic level your computer is also analog. It works with voltages, currents and charges, which are all perfectly analog magnitudes (Ok, charge can only come in integer multiples of the elementary charge, but then, the charges in your computer are still large enough that this doesn't really matter). Indeed, 0 and 1 are not represented by an exact voltage, but by a whole voltage range (i.e. everything which is below a certain voltage counts as 0, and everything which is above a certain other voltage counts as 1).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.