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Study Finds P2P Has No Effect on Legal Music Sales
MBrichacek writes "The Journal of Political Economy is running the results of a study into P2P file-sharing, reports Ars Technica. The study has found that, contrary to the claims of the recording industry, there is almost no effect on sales from file-sharing. Using data from several months in 2002, the researchers came to the conclusion that P2P 'affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.' 803 million CDs were sold in 2002, according to the study, which was a decrease of about 80 million from the previous year. While the RIAA has been blaming that drop (and the drop in subsequent years) on piracy, given the volume of file-sharing that year the impact from file sharing could not have been more than 6 million albums total. Thus, 74 million unsold CDs from that year are 'without an excuse for sitting on shelves.'"
That means they should give back some of the money they've confiscated in lawsuits over their 'losses'.
As if the world were fair.
I never believed that P2P would have a significant effect on the sales of records. Let's face it: most of us will simply go out and buy a record if we really want to have it. If we don't really want to have it, we may still pirate it. But we would definitely not go out and hand over a hunk of cash for it. Most of the music that we warez, I believe, would be the music that we wouldn't otherwise buy. Same goes for movies, games, everything.
It's easy for the large publishers to complain and act as though their sales are declining due to the increasing amount of P2P networking, but you might as well say that global warming is the cause. Afterall, neither have ever been proven to have a huge effect on record sales...
Well, we can start with everyone who plays WoW... Some people like getting their favorite free *nix distros via P2P. Just like some pirates like getting their free *dows distro via P2P, except the former is legal.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Filesharing HAS caused a drop in CD sales.
Because:
A. File sharing has caused RIAA lawsuits
B. RIAA lawsuits have pissed off customers
C. Pissed off customers look for other things to buy instead of CD's.
A->B->C so A->C
On a more serious note.... This reminds me of the global warming debate.. First you have those that say it's happening and those that say it isn't. Then enough studies come out that Global warming happening becomes the prevailing idea. So the next debate is Well, humans are causing it/it's natural. and so forth.
So we've seen the Cd sales are diminishing debate, CD sales ARE going down, now we're looking at why, the debate is File shareing / not file shareing / impact of file shareing.
I will be quite happy when the debate turns to "Your artists are CRAP, CD sales is dropping because the consumer is moving to buy independent artists' work, where they can find decent music."
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
That's the comment I got from various American youths. The music they are interested in has no long term value, unlike the Beatles/Stones/et al. Partly this has to do with the fact that most of modern pop is programmed on a cold computer and utterly devoid of real feeling; I get the feeling that while the kids are diggin' modern music at the same time they are unable to form a true connection to it, in the same way a human can't truly fall in love with a computer, because one knows it's an inanimate object at the end of the day. (And yes, I have read Isaac Asimov's robot story on the subject)
When I listen to music I'm partly looking to be wowed by the performance of at least some part of the piece. Current electronically generated and produced pop has no real performances to speak of, or if there is one can't be sure whether it's a sample of some old record thrown into the mix.
The point to all of this is that people now feel no reason to want to own the tracks they think they like (so that they can be listened to years down the road with fond memories) as music has become as commoditized and disposable as Gillette razors - only meant to be used for a certain period of time before being chucked in the bin.
There's a lot more to the problem of course, but the above does play an important part. The record companies need to produce artists (and they are out there) who produce real music and do it well. Fiddling with MIDI settings all day isn't producing music - it's computer programming.
Cheers
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Thus, 74 million unsold CDs from that year are 'without an excuse for sitting on shelves.
You mean besides the non-music industry perception that they contain music people are not really interested in or are at a price people are not willing to pay?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Thus, 74 million unsold CDs from that year are 'without an excuse for sitting on shelves.
That's the excuse. Sorry, people are buying less CDs because so many of the new CDs pushed by major labels are cookie-cutter copies of other CD's that sold well. Maybe I'm just getting crotchety in my old age, but all the music *does* sound the same to me.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
For all the CD's unsold and rotting on the shelves... they are assembly-line crap... like fast food for the masses, it is bland. Pay attention and you will see that a lot of what kids are listening to is... old fogey music! When I was a kid, I would never have listened to my dad's music because ours was so much better. Now, my son and his friends are hitting me up for ACDC, Led Zeppelin and many other old gems... in fact last night I turned him on to... the Cars!
There is some good indie music out there, but the major companies shun it while pushing out their canned pap. This is what is on the shelves rotting (as it should). No wonder their primary source of funds seems to be lawsuits right now.
No wonder the Police have chosen to reunite. The rockers with walkers are making a killing because the industry today is creatively bankrupt. Bring on Jagger, the Stones and their musical wheelchairs.
Their record sales plummeted because the music they're selling sucks. And because the music sold before is now available in much greater amounts, whether on "classic" (rock/R&B/80s/oldies) radio, much less destructible (than vinyl/tape) CDs, and even downloads that don't get lost as much.
The music biz used to be mainly in the business of finding artists coming from the mass of people, trying them out before "focus groups" (live audiences) who selected themselves from the cultural word of mouth, and cultivating them for a decade or more. The artists getting the most continuing investment were those most successful in either a live audience, or record sales even in a regionally highly varied market, feeding back with radio play. A natural coevolution of the artists and the audience, when mediated best by the music biz people engaged into both.
Now the biz thinks it's smarter than the market. Creating fake "artitst" who are really just spokesmodels in videos for a recorded product tied in with cobranded products like so much anime breakfast cereal. The model is to create as many products that can be most controlled as possible, within a narrow range of those styles best "understood" by the marketers, pushing more money than brains through the network of middleman connections, and maximizing the profit from anything that looks like it's "hitting". Meanwhile, these "smarter than the market" marketers are dumber than ever before, especially about music and the mass of people in the market, because the smarter ones have already fled the sinking ship a decade ago.
It's like the factory farms that breed mad cow. No wonder the music sounds like a soundtrack to the cows' death dance.
--
make install -not war
One possible flaw in the study is that consumers are often not interested in entire albums. If the data is being presented in album units, and most of the download traffic is around popular songs from those albums, that explains some of the discrepancy.
Well here's a question: was the music industry losing sales at a rate that doesn't correlate to the growth of p2p before p2p became popular? Your rant doesn't answer that question.
I download a shitload of music and movies. Yet, I buy the music I want. The availability of filesharing has not affected the amount I spend on culture each month. If I bought everything I download, I would probably have to pay some $2000/month.
When you say Everytime a new study come yet the results differs., take a look at the sources. All independent research has always shown that filesharing has not and does not affect record sales. All information that comes from the record companies says that they do. Who do you trust?
c++;
A little analogy to help this along. I've met a lot of Americans who say that they like Nickelback. Most people from Canada can't stand Nickelback. And do you know why? Well, Canadian content laws say that a certain percentage of music on the radio has to be from Canadian artists. So, because Nickleback is Canadian, and they are popular, you hear them about once an hour. They get way overplayed, and people stop wanting to listen to it. Even if Nickleback was replace with (insert best band ever), it wouldn't matter, because people would still get tired of hearing the same thing over and over again. I don't think the radio has ever been that good, but once file sharing came along as a way to find new music, the radio lost 98% of any appeal it had.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No, but there bias toward scientific studies and technical fact give most of them a good insight on IT debates.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The difference is that the RIAA and other similar industry reps will tell you that it affects sales for the simple reason that they view every download as a lost sale. What they refuse to admit is that in the vast majority of the cases where a song or album is downloaded, it never would have been a sale in the first place because the person wouldn't have ordinarily bought that album or song. By the RIAA's rationale, people would otherwise be spending hundreds of dollars more per year on music, which we all know is just not true. If there was no means for them to have free music, they would just not listen to as much music. What I never understood was why the RIAA thinks that people listening to less music is a good thing, regardless of the reason.
I didn't see any parading, though I did see evidence that it hurts sales by no more than 0.7%. How does openly discussing causal relationships in economics with respect to P2P hurt the credibility of a /., a news website that's centers a discussion about a topic for us to hash about until we set the facts straight?
Really, until you actually RTFA and tell me why they're wrong, I'll stick with the only person who has developed a point so far: TFA.
The problem with this study is that it's based on scientific criteria. The RIAA doesn't need science, they won't let reality fool them. They create their own parallel reality first and then base all their assumptions on that. More or less like what TV pundits do.
It's a model for long term gain, not short term profit. There are still some people and small companies following this model, but I agree they are dying out.
Market economics will quickly provide competition for short-term profit, but I suspect that markets don't innovate so well when the timescales are longer and the risks appear higher. The established market probably has to collapse in some way first, and some new bottom-up models emerge to fill the gap.
Sort of like an ecosystem that has ecological niches. You can't compete with the quick creatures that are already established if it takes you longer to get there, even if you would be bigger than them if you were allowed the chance.
Because the RIAA isn't about music. It's about money.
Artists hate dealing with business. Businesspeople know this, so they'll gladly flock to the "aid" of artists, telling them, "You just go and be artistic. We'll handle the business end for you." The trouble is that this lack of business savvy on the part of the artists attracts the bottom of the business barrel, the least scrupulous, most ambitious, laziest get-rich-quick bastards ever to earn an MBA.
They don't give two shits if you listen to music. They just want you to buy it, for as much as possible, as many times as possible.
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
And you seem to buy into the RIAA fascists' doctrine that the creators have some kind of God-given Right to profit from their so-called "IP." Here's a news flash: they don't. Copyright only exists "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," yet it has mutated into an abomination that hinders that progress instead. Therefore, it should be abolished with prejudice.
Perhaps what's immoral is upholding copyright, not violating it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No kidding!
Q: What's the only advantage radio still has compared to my iPod?
A: Traffic reports.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"We wouldn't have to put up with DRM if it weren't for pirates"
I'm not so sure. CD's are lacking any sort of copy protection or DRM, as were LPs before them.
The legislation to support DRM was put in place primarily with the DMCA which predates any sort of file sharing on a large scale. My guess is DRM was put in place primarily because of the *fear* of unauthorized file sharing, not from any losses.
But even if what you're saying is true, what do you propose? If people didn't commit crimes, we wouldn't need the police. If people at healthy, our health care costs would be lower. If people paid more attention on the roads we wouldn't need all those safety features in cars, etc etc.
But none of those things are true. The record companies can go one of two ways.... they either tighten down restriction on copying even more, or they remove it, lower prices, and go for higher volumes; at least change what they're doing somehow. It will be interesting to see what path they go down and if they fail or succeed.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Next, the MPAA will admit that TV show downloads does not help to decrease viewership and DVD sales.
In fact, I think it helps INCREASE it. I caught up on Futurama thanks to Usenet when I got into it toward the end of the first season, have since downloaded every episode, then bought the DVD sets, including the extra "Monster Robot Maniac" DVD. Ditto for Stargate; I got into it after it moved from Showtime to Sci-Fi, and am still working on buying the DVD sets.
I think the reason there has been no net gain in MUSIC sales is twofold:
- Most of today's music targets the lowest common denominator, and as such the quality suffers. In fact, it sucks. If you invest tens of millions into a few pop acts which you want to go multi-multi platinum, rather than a bunch of really, really good, but not cross-genre bands, you are digging yourself into a rut when people get sick of seeing Britney's mug everywhere
- Backlash for RIAA's lawsuits. I for one avoid exposure to new music. I shifted my entertainment dollars from buying up to 15 CDs per month to buying 5 to 15 DVDs per month. I do not download music, and my music collection is fairly large because I was buying CDs like mad when Napster let me conveniently try music before buying. I do not expose myself to new music any more because I do not want to be tempted to buy new material from large labels. Oh, I bought a couple of albums in recent years (Pink Floyd's In the Flesh, Gilmour's On Island), and will likely buy anything new The Police produce, but aside from the few bands I follow really closely, I'd just as soon skip it entirely.
For radio, I listen to talk, classical, and classic rock. I have pretty much all the classic rock one can own on CD (I still buy it, but only USED CDs), and pretty good renditions of standard classical pieces can be had for free from various Creative Commons web sites.
Fuck the RIAA, and fuck the MPAA.