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Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal
Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"
From the report:
Music companiesâ(TM) digital revenues internationally grew by an estimated 25 per cent in 2008
I can think of a long list of other industries that would love to have that kind of growth given the current economy.
Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
Advice to the RIAA: forget the piracy exists. You simply are not going to ever get money from those people - get over it. On the other hand, you're making more money than every from downloads and you should work to keep growing those figures. That's the only thing you can do, frankly. Fighting piracy is like punching marshmallows.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How can they be sure 95% of them are illegal? Isn't this the same group that's for years been trying to track down who is downloading what and suing them? I mean, studies like this go to the honesty of the other person. And if people will lie about something as trivial as how many sexual partners they've had, what are the odds of people telling the truth here? Besides, if 95% of music downloads were illegal, that's a pretty strong argument that downloading music should be legalized, especially considering how pervasive it is and how ineffective enforcement has been to date.
There are three kinds of lies...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
... Tell the Artist to stop making illegal music.
How is it odd? Most of my trips to the bathroom are to urinate. Is it therefore odd that I am defecating more lately?
(Yes, this is a commentary on the overall state of modern music.)
If you provide customer-friendly channels for obtaining music legally online, your sales will increase. Quit yer bellyachin' already.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Earth determined to be, in fact, round.
95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
...the other 5% are lying.
And how many people have been successfully prosecuted for these "illegal" downloads?
Why don't we use BitTorrent to our advantage and do some creative sharing? I propose a system of sharing free(as in freely licensed, like creative commons) songs where once a person has seeded the song to a certain ratio, it is deleted and it is automatically downloaded again. With enough people helping, I'm sure we could have some fantastic fake statistics a year from now.
Hurry up and give consumers more choice in how they acquire music (i.e. change your business model) some time this century, and perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem to begin with. At the moment, we're stuck with "pay as you go" music for per single/per album. Where's the contract music? Where I can get a certain amount of music I want for a flat rate per month etc. Oh wait, it doesn't exist yet (or isn't popular/supported enough)
My ass. I used to download music legally (well, paid for anyway). But that was before my country's Commerce Department decided to kill allofmp3. All that the labels needed to do was buy allofmp3 and set up servers worldwide. Hell, combine it with pandora and they'd have a great service. But no, we can't let that happen, it just has to be shitty quality doesn't it? FLAC or bust, morons.
(Before anyone brings it up, yes, I know about sparks, but never got it to work. And yes, there are many songs in which there is no noticeable advantage with FLAC.)
Yeah, 'engaging'. Uh huh. Doing nothing is not an option? Oh, I don't know, I think it's a damn good option. Then again, I don't have lobbyists.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
117% of people don't understand percentages.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Are they including songs being played on MySpace pages? Unauthorized used on YouTube, etc?
Sounds pretty stupid to me.
So this means that the album IS available for free to legally download via torrent AND it was the highest sale on Amazon. Remarkable eh!
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Straight piracy numbers, even when they aren't pulled right out of the industry's ass, really aren't all that informative, given how incredibly easy it is to download massive quantities of stuff. The real question is, how many of the pirates could actually be converted to paying customers?
Back in my highschool days(IRC, usenet, and earlish Napster, on dialup, eventually low-end DSL) I had a collection of ~80gigs. Given that most of it was 128kb mp3, that was a gigantic number of tracks. I doubt that I listened to even half of it once, and only a small part of it more than a few times. I ended up discovering some bands whose stuff I purchased; but obviously not nearly as many as I downloaded.
Now, I'm not going to say that what I did was right or idealistically motivated. Frankly, it was sheer packrattery on my part. I was caught up in the collecting process for its own sake, what I was collecting was largely secondary. And that was back when downloading was marginally inconvenient and slow. Somebody of that kind, today, could easily reach 800gigs by doing with modern methods what I was doing then. Almost none of that, though, would represent actual lost revenue.
5% of all music downloads are overpriced.
...let's go through that list of "illegal" downloads & find what percentage are not available for "legal" purchase/download.
In other words, how much of that music is not available from any "legal" source?
The only people who's opinions I respect in the music business are the artists and recording professionals. All the rest are spongers and leeches. If digital music connects the people who create music directly to the people who want to listen and pay them, then that's great. If it means that the business goes back to it's roots as a cottage industry and puts all the fat-cats out of work, then even better.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Sheesh, why not say it's 100%, or even 99.999% At least come up with some believable percentage for crying out loud..
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
100% of music downloads were illegal. Sounds like the RIAA is making progress
Beacause I've paid for my right to legaly download all the music I can sice I paid levies on CD's I used to backup my photos.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
In Canada, 100% of music downloads are legal. The law is clear: it is perfectly legal to download music without paying for it.
I mean really, a person can download a prolific artist's entire discography from a torrent site (and often times get a better product than they could pay for some where else, i.e. more complete, higher quality rips, obscure and bootleg recordings, etc) with a single click. This can be 500 or 1000 songs. Ok dumb (but partly true) example trying to put a nicer face on music piracy. But I feel it is higher than 95% just because it is relatively easy. I mean I could almost teach my mom how to do it.
And how much of these "statistics" are based on legally purchased music from indie bands? Just because some fat cat music exec doesn't make a buck off of it does not make it piracy.
Anyone else need to read that twice to read it correctly?
This is all because of this attachment to copyrights, which are harmful.
For more information see:
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
At my IP address it's a true 100%, no need for statisticians or surveys. Thank you to the director, the camera man, the other nominess *blubber* *squeal* and most of all to me...oh yeah and all you other leechers too. What strikes me as odd is that the illegal music sounds better than legal music and Works Everywhere!((TM)) Did anyone tell the RIAA yet? Maybe they didn't realise that selling a substandard product at a premium price alienates customers while empowering and enabling alternative providers.
While iTunes is a really nice idea for those clueless enough to need some handholding to load their iPod with music, face it - iTunes barely breaks even with the costs between credit card transaction fees and what they are paying to the copyright owner. It isn't a model that anyone would want to emulate. Apple has to do it because otherwise the clueless wouldn't have any way at all to put digital music on their iPod, thus iPod sales would suffer.
I don't know anyone that actually would pay money for digital music. It is all free, free for the taking online - if you know how. And if you have some kind of broadband Internet connection.
For the folks that access the Internet at the library, well, they aren't going to let you download music there, are they? Similarly for people with dial-up. No music downloads there. There is also the over-30 crowd that doesn't understand the Internet, computers or how to program their VCR. So there are still lots of people that have to pay someone to help them get digital music.
Oh, and we can't forget the guilt-ridden. Yes, the RIAA is suing people that distribute music. They are not suing people that download and merely download without redistributing music. So if all you do is leech music downloads from the Internet you are perfectly safe from the rath of the RIAA. But there are plenty of people that will say "... but, but, but, ... it is just wrong!" Yes, in today's climate it is wrong. No question about it.
The "wrongness" of downloading is soon to be moot. We are training (and have trained) an entire generation of people that believe it is not wrong. Anything that can be done on the Internet is OK and it is all there for free. Destroying people'e lives is OK, as long as it is on the Internet - our favorite MySpace scammer is getting another shot. Taking anything that isn't nailed down is OK too. So I see we are coming to a reckoning about copyright, distribution and the Internet.
Yes, I think it is probably a dark future for people that want to "create" as apposed to those that want to create "mixes" and "mashups". Creativity better be its own reward in the future, because anything else is going to be pretty slim in the "reward" or "compensation" category.
"In France in the first half of 2008, album releases by new artists fell by 16 per cent and local repertoire accounted for 10 per cent of albums, compared to 15 per cent in the first half of 2005."
France also has some of the strictest IP laws in the world. So obviously they are doing something right.
Not only is fighting piracy like punching marshmallows, it's like dealing with this one. They'll definitely need to cross their emitted energy streams to kill it off!
Haven't you heard that 83% of all statistics are made up?
and a 50% chance they will ask for a federal bail out package
I'm 95% sure I don't give a damn.
I have about 150 albums in mp3 format that I've downloaded.
Almost all of them I own or have owned on CDs or cassette tape in the past very few of which have survived my various moves or the test of time.
You can't take the sky from me.
Obviously the numbers seem quite inflated, but thinking about it for a moment, it might be plausible.
With the advent of iTunes and other pay per track services, consumers are digitally purchasing only the tracks they want. Pirates on the other hand will likely download the entire album for completeness sake. Assuming the average CD is 12 tracks, the numbers do not seem that hard to believe.
Also if it really is that big and your sales are going up, well then what's the worry? Maybe it actually leads to MORE sales.
The problem is they project this image, and indeed have this mentality, that copyright infringement is theft. No it isn't. The reason a retailer hates theft is because not only does it decrease sales, but it takes away an item they had for sale. That hurts the bottom line. If someone steals a bag of chips, I can't sell those chips to anyone else. So if I'm a retailer, I want to do everything I can to stop that (and even then retailers accept that some shrinkage is going to happen regardless).
However if someone came in to my store, made a perfect copy of a bag of chips and then started handing out those copies for free. Well I'd be less miffed. Maybe I'm losing some sales now, but it isn't as though anything has been taken from me. Now suppose that when someone does that my sales don't go down, they in fact go up. People decide they want to come in and buy more chips, or other things I offer. Despite the free stuff being given away, I make more money. Well hell in this case I'd be happy. Let them hand out free stuff all day long if it makes me more money.
They just have this unrealistic greedy idea that if there was a magical system that could stop all copyright infringement, they'd get 20x the sales and thus 20x the profits. Ummm no. At best, you'd probably stay the same (the only empirical study of this ever done by Harvard and UNC found copying has no statistically significant effect on sales) at worst your sales would go down. They need to stop living in a fantasy world and be ahppy with what they've got.
What if ISPs were to offer, as part of their Internet service packages, subscriptions to legit online music services? Like...
Basic 10mbps service = $30/month
Basic 10mbps service + music = $37
This is NOT a copyright tax, or anything of the like. Some ISPs make deal with AV companies, so customers can get free AV service. How about allowing people to upgrade, for a nominal monthly fee, to get a free subscription to a music service?
If the cost of music is the reason why people pirate, then a low cost, simple as that, may be a partial solution.
Remember, kids... NYCL doesn't believe in copyright infringement, and neither should you!
For such big man talk, you felt the need to comment anonymously. On the internet. On a thread completely unrelated to what you're ranting about. That hardly anyone who would care will read.
I think someone needs a hug.
*hug*
"The top-selling digital single of 2008 was Lil Wayne's Lollipop with sales of 9.1 million units"
I think my hope for the human race just died a little.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Since pirates created the digital music market how much will the companies profiting from that market be paying to the pirate community? Apple owes the pirate community compensation for all the iPods they've sold as well as all the iTunes sales. That's a pretty chunk of change.
It may not be inflated. Remember what the music industry considers piracy: Copying your library to an MP3 player, burning a CD for your car, putting your library on a laptop, etc. The industry doesn't like the fair use provisions in copyright law, so they frequently pretend like they don't exist.
The amount of P2P traffic with copyrighted material is still huge. An amusing case study was when Icelandic police shut down a popular local torrent site featuring mostly copyrighted material. Local ISPs reported anything up to a 75% reduction in network traffic until alternative sites popped up. This of course did not take very long. But it still comes to show how immense scale of this phenomenon is since most of the material on this torrent site was definitely copyrighted. Sooner or later copyright owners and the people who in the past became used to raking in cash by controlling the flow and distribution of this material will have to come to terms with the idea that the best they can do is accept P2P as an unpalatable reality and leech it somehow for their revenue. It seems to me Apple has a working model; guarantee a certain level of QOS at prices that are so low it is less hassle to pay the tax and get instant gratification than it is to spend a long time queueing up for content and then downloading it at a snails pace and finally running the risk of spending a while in codec-hell until you can finally enjoy the material. Until this finally sinks in, content owners and distributors are fighting a losing battle against an infinitely adaptable opponent.
You just responded to some ancient copy/paste job, supposedly from the guy who created this page: http://dogcow.atspace.com/
Who are the stupid 5% that are paying for music?
What they need to do is develop some sort of pricing model that achieves some level of market segmentation. Kids downloading songs off of limewire aren't going to pay $.99 per song, so if you give them the song for $.05 then you just made $.05 (minus the tiny infrastructure cost) that you otherwise wouldn't have. At the point where the infrastructure cost outweighs what you can charge them (kids don't all have credit cards), then let them pirate it, theres no profit to be had anyway and its just free publicity.
The real challenge is in achieving that segmentation, and doing it legally and in a way that won't get every privacy group in the world up in arms. Things like Ruckus, a windows media format (DRMed, of course) based site offered for free to college students, are one way of approaching the problem, and considering how shitty it is, it is surprisingly popular among kids (especially girls) in the dorms at my school.
A similar, but more generally applicable approach, would be to have a tiered system of account "levels", where "higher" level accounts actually charge more per song (but perhaps offer other benefits). Offer large schools and employers a certain number of accounts based on how many employees/students they have, and a certain portion of those accounts be of each level. Offer the institution a certain portion of the profits, and point out that by giving the accounts where songs cost the most to the highest paid employees they will maximize profits. Or, offer them (and the employees/students) the chance to buy into a plan where all accounts offer cheap music, but they still get back a portion of profits.
Another important thing to do is just plain give up on the DMR on such systems. If someone wants to pirate the song, they'll pirate the song. By DRMing the shit out of the media people obtain the way you want them to obtain it, you just encourage them to use other means.
Its really all a game of trying to target the right demographics with the right products and the right prices. And, of course, doing so legally, etc.
Huh? How in the heck could that be? There are costs associated with manufacturing, shipping, distributing and marketing the $12 CD that just aren't there for the $1 downloads. If you're sell a million dollars of $12 CDs vs. the same amount of $1 downloads, how could you possibly make more profit on the CDs?
--MarkusQ
All of my music starts life in CD form.
Snobby, sure, but no digital format's outpaced the old standards, and I doubt any will.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
And that was nearly a decade ago, right here on slashdot. Remember Taco? Taco must have a million by (note that is not buy) now.
there isn't a Google Records yet. They certainly seem to have the capability to make money from advertising and giving things away for free.
or IOW how in the fsck is this news? and more importantly why should anyone give a rat's ass about the RIAA & co.?
Only about 5% of free music is any good
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The internet the new radio. I wonder if they ever did a study comparing how many people just listened to the latest top 40 hit on the radio (usually played every hour) compared to how many people actually bought the 45.
So F U recording industry. (Not the artists themselves)
And they act surprised. ROTFLMAO!
The point of the FA is that 95% of, uh, listeners, don't buy what they've downloaded, so saying "it will sell itself" is contrary to fact and the FA. Well, 95%, that is. I don't know about you, but if somehow between my paycheck and my bank 95% up and walked away, I'd would not accept this being a good thing. Now, if it were your 95% walking its way into my pocket, then alrightythen, no complaints, and I welcome more of the same !!
Hey, current record labels?
You know how you can get people to download from you legally? Make it cheaper. So cheap that it's not even worth the minimal hassle to find it free. Don't like that? Not going to buy you your next Porsche? Tough; that's your only option to reduce piracy.
You've made a lot of money out of other peoples hard work for too long. I for one am not sorry to see your slow, struggling death. Evolve or die, bitches.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
My mind must really be in the gutter.
I thought it said "The International Federation of the Pornographic Industry"
yea, you need to learn how to read... your post makes no sense, and your claims are not supported by reality.
most people i know pirate music. that is often how they are first exposed to new artists/bands. as a result of this exposure, they go out and see shows by these artists and buy their albums & merchandise. the artist & record labels benefit from this, but their initial pirated download is still considered illegal. so it doesn't matter if 95% of music downloads are illegal. illegal downloads don't cost musicians or record labels any money. and if the result is a net increase in overall sales, then it's still good for business.
what you do or don't consider a good thing is meaningless as you seem to have a very poor grasp of economics. also, i'm glad you think that it's ok for people to be screwed over as long as it's not you. clearly you're a very enlightened person. luckily not everyone thinks that way, and it's certainly not why i promote file sharing. if i thought that file sharing hurt record labels, then i would not be promoting it, as i work for one, and they sign my paychecks.
:) :)
I think we should perhaps stop bothering reporting these numbers, it's all guess work with no real data.
It's not possible to prove that they will earn 95% more if there was no "downloads". It's not even possible to prove that the 95% number is true.
And any counter claim is also based on pure guesswork with no real way to prove it.
All I can do is wonder how much of those 95% illegal "downloads" can be considered advertisement that generate sales? In other words, if we remove all stuff they consider illegal, would it kill the recoding industry due to reduced sales?
The latest flavor of the month is only played once per hour?...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
And I don't buy 95% of the music I hear on the radio either, I don't see what it has to do with any lost income or lost sales anywhere.
c++;
"Oddly enough, digital music sales are up"
It's not Odd at all, 95% of those ilegal downloads wouldn't have resulted in a sale anyway.
People will get things from file sharing that they would never pay for themselves, thus the industry loses very little and actually gains due to higher exposure.
People buy music to support the bands, because if they don't the band will disappear and there will be no more music, so they do.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
But "its" is the gender-neutral version of "his" and "hers." The folks who mistake "it's" for "its" usually don't write "hi's" or "her's."
I like to point people to how-to-spell-its.com.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Oh I know that, I'm just pointing out why people get it wrong so much.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If I didn't know better I would think the vast majority of people might want different music copyright laws. Hey Legislators, knock-knock, it's us, the voters.
Music? Who cares?
Cable? Who cares?
Phone service? Who cares?
Sexual service (from best friend's wife)? Who cares?
I pay for none of these. Nothing is lost. I gain a lot. That's win-win for me and that's what matters.
...for bias.
Much like Monsanto claiming non-genetic crops cause 95% failure during harvest.
Why doesn't someone publish a pro report stating with facts that music stealing causes more legal sales and more income?
I bought Britney's latest CD AFTER i downloaded a copy from RS. Why? Hell i wish to support her coming back.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Wow, I can't believe it. That number is SO high! It's simply impossible to believe it, the technologies that we came up with in 2007 helped us pirate a huge amount of music in 2008. This is unheard of!!!
So, what's new?
ciphersort claims that 95% of firms break laws.
Ah forget it! The figures are bogus anyway.
They're announcing record breaking profits year after year. Billions of Dollars. Legal download figures went up significantly last year. With all that water flowing their way they still can't drink enough? That's what's wrong with these guys. They're making billions of dollars and start complaining about what they COULD HAVE gotten if they did get the revenue from black market sales as well. That is as if BMW announced they would sue the entire East-Bloc states for the black market sales value of stolen cars. What the hell?
...95% of MY music downloads are illegal. Go representative sample population!
If the IFPI says so it must be true.
Considering that 87.34% of all statistics are made up I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit.
You may not hear it in your setup, but in my setup of hand-woven pure gold-plated copper wrapped in diamond-encrusted insulation, the artifacts of FLAC come through clearly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Anyone remember buying an album [vinyl] for a song you heard on the radio? If you really liked the single, you might go pay $5 for the 45, and if you really liked the flip side, you'd buy the album for $20? Then you'd discover that you hated all the songs except those two (for me it was Supertramp's Breakfast in America.)
So casettes came in, and you could record songs for your friends or from your friends - and that way you knew if you liked the album or not - because as a kid $20 was a lot of money. The hiss on the casette was usually a good incentive to buy it on tape or vinyl. But those pesky tapes always seemed to get chewed up, and those albums scratched, so you almost had to make favorites compilations.
Then CDs, and the hiss is gone, but you still shared casettes and as the technology got cheaper faster, you could burn tracks. Not so easy until machines got powerful enough to chew through FTs and MP3 took over the world as a lossy compression.
Now you save the files to your computers, MP3 players (phones or whatnot), and email or message them to your friends... and if you really like it, you probably still buy an album (though that paradigm is twilighting), but maybe some other songs by the same artist (from their collection, which is what an album was anyway).
Being able to share music and copy it has always been with us. From sheet music to MP3. People always discriminate based on taste and take a least-cost approach to investing something of themselves... I think the music "industry" has focused too much on "protecting their investment" and has completely missed aspects of human nature that they could foster and exploit rather than punish. Sure, go after the big time pirates dup'ing CDs, or rogue music stores charging for someone else's work. But stop people from sharing music? Never going to happen. Maybe put that money into increasing quality or diversity of the offering... or better yet R&D that figures out how to make a buck on the social networking aspect of it.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
There has to be some spread by area. My main exposure to the classical RIAA model was mall music stores, and not counting the special 10 discounted loss leaders of the week, "average" price was easily $15-17. (Gotta love those .99 pennies!)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Is that design a colossal Moebius Strip?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
No one likes what it became, but it does have to exist because band members can't usually negotiate all the externals. In comes the Band Manager.
So far, so good. But American business likes to accordion between consolidating and spinoffs.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Double Mobius - or -1 * -1 = 1 - sad.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
is called a market...
It's also called "inevitable".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!