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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
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.
Are they including songs being played on MySpace pages? Unauthorized used on YouTube, etc?
Sounds pretty stupid to me.
...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?
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*
Wow, what a dismal and petty future you paint for yourself. Incidentally most of us "Over 30 crowd" are the people that designed the technology you asshat whippersnappers use to illegally download stuff with.
you disgust me.
right, because you wouldn't want to actually listen to an creative commons music, now would you?
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.
Because it was cheap (only $5) and you could share it with your friends (CC). People like both. People buy both. Are the music labels even listening? It works!
Actually, that just shows that no-one who listens to Lil Wayne was smart enough to go to TPB and download it for free.
well, unfortunately the legislators don't make laws for the common voters, only for those that vote with corporate 'donations'.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
I love how you try SO hard to take his comment apart, but apparently failed at reading it. You see, there's this thing called context, where you actually have to read the words AROUND a phrase or sentence to fully understand the meaning.
The poster did not say that marketing is always constant at all times under all circumstances. The poster said that, comparing marketing for a song that is distributed digitally, or one that's distributed physically, the difference, if there even is one, is negligible. If an artist is popular with a certain demographic, you're most likely going to be marketing to that group in the same way, regardless of how it's distributed. The difference between having a brick and mortar store erect a cardboard stand to advertise a cd isn't all that different from the price to have a digital music store show an ad for the album on their homepage. So yes, the net impact of marketing is almost nothing in this comparison, as the marketing strategy would be unlikely to change one way or the other.
Please learn to actually read comments you're replying to before flaming them.