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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.'"
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!
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I wonder if they take into account people downloading music for cds/albums/tapes which they own but are damaged or lost. I have a few friends who have to regularly re-download their music collection each time they get a new computer as they have no idea how to transfer files from one computer to another etc... these same people only seem to download the same 80's music that they already have cassette tapes for, but it's easier to download rather than digitize the music.
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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.
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.
It's not like the old days, where you buy an 8-track tape for the car and LP for the house... eventually replacing them with cassette tape and compact disc... sometimes more than once. Who's ever lost or broken an album?
Now that people can make their own copies and backups, there's a lot less opportunity to sell the exact same product repeatedly with ever increasing costs. Digital downloads tend to result in only one sale. You can't "break" an MP3 like a scratched CD. Bummer. Time to bring back Vinyl.
How about these maths:
Assume that instead the 40 billion downloads were legal downloads, and not even count the other 5%. Lets also assume that a download is worth 99 cents. Of that, the RI takes a huge chunk, I couldn't find exact numbers but lets say for the sake of argument the RI gets 50 cents (a low estimate in my opinion as the artist gets less than 10 cents in royalties, and apple claims most of the 99 cents goes to the recording industry). So at 50 cents per track this would mean additional revenues for the record industry of 2 TRILLION cents, or about 20 billion dollars. There is no way they were making their current cd sales + legal downloads + extra 20 billion prior to digital downloading.
So what does this tell us? Most downloads are not lost sales. The fact is that people consume many times more music because of music downloads, than if they had to pay.
I'll use myself as an example, prior to MP3's I bought about 12 albums a year or 1 per month. I'd say today I still buy about 12 albums per year, but I also download 3-4 additional albums per month that I never would have bought (i.e. worth a listen or two but not worth my money). Basically I am adding to the download statistics, but the statistics are misleading because the RI has lost no sales in my case. I think the numbers are extremely inflated because of this.
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