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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.
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.
95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
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.
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
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?
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*
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.
"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.
It's almost amusing but mostly sad how both you and another guy failed to read the first part of the parent's post, ignoring the information and just try to reply to his other statement without understanding it.
Everything is copyrighted. FOSS software too. Linux is copyrighted, GCC is, this post is copyrighted. That's why, almost by definition, everything linked to from the torrent tracker was copyrighted. (The torrent files are not copyrighted, btw, but that's not relevant to the discussion).
What the RIAA/MPAA are trying to spread is the notion that everything under a copyright is forbidden to make a copy of, which is clearly false, and I think they are afraid that people will eventually realize that there is music out there you don't have to pay for, and there is quality software you don't have to pay for (not even by having to watch/listen to advertisements).
c++;
That is correct, they couldn't possibly make as much off the physical CDs. I hate being boring "on purpose" but, manufacturing cost, shipment, advertising, returns policies, middleman (jobber) profit margins and last retail outlet margins cut into the list price something fierce.
Sure they have some economies of scale, but not even remotely enough to negate the cost of incidentals.
One thing though, about CDs, is that they are a lot easier for Artist management to enumerate, for purposes of figuring the artist share. And that "share" is usually subtracted from advances, given at the time of signing "For hire" contracts, and is the artist's only non-touring, non-merchandising income.
Contracts almost always have a per unit rate (minus a percentage for breakage/returns) that is considered the artist share. There are exceptions, of course, and some artists have the wherewithal to initiate touring and merchandising business models that allow them to recoup a lot of the actual cash that was sacrificed when they signed away their publishing rights. But that is rare when we look at the industry and its "workers" as a whole.
Things are stacked against the workers, in many of the same ways that are common all across the board in our work for hire system. But the cool thing is that, although the labels can make more money with less accountability, by using all-digital means of production, that same tech is available to musicians, and, if utilized, will put growing numbers of them in control of the "means of production."
If that scenario were to gain the force of momentum and become the rule, rather than the "exception," we'd have a small revolution on our hands, at least in terms of workers' rights and fairness in that industry.
It would be a rather classic case of a monopoly based on shared objectives, rather than negotiation or collective agreements, etc., with the "workers" on the dealing, rather than the receiving, end of the game.
"First off, it only costs $1(us) at most to manufacture and ship a CD. Probably more like $0.50 or less, perhaps even $0.25. So they are likely making $11 to $11.75 for each CD after the physical costs of creating and moving them."
Distributors and retailers get part of the money you spend when you buy a CD. Record companies typically sell CDs into distribution for $8, so if we're trying to break down the margin model for CD sales, it's best to start with $8, not $12.
"Add to that the fact most people don't want to buy every song on a CD, and this means all things being equal, music companies will make more money on average by selling CDs."
You're correct, and that's why the industry is hurting so badly. Customers are buying too much digital media and not enough CDs, and the record companies' profit models just aren't prepared for this.
"Don't they usually charge $15 to $20 for newly released CDs?"
Some stores do, I imagine, but the average price of a new CD is around $13. This average price has held steady since about 2004. All the CDs on the Amazon top ten sell for between $9.99 and $12.99. The one exception is a David Foster CD/DVD combo for $19.99. Target and Wal-Mart have similar prices and Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart probably collectively sell most of the physical CDs in the United States. There might be some retailers that price new CDs at $15-$20 but they're a dying breed. These retailers are taking the extra margin; the CD sold for $15 or $20 was still sold by the record company into distribution for $8 and that eight bucks is all the record company saw.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
If you read up the thread you'd see that:
So the issue is $1 million of downloads vs. $1 million of CD sales. The dollar amounts have stayed the same, but their expenses are lower, and yet they whine that it isn't as profitable.
--MarkusQ