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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.'"
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?
... Tell the Artist to stop making illegal music.
so did the artists themselves see at 25% increase as well, or are they being screwed on all sides now?
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
How can they be sure 95% of them are illegal?
This is what is going on here. The media companies decide, beforehand, how much money they should be making in a given period of time, based on voodoo bullshit as far as i can tell, then if they don't make that much money they bitch about the pirates and blame losses on them.
So while their digital revenue and legal downloads have probably gone up, the RIAA and the companies they represent think it should be going up MORE, a lot more apparently. The problem is they are fucking wrong, and have no credibility to say anything in public anymore.
100% of music downloads were illegal. Sounds like the RIAA is making progress
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.
The fact that the digital downloads grew from 25% and went from 20% of all sales to 25% of all sales says that overall sales remained the same (ie the digital downloads were direct cannibalization of physical purchases). The numbers themselves give that for a fact.
Couple that with the economy right now and you could say that, since the rest of the economy has gone to shit, avoiding a decline was as good as they could have hoped for. In addition, you could say that since digital downloads make a la carte purchasing possible where physical sales require you to buy a whole cd, the popular songs are getting even more popular with digital downloads. I think that 4x the number of people downloading certain songs would be good overall for the music industry since concert sales are a big draw and everything else (generally) would remain even.
That doesn't take into account the cost to produce a cd or the comparitive profit margins between the two. I don't know what those comparisons are and I'm not even going to guess at them since the rest of my post is based on things that are true and relatively simple extrapolations from that point, but I will say that I personally believe that the shift from physical to digital media isn't hurting their business, although it is definitely changing it. Let's call it a horizontal shift with opportunities to capitalize on the change.
"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.