Game, DVD Sales Hurting Music Industry More Than Downloads

Aguazul writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "The music industry likes to insist that filesharing — aka illegal downloading — is killing the industry; that every one of the millions of music files downloaded each day counts as a 'lost' sale, which if only it could somehow have been prevented would put stunning amounts of money into impoverished artists' hands. ... If you even think about it, it can't be true. People — even downloaders — only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs? I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else. What else, I mused, might they be buying? The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed 'a record year.' In fact ... games spending has risen dramatically — from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008. Meanwhile music spending has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn."

Comments

I would say that fits my personal spending habits

[Qazimov]

I have well over 200 CD's that I paid full retail for at legitimate stores. I listen to music all day at work and for many years enjoyed my collection digitized and copied to whatever machine I was working on. That said, I haven't purchased a CD in over 3 years, and I don't download mp3s or touch any torrents of any kind.

I switched to shoutcast streams many years ago, and as of a little over a year ago I started using Pandora.com and haven't looked back.

I buy and play games for my xbox and my PC. I purchase movies (I still haven't paid more than $10 for an HD movie, MPC + HD/BR player FTW).

Anyway, that said - if you were to graph my spending over the last decade 1999-2009 you would see a lot of money going to the music industry (15-25albums /year @$15 each) dwindling down to nothing as of about 2005. Some spending on games (probably 5-8/year @ 50 each) staying pretty consistent with a slight upswing in the last 4 years. Movies, didn't buy all that many VHS, have probably 80 or so DVD's (at probably 10/year) - 20 or so HD/BR movies, all within the last 10 months.

Re:The magic of Blu-Ray!

[TheRaven64]

This is precisely what people said about DVD's about a decade ago

No it isn't. People looked at DVD and saw:

• Smaller form factor.
• Better picture.
• Better audio.
• Longer lasting.
• No need to rewind.
• The ability to play on computers and portable players.

People look at BD and see longer load times, and a better picture (if you also buy a new TV when you buy your BD player). DVD was better in every way than VHS. BD is not noticeably better on existing equipment. If you bought a DVD player, took it home, plugged it in to your existing setup, and watched a DVD, you immediately got noticeable improvements. BD does not have this advantage unless you already have an HD TV.

The other thing to change is that the durability of DVDs has made rental prices drop and - most importantly - made renting by post easy. These rental services give you access to a massive library of material on DVD. Most of this is not available on BD and even if it were, there is no compelling reason to prefer the BD version; in a lot of cases the source material does not make use of the quality available for DVD.

That's not to say HD video won't catch on. BD has a race to get sufficient market penetration before it's completely obsolete though. I can get a 20Mb/s connection now. My ISP is currently rolling out 50Mb/s, and their competitors are deploying similar speeds. BD has a maximum AV bitrate of 48 Mb/s. The companies that offer DVD rental are now offering Internet streaming as well. Given the choice between a BD player, where I have to get disks posted to me, or a box that plugs into my Internet connection and lets me stream video on demand, I know which I'd prefer. With the introduction of iPlayer, I already watch more via the Internet than by any other medium, including DVDs. I doubt very much that that trend will reverse, certainly not in time to save BD.

Re:Some excerpt

[jedidiah]

This isn't correlation or causality. It's simply painfully obvious.

Those in the game industry explicitly acknowledge this and
freely admit that they have to compete with not just other
forms of paid diversion but of diversions in general. The
game developer has to compete with it all, including sex.

The members of the MPAA and RIAA are probably too complacent
and too "fat and happy" to realize this.

Game developers do though.