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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."
For defining Opportunity cost, and boring everyone senseless at the same time.
Let's see.
Games are on Blue-Ray.
Movies are on Blue-Ray.
If only the music industry would put their product on Blue-Ray, it would sell well, too!
Yes, apparently, constant threats of lawsuits might cause people to spend their entertainment money elsewhere. It's kind of like with those Capitol One mailers. On the back of the envelope it says something like "tampering with or changing the contents of this envelope may subject you to legal action." Oh yeah, I am so going to get a credit card from people who start off threatening to sue me (and for what?). Same thing with the RIAA. You sue your customers, we go elsewhere and tell you where you can stick those shiny, plastic discs.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
You mean like NBC did with Hulu? Or Apple did with Ipod?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
no one
ah you're wrong...
One of them would win, some times one, some times the other...
but the loser will always be the consumer.
the interesting part is that in a proper market, the consumer would be the winner when there's increased competition.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
The article claims:
1- consumers buy games/DVDs over the latest music album
2- consumers don't have enough money for music
3- consumers download music
Based on their evidence, though, you could also conclude:
1- consumers download music
2- consumers still have money
3- consumers buy games/DVDs with saved money
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that downloading a song==lost sale, but I don't think the evidence stated necessarily means that people are choosing games/DVDs over music.
One thing that is not really debatable is that the music industry business model is outdated, overgrown with middlemen, and on it's way out. And the end won't come soon enough.
FUNK!
The rise of zero personality manufacturer bands (The Jonas Brothers... like the Monkees but with out the hard cutting edge) and their cult of multiple product selling surely also has to be responsible. Its not just Games and DVDs its the fact that for a given "star" you can get pens, pencils, school bags, DVDs, 3D Movies and all manner of other crap. Their objective almost isn't to sell the music its just to sell the image and then have people buy lots of things with that image.
Dora the Explorer has as much credibility as these bands and is focused on a similar financial plan.
Meanwhile good bands seem to be going into the live tour set up more and more and being less worried about CDs. So what is killing CDs is that at the crap end people are flogging pens and school bags and at the good end its about the live gigs. Meaning that if you want entertainment at home you go for DVDs (because the Cinema is a rip-off) or Games (where you get to do more of what you want).
The music industry has killed the CD by focusing on bag sales and forcing decent artists to focus (thank god) on live gigs.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
As much as I would like to believe this, the mantra still applies:
correlation != causation. (and I'm not even sure there's enough data to establish for the former)
because you can get the one song you like off of iTunes/amazon/whatever. Why always start from the assumption that it must be illegal activity that is adversely affecting sales.
The legal marketplace has changed to benefit the consumer economically, by not gouging them for $6/15 for a single/album respectively, now they can get what they wanted for around a $1. Some will buy more music but many others will move that savings to other avenues of entertainment.
And offers such iron-clad evidence as "If you even think about it, it can't be true," and "I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different."
It seems so obvious it amazes me how many higher ups in these industries fail to recognize that they're not in the record business, or the video game business, or the film business. They're in the entertainment business. If you're going to make it a pain in the ass to purchase your music or to watch your movie, I'm just as happy to spend my time reading a book, or surfing the Internet, or playing a video game. 99% of the time I'm not even going to bother trying to hunt down a pirated copy, because quite frankly I'd rather just spend that time being entertained by one of the other numerous options I have available to me. You're not competing for my money, you're competing for my time, and you're competing against everything else I can possibly find to fill it with. The sooner these businesses learn this the easier they'll find it to get my money.
Who is the main target audience for popular music (i.e. the staple of the music industry)? Teenagers. Now, teenagers have a bit more pocket money today than they did in the 80s and 90s, inflation sure took care of that, but they also have a lot more to spend it on.
I was a teenager in the 80s and 90s. What was there for us to spend our pocket money on? Music. Fashion. Junk food. Umm... Arcades, maybe. Besides that... umm... I'm open for suggestions, but that's what my friends spent their dough on (for me it was computer games, but that was me...).
Today, you have cell phones (and the various services that come with it, from ringtones to games), you have computer games, MMOs with their recurring subscriptions, Trading Card games, you have all sorts of markets geared either exclusively at teenagers or at least aiming heavily for them.
The music industry simply has to share the market with others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
/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.
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
Lack of quality music hurting music industry more than downloads.
After taking a step back from everything related to music, radio, magazines, and quality of artists, there isn't one thing that isn't failing, Radio isn't playing anything that isn't on their Clear Channel list and doesn't care to play anything extra. Rolling Stone, which is supposedly is a magazine that celebrates music, is failing miserably in content by falling to much on pop music when really good rock bands are out there, but can't get any airplay because the only thing that sells is pop music. Then we come to the artists, maybe I am getting older, but music, in all forms is truly horrible, at least accessible music. Rap and R & B has fell in love with the Cher, Believe voice autotune, Rock sounds like the instruments are played under water because it just plods along. Country even though I don't listen to it, turned into twang pop, and then my favorite is Pop itself, which seems to me can't get any blander, no matter how much sex and edge they try to put into it. I honestly think soon there will be something to make music better than it is right now, but I have know idea how that is possible, any suggestions?
It's poor product that is hurting sales. Put the blame where it belongs, with the RIAA cartel itself.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've said this for a while.
People only have a finite amount of money. What the music industry has failed to grasp is that it no longer has a near monopoly on entertainment that it shared with the likes of the movie industry for the decades before the internet. It now has to compete with a bigger set of movies than ever before, it has to compete with the games industry and really for teenagers it even has to compete with things like text message costs and so on.
The music industry isn't in competition with piracy, it's in competition with every other form of entertainment expenditure out there. The only way to win that battle is how you would win a single industry battle - provide the most attractive product.
When people can buy their computer games, say, Rock Band, and get their music as part of that, they'll be less inclined to buy the music alone.
The same goes for those developers complaining about people pirating their games but if people can only afford one game, they'll buy the best game, that doesn't stop them wanting to play the other game though, they simply don't have money for both, so they'll buy the better one and pirate the not so good one.
It's simple business competition through and through - again, make a good product and you'll get your fair share of sales from people who think your product is the one worth paying for. Try and sell people crap, or try and sell people the same thing multiple times in multiple formats and don't be suprised when it's not your product they choose to spend their money on.
I'm sure some people will try to argue it's immoral that people do this and that's a fair enough argument, but arguing the morality of it doesn't change the reality of it and anyone with any business sense would realise that and make sure their business factors it in and produces a product good enough to get their share of the finite pool of consumer cash out there.
Meh, there's also the physical medium to consider. I suspect more people buy games than buy music because many come on proprietary cartridges, which end up being a lot harder to clone than CDs. This may not be true of some of the newer systems if they use standard DVDs, but it used to be that you had to invest quite a bit of time and/or money to rig up a cartridge writer.
I download cracked games and MP3s to check out the content before I part with my hard-to-come-by money. While I no longer spend nearly as much on either as I used to, I am much happier with the items I do purchase.
And no, you can't really get a feal for whether a game is going to be worth playing on your home system from a demo at the store. Aside from that, the only game demos I see running are on consoles, not PCs.
Some music stores let you listen to a select set of albums before you buy them, but usually it's limited to the current top 10 or 20 CDs, which are rarely what I'm interested in. For that matter, I find I just gave up on shopping at the local CD store and go straight to the internet to order new CDs -- the stuff I want is rarely stocked by the local stores. (Ask them about Blind Pig Records and you just get a blank stare.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
people buy games and DVDs these days instead of music because most of the music available now simply sucks
IMO the value of a $50 game is far greater than a value of a $15 60 min. audio CD or a 90 min. movie DVD. Music feels dirt cheap compared to games where every single object in a huge GTA map had been created and placed by hand, and when you can do all kinds of things and expect reasonable game response to them. I feel comfortable with paying for a game because I see what's there on the DVD and I'm amazed at complexity and labor that went into making that game. But I am minimally awed by someone singing (even if that) for three minutes - definitely not to the tune of $1 per song (or $10 per song that you like.) I understand that there is some labor in composing, rehearsing, recording and publishing the song, and I may be willing to pay $1 per CD, but not much more than that.
You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie - they are static; because of that their replay value is low (especially movies.) But a game can be played several times - not just on different levels, but using different tactics, with different goals. A $50 Resistance can result in many hours of play - which is a creative activity, since you have to invent your own ways to get around or through those Chimera. But watch a movie of someone's playing, be interested for a few minutes at key scenes ("Does he quickly run into that end room in Cathedral, or just retreats within the main hall?") but be bored otherwise. Add multiplayer, and the movie can't be even compared - you can play multiplayer for weeks and each time get a different result; but the movie, of course, ends the same way each time you watch it.
Which is to say, they are competing against the internet itself. Email, facebook, youtube, slashdot, wiki, flashgames. All of the free legal entertainments and timekillers online effectively chew into paid entertainment sales aswell.
But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue.
An excellent point about how the music industry is cooking the books. Here's another point they refuse to discuss: You can illegally download games too, and it doesn't seem to be hurting the games industry one single bit.
No, really! You can. And yet the games industry is booming and the music industry is not.
I wonder what the difference could be.
Could it be that suing your customer base is a bad idea? Could it be that the games industry is putting out a more appealing product? Could it be that music and games both compete in the entertainment arena and people only have so much money to spend on luxury items in a recession?
Nah, couldn't be any of that. Clearly it's P2P that's killing the music industry.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie...
I'm sorry, but that's pretty narrow-minded - if you think music always sounds the same and that therefore you have no reason to listen to it more than once, you either have truly horrific taste in music or you don't pay much attention to it. I've listened to some albums hundreds of times and I keep hearing new things, making new connections, realizing new influences and learning from them. Video games might be more expansive, but they are ultimately finite in scope - a good album breathes and grows depending on the other stuff you listen to, on what you bring to the table. Video games are like stale bubblegum from a supermarket vending machine in comparison.
I could take an axe to my game systems tomorrow and not shed a tear, but the thought of living without music scares the piss outta me.
I wrote a letter to "Wired" stating essentially this... two or three years ago, in response to some article or another discussing music piracy.
When I was a kid (back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, of course), home entertainment media was pretty much your choice of LP, 45-single, cassette, or 8-track. In short, all products of the Recording Industry. Today, you have CDs, LPs (rarely) and downloads from those guys. But that same entertainment dollar is now also split between electronic gadgets, videos (DVD, Blu-Ray, that one guy still buying VHS), and gaming (console, pocket, online).
Then add in the fact that digital downloads re-introduced the single, and the whole industry plan that removed the single back in the 70s in favor of the whole album is gone... only now, they've grown dependent on selling whole albums. Then add in discounts on digital downloads... I've bought direct form the artist, from eMusic.com, and from Amazon.com. I only buy full albums, but if the digital version is near the CD price, I'll just buy the CD. When I can get an album for $2.00-$4.00, I probably buy the download.
And that's perhaps a good thing in the long run for the music industry. They'll have to adjust, and stop paying their relatively worthless executives so much. The new point of stability has a CD selling for under $10, so that it's seen as competitive with DVDs at $15 or video games at $30-$60.
They also need to acknowledge the actual role of record companies in the 21rst century, and price accordingly. There was a time when these guys were responsible for all sorts of artist development... they hired the backing band, they owned the studios, etc. It was very much the same artist management model use in Hollywood of the 40's and 50's. But today, you don't get a recording contract with a major label until you have a fully produced CD to show them... they're not even remotely part of any creative process at that level (they may get involved pushing established artists... after huge cuts to their rosters, due to cost reductions and mergers, they're more dependent than ever on a few big hits every year, despite the fact you can't really depend on that).
So the Big Label really has a purpose only as a publisher and distributer... the same thing book publishers do. Only, when I buy a Stephen King book, I see his copyright on the backside of the title page. When you buy most CDs, you'll see the record company claiming copyright. That's a projection of just how important they think they are, and when that starts to change, you'll know that there's maybe some hope for the industry. The big labels, or their replacements, will catch onto this... the only question is whether or not a record label still makes any sense, or generates any money, by the time they do. It's easy to see folks like Apple, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best-Buy, and Starbucks replacing Sony, Warner Bros, EMI, etc. if things keep on their current path.
-Dave Haynie
You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie...
I'm sorry, but that's pretty narrow-minded - if you think music always sounds the same and that therefore you have no reason to listen to it more than once, you either have truly horrific taste in music or you don't pay much attention to it. I've listened to some albums hundreds of times and I keep hearing new things, making new connections, realizing new influences and learning from them. Video games might be more expansive, but they are ultimately finite in scope - a good album breathes and grows depending on the other stuff you listen to, on what you bring to the table. Video games are like stale bubblegum from a supermarket vending machine in comparison.
I could take an axe to my game systems tomorrow and not shed a tear, but the thought of living without music scares the piss outta me.
Music ain't that much these days. I realize your perception of it may change over time, but that's as far as it gets. In a videogame like GTA or many others, you can face a very wide spectrum of situations you don't expect, so there's much more stimulation available to you.
The magic of videogames is the freedom they offer. It's the ultimate form of entertainment.
diegoT