Music Industry Thriving In an Era of File Sharing

levicivita notes ZeroPaid coverage of a recent study by the UK music industry's own economist showing that overall UK music industry revenues were up in 2008 (study, PDF). The study is titled "Adding up the Music Industry for 2008" and it was authored by Will Page, who is the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers. From ZeroPaid: "[T]he music industry is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to hear and consume music. Sales of recorded music fell 6% for example, digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%. In terms of what consumers spent on music as a whole last year, this surprisingly grew by 3%."

Comments

Re:AGAIN?

[bonch]

Oh, geez, not the ridiculous "free advertising" argument again. Let's throw out the other Slashdot cliches too, like "obsolete business model," "cultural revolution," and "MAFIAA."

It's not improving

[sn00pers]

As someone who works in the music business and works with the major record labels and artists I can tell you that most of the people in the business are now out of work of struggling just to pay bills. Most of the labels are out of business, most of the facilities are closing down, and many of the people in the industry are suffering. It's sad to see so many people touting stealing. I wonder how many would feel if people were stealing from them and taking pride in it. And most of the arguments people here are making are false claims that they are making up simply so they can talk themselves out of feeling guilty for stealing from other people.

Re:File-sharing has dropped in the UK

[nine-times]

I think you have a decent point in that there is a pro-file-sharing contingent in Slashdot. On the other hand, there are a lot of us who just dislike the bullying tactics of the big record companies, which seem to abuse both the customers and artists that they depend on.

So yes, if piracy is down and sales are up, then it seems reasonable to assume that those two are connected. But what's the cause? Are sales up because piracy is down, and if so, then why is piracy down? Are those RIAA lawsuits with million-dollar judgements scaring people in the UK into "being good"? Or is it possible that piracy is down because sales are up? Is there some way that the record companies have done a better job at selling legitimate distribution?

The article you link to suggest that they "are now streaming music regularly from places like YouTube, MySpace, and Spotify." So that wouldn't account for increased sales unless you count "streaming" as a sale. Plus, the article says:

File sharing still happens, of course, and the number of users who have ever gone to P2P for music has increased to 31 percent, up from 28 percent in December of 2007. The report also pointed out that people were still giving music to each other the old-fashioned way.

"More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks," said the report.

So this news isn't uniformly about file sharing and "free" music diminishing.

Re:Just imagine...

[commodore64_love]

>>>I think that your problem here is that you listen to bad music..... the problem is... your devouring of what the radio shovels into you.
>>>

And I think your problem is that you confuse your OPINION with fact. I've tried various types of music that friends recommended to me over the years, like Alternative or Ska or or Rap or Whatever, because they were supposed to be "better" than the pop-radio music I normally listen to. But I found these recommendations largely boring (or noisy).

Which is fine. You like your music; and I like my music. Different people like different things. Some people like broccoli and some don't - Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination make the world an interesting place.

In other words:

Frak off. It is NONE of your business to judge, criticize, or insult me personally. You should have kept your mouth shut, and while you're at it, signup for Manners 101 so you'll learn to be sensitive of other people's feeling instead of making a donkey of yourself. Maybe then you'll learn to stop acting like Simon Cowell.