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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%."
The recording industry has lost [CARL-SAGAN] Billions and BILLIONS [/CARL-SAGAN] due to those Evil Content Pirates(tm)!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
How much greater would the reported growth be without losses due to piracy?
I'm guessing it would be something like 3 billion percent.
Required reading for internet skeptics
recorded music is where the juicy profits are though, so profit wise i'm guessing they lost out.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The report does tell us:
Make no mistake; the live music industry grew in 2008. More events, more bands, more tickets and importantly, higher ticket prices. Breaking it down to basic supply and demand economics, and given the scarcity embedded in its model, the live music industry is somewhere you really want to be right now.
My emphasis.
Perhaps the figures include all the tickets all those suckers bought for the triumphant London return of the "king of pop".
Or maybe this year's new music isn't as boring as last year's (I pretty much gave up buying CDs when I found they were all bland and soporific).
That's quite a report, in its gushing marketingese. I note with delight that "heritage act" has supplanted "senior citizen" as the euphemism for "old age pensioner" or "old geezer".
The music industry needs to realize that people are still willing to buy music if they really like an artist and want to support him/her/them.
[ irc.p2p-network.net -> #zomgwtfbbq ][ http://zomgwtfbbq.info ]
This is bullshit! I am sure file sharing and the free exchange of information represses interest of anything if not everything... hold on..
The money flow is going the way it should. More about the artists and less about the publishers. And at better prices. To gain recognition, artists aren't required to sign away all their rights to a giant publisher anymore.
Wow. I guess piracy really doesn't hurt the digital content industries.
Oh wait. Two caveats:
(1) "Sales of recorded music fell 6%" (which means other digital industries that don't involve giving concerts shouldn't expect comparible results).
(2) A recent (July 13, 2009) study of UK piracy says "The analyst firm published a study on Monday that showed the numbers of those who regularly file-shared had dropped by a quarter between December 2007 and January 2009. The trend was particularly pronounced among 14-18-year-olds -- at the earlier date, 42 per cent were file-sharing at least once per month but at the latter date only 26 per cent were doing so."
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090713_439306.htm
Ticket sale money doesn't line the same pockets as CD sale money (for one, the artist gets a cut).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
From what I remember, the same increase was seen throughout the industry when Napster was at its peak.
The industry should be thankful for being able to reach a larger audience without having to pay the giant advertising costs!
An album hasn't turned a profit in twenty years. Otherwise they would have to pay royalties to the artists, which would ruin their business model.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Interestingly it looks as though even though the physical products are not selling well people are returning or atleast partially embracing vinyl records
From Wikipedia -
"Figures released in the United States in early 2009 showed that sales of vinyl albums nearly doubled in 2008, with 1.88 million sold - up from just under 1 million in 2007."
The RIAA et al. is screaming about piracy not because money is not lining into pockets. The money is only being lined into the wrong pockets, and they don't like it.
Executives only exists to protect themselves. The facts don't lie.
I like how both the article and the Slashdot submission completely ignore that file-sharing has dropped in the UK, especially among teens. Though I know this was posted on Slashdot to give pro-pirates the idea that sales are thriving in spite of piracy, this story doesn't disprove the effect piracy has on sales--if anything, it bolsters the idea that sales go up when piracy goes down.
Interesting statistic. I am all for pushing digital content out to the masses and being able to pick songs you like. I'd much rather buy a couple of songs that I like off an album and not having to fork out the bucks for the rest of the dross. It also creates competitive drive for artists and makes them dig deep into their creative juices or shell out the money for people who know how to produce stuff that sells better (whether of better quality or not).
But it would be interesting to do a follow up statistic on how much concert ticket prices have changed with the onset of the digital file sharing. I have certainly noticed the hike in prices over the last 5 years. I am sure there will be arguments about recession being blamed for it, and I am not denying it may be true. It would just be worth a second and deeper look into the profit stratas to figure out whether it's really digital file sharing that's causing the profits to soar or if it's something else.
Well good, I can keep pirating music without feeling bad. But seriously, if the record companies caught on to the fact that people downloading music are doing so because they love music, not because they hate the industry, they could be making a lot of money. Lets say Atlantic records got their own paid torrent tracker and charged $20 a month to download albums at will. There would still be the super leeches taking 10-15 albums a month and after the first download it would be loose for everyone. But I know plenty of people that would pay the $20 a month, get two or three albums a month just because it's easier than navigating the spam and virus party that is bittorrent. When it becomes easier to buy music than steal it, people will actually buy it. But when I can get just about any album days, even months, before they are released in a matter of minutes, why would I go to the store which may or may not have it in stock even weeks after the release date. Until the record companies start seeking listeners where they live, they are going to keep floundering. Just look at iTunes, it took the record companies too long to figure out that people would actually pay the same amount for something that costs half what it does to produce a packaged album. Now some have and -- gadzooks -- people are actually buying more legal digital music. It'll be the same with torrents, hell, smart pirates are already charging for community-driven trackers and take requests for new content. Until then, I'll keep stealing music and spending that money on concert tickets and T-shirts. That way I'm actually giving money to all the actual band members in the bands that I never would have found browsing the local record store.
All money that's not spent on what is supposedly downloaded instead (rather than in addition to), is still there to be spent on other things. Other media, even.
We are all God's parents.
The PRS is the '_Performing_ Rights Society'. As the article says - 'Consumers spent less on recorded music, down 6% since 2007, but concert ticket sales have grown by some 13% as the industry as whole slowly evolves and adapts to digital distribution.'. They collect royalties for performances, not physical sales of CDs, or royalties from downloads, which are collected in the main by the MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Service). The music industry in terms of the main labels remains slow to adapt, and the ridiculously high percentages charged by download services like iTunes (50% for smaller labels/bands in the UK, plus another 10% to go through a broker if they refuse to deal direct) means that bands are forced to play live as the only sensible source of income.
I can't say I feel sad about record labels. I don't want labels. I want to pay to the artist and artist only.
It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. Stealing would imply that the one stolen from actually loses something, instead of not gaining.
You can't "steal" from me because I charge by the hour. Please take my work and copy it all you want.
I'd be buying from the industry, if it was willing to sell me something. Say, I hear Amazon is selling music. Except I can't buy it because I'm not in the US. You could start by getting rid of that stupid state of affairs.
Honestly, I despise the current industry, which keeps trying to push DRM and fees on my hardware, and "3 strikes" laws on my internet connection. I really wish it died already. I'm willing to even accept a complete lack of new music in exchange.
The guy works for a group whose business is *collecting royalties* for artists. Of course he's going to say that sales are up, and his clients deserve more money. If he were saying that sales were way down and had less than 7 degrees of separation from the RIAA he'd be flayed alive. When his position supports the /. mindhive it doesn't matter what his credentials are.
I should know better by now, but I'm disappointed by you, /.ers.
The Chief Economist of PRS was found dead in his home, apparently of autoerotic asphyiation, with ropes tied around his neck and completely naked.
The UK police are stumped. "We did find a card with the word 'RIAA' on it, but we decided to ignore it and call this a suicide. A sex game gone wrong." Outsiders call this a case of corporatism - the government and the corporations colluding to cover-up a murder. "It be fascism, that's what it be," said a local man who refused to identity himself.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm told it's virtually impossible to make money running a small venue or festival. Moreover, the not-so-famous bands that tend to play at them are lucky to get travel expenses, never mind actually being paid to perform. The total revenue for live music may have gone up, but I'm willing to bet it's all gone to large venues and famous artists through (in my opinion) ridiculously high ticket prices.
It seems likely that the same is true, though perhaps to a lesser extent, of recorded music: small indie labels (e.g. Sotones, with which I'm loosely affiliated) don't tend to see a lot of revenue through direct sales of recordings. Most of the sales go through the big online stores, and they tend to promote the big/hyped acts, just as the big retail stores do.
This isn't to say things aren't changing in the music industry, but I wouldn't get too excited about the ascendancy of live and independent music just yet.
https://alephnull.uk/
With all due respect, as someone who works in the music business you're not exactly an impartial commenter. Fair enough, as someone who doesn't know the figures, or even sufficient knowledge of statistics to understand them even if I had them, I'm not either.
It's almost certainly a fact that some people are pirating music instead of buying it. However, it's also almost certainly a fact that if the piracy avenue was not available, then some (most?) of those people would simply do without music. The music industry is not "competing" with free, because it's not a competition. The offerings are not "like for like".
As other people have pointed out, it's more than price, as well. A high quality MP3 is more valuable than a high quality AAC with DRM, because you can use it however you want without having to repurchase the same track. Most companies now seem to be going DRM-free, but for myself it's still not a good option because I don't trust digital-only storage... recently losing several years of digital photographs (and the on-site backup) in a home robbery has made me even more wary.
For me, the CD is still the best value option available... which means that if there aren't enough good tracks on the CD to justify the cost, I just do without. Funnily enough, I haven't bought many mainstream CDs in recent years... purchases have been limited to bands I particularly like (which coincidentally happen to be small-label, but I'd buy them even if they were mainstream non-Sony/BMI), musical scores and compilation CDs.
Finally, you mention in another post that "For every successful artist you know of, there are 10-15 failures." I don't believe this sufficiently quantifies the vast explosion of artists producing work at the moment, documented elsewhere in this story. I would put money on the fact that independent and small labels do not have anything approaching this failure rate, since there are such low cost distribution and advertising avenues that even a "failure" manages to break even, and simply doesn't become a success. There is no compelling need for one success to offset so many failures if you aren't losing so much money on the failures, and the double whammy supporting a huge ecosystem of non-artists inside the label itself... unless they are the failures you refer to ;-)
... who blamed all those previously reported drops in sales on loss of quality will surely attribute this spike similarly: as a rise in quality? Surely they weren't just coming up with excuses to justify their illegal behaviour, right?
Seriously though, this is all a non-issue. It's up to the copyright holder what they do with their works. Whether sharing is beneficial or not, it's still not up to us to dictate to artists how they should market their product. If the statistics say that sales with sharing are higher than without, then eventually, artists will start allowing sharing. If it works, they'll probably do it again, and others will pick up the trend. Right now, these trends have a far too high chance of being coincidence, or something related to both sharing and sales (e.g. quality, as mentioned before), so this is far from convincing evidence, let alone proof, that the sharing system works.
Be patient. If sharing produces a superior culture, then it's only a matter of time before demand, and eventually supply, will reflect that. Until then, to aid the process of change, I strongly suggest that you don't pirate, lest you start muddying the difference between the two systems. If we stick to sharing only shareable works, then full cost of restricted media will become apparent, as will the value of (or perhaps lack thereof) what restricted media creates. Right now, pirates get free access to everything that restricted media created. We have to each make choices: buy restricted and stick to it, or buy free and do what you damn well please.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Even if their "mainstay" of physical media continues to tank, this just goes to show that they'll make it up elsewhere. They'll likely continue to increase the price of concert tickets to offset the revenue loss (and to continue the modest increase reported this year), but that will only be sustainable for a limited time. Music remains an overpriced product through most outlets.
I find myself buying a lot of Amazon MP3s when I see album specials for $3 (USD) or less. Sure, I'm not picking up the newest artists or releases this way, but, because of those deals, I've purchased more music in the past year than I did in the preceding decade.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The simple reality is: most people who pirate aren't going to buy anyways. It's not a loss if someone downloads your content and tinkers with it 5m and then never touches it again and that is what happens with *a lot* of content. Nor is it a loss if someone downloads your content (because they can't afford it) and likes it and 5 of their friends go out and buy it even though the original person never does.
Shadus
I still contend that 90% of all illegal downloads comes from people who weren't going to buy the music anyway. The problem for the music industry is that piracy opens the world up to a larger variety of music. As a result, it's almost impossible for the industry to dictate the music trends. In this modern world it's much harder for the industry to ram "She Bangs, She Bangs!" down our throat. My cousin was so happy when he got a six record deal ten years ago. Then they promptly shelved him for the duration of his contract. Turns out my cousin sounded too much like their cash cow, Marc Anthony. These shenanigans happen all the time. In 1998 the record company shelved Chuck D, stating that market research showed that no one was interested in Public Enemy anymore. So he circumvented the record company by releasing the album on mp3.com and it went on to become, up to that point, the most downloaded album of all time. though he lost the battle with the record company, he was able to, thanks to digital downloads, rub egg in the face of the label execs. What the record labels are most afraid of is not piracy, it's the fact the digital era and the internet is going to render their services obsolete. Who needs a record company when you have the internet? The recording industry needs embrace piracy and re-adapt their business model to one that embraces the advantages created by piracy. As this article clearly shows, though album sales are down, concert sales are way up, and so are sales of paraphenilia. If you don't think the piracy model can't make money, then take a look at the Grateful Dead. They asked their fans to pirate their songs and to make bootleg tapes and distribute them freely. Then they went on to make a fortune on sold out concerts, t-shirts, books, magazines, etc.. They became the highest grossing act of their time! One last thing, another reason for more sales is that now you can buy your music unencumbered. That's major. DRM is terrible in that it severely inconveniences those who are trying to do the right thing. Meanwhile, the people using pirated goods have the freedom to play their music anywhere and on any machine or gadget they want to.
Isn't this exactly what the entire geek community has been saying for over a decade ? We don't give a fuck about the shiny discs, we give a fuck about the music and the artist.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'm told it's virtually impossible to make money running a small venue or festival.
You don't get rich, but you make enough to make it worthwhile. That's why we keep seeing more and more festivals popping up. Personally, I think that's a good thing. I'd rather go to half a dozen cheap small festivals a year than one huge expensive fest like Bonnaroo. As long as the staff and musicians get paid, and the organizer gets enough to make it worth doing again, it's a success.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Your words belie the facts, but if your industry is dying it's dying because nobody needs it any more. Thirty and more years ago it cost a fortune to record an album, now it's dirt cheap. My musician friends rent studio time and produce their own CDs, profesionally duplicated and packaged at an affordable price, and they sell them for five to ten bucks a pop and make a tidy profit on them.
Do you feel sorry for the buggy whip manufacturers? You should find another line of work, like they did. Like them, like the human computers that did maths before electronic computers, like stenographers and typists, technology has made your employers obsolete.
Free Martian Whores!
When you buy music, make sure to check http://riaaradar.com/ [riaaradar.com] to see if the album is from a company that funds the RIAA. If they do, don't buy it and stick it to them a couple dollars of lost earnings at a time.
Paging New York County Lawyer. Here's another brick for the wall you're building on how the recording industry lies and lies and lies about all the harm that evil filesharing perverts are causing them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."