Slashdot Mirror
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
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 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.
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.
The reason that the big record labels perpetuate the myth that new artists need to be 'funded' is so they can perpetuate the closed ecosystem where artists can't reach the public without signing away 90 to 100% of the profits to them. This is the real reason why the music industry are willing to make payola payments to distribute songs for free on the radio, but are fighting against the free advertising of their product by filesharing, although both forms of advertising generate sales - it's because they can monopolise the airwaves but they can't do the same with P2P. It's all about artificial barriers to entering the market.
Apple don't lose money on iTunes, they make a HUGE profit. They take 29 cents per 99 cent song, and have sold over 6 billion songs, do the math!
Not much variety in music? Go count the number of artists on iTunes, Mr Troll.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a