The Numbers Behind the Copyright Math

TheUnknownCoder writes "The MPAA claims $58 billion in actual U.S. economic losses and 373,000 lost jobs due to piracy. Where are these numbers coming from? Rob Reid puts these numbers into perspective in this TED Talk, leaving us even more puzzled about the math behind copyright laws. 'Ignoring improbabilities like pirated steaks and daffodils, I looked at actual employment and headcount in actual content industries, and found nothing approaching the claimed losses. There are definitely concrete and quantifiable piracy-related losses in the American music industry. The Recording Industry Association’s website has a robust and credible database that details industry sales going back to 1973, which any researcher can access for a few bucks (and annoying as I’ve found the RIAA to be on certain occasions, I applaud them for making this data available). I used it to compare the industry’s revenues in 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010 (the most recent available data). Sales plunged from $14.6 billion down to $6.8 billion — a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk. This number is broadly supported by other sources, and I find it to be entirely credible. But this pattern just isn’t echoed in other major content industries.'"

Comments

Losses, but due to piracy?

[mpoulton]

I haven't pirated music in about 5 years. I also haven't bought any CD's in that time, either. I have moved almost entirely to using Spotify, Pandora, and other subscription services for my music. Music I do buy, I buy electronically. I estimate I spent about 25% as much on recorded musical entertainment now than I did in the late 90's, during the heyday of the CD. This probably results in less revenue for the content owners, but that is not attributable to piracy. An industry's decline due to changing market factors is not necessarily a problem - it's just the natural way of things.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[TheLordPhantom]

I have noticed the exact same thing with myself. I don't pirate, and haven't in years. Yet, I almost never buy music anymore. I do own a decent collection of music, but really, I find Pandora, Spotify, etc. to be a far more interesting sources of music, even at times more practical (as in I don't need to copy files from one piece of hardware to another). I honestly don't think that MPAA really can blame even the majority of the decline in sales on piracy. In my own anecdotal experiences, that is simply not the case. People's methods of listening to music are changing. Ultimately, the media companies will have to change the way the approach the gathering of revenue.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the gaming industry. They have modified their business models to battle piracy. However, not everyone likes it and especially on Slashdot you can see many people complaining about free2play games and everything moving online. That is the only choice companies have tho. So, if everyone continues pirating games (the actual piracy rate is about 90%, even with indie games), every game will soon be something like Zynga's facebook games, mmo's or some other multiplayer games. Personally I have no problem with this, I love TF2 too, but I've noticed people complaining about this on Slashdot.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd venture a guess that piracy is hurting them (slow down there, read the rest before you foam at the mouth and post a vitriolic reply), and that what they're doing to combat it is making it much, much worse, turning what would be an inconvenience into a death spiral.

I don't recall the major labels being quite so vilified in my youth. Possibly there's an element there of the internet giving voice to malcontents who waste no time in airing the recording industry's dirty laundry, but I suspect the big issue people have with them in their anti-pirate tactics. Suing grandmothers is never good PR. Nobody likes DRM. Laws that shore up antipiracy measures are widely loathed by anyone who knows much about them - see SOPA/PIPA or the DMCA.

What does this have to do with piracy? People like free shit, and dislike feeling guilt. People can pirate music for free (we'll stick to just music, since TFA is about the RIAA), but feel guilty about the artist. They assuage their guilt by familiarizing themselves with the evils of the recording industry and "stick it to the man". And by reminding everyone who'll listen that the artist hardly sees a dime from album sales anyway, unless they're already a big name. Guilt gone, music free.

My evidence for this statement is that when the artist is separated from the industry, when the pirate CANNOT pretend to be Robin Hood, then the musician actually can make a living selling their music online, DRM free. See Jonathan Coulton (who'd never make it in the industry) and Nine Inch Nails "Ghosts" album (which were actually made available for free, with a "please pay us if you like our music" option that made Reznor more money than he gets from his regular album sales).

Watch now, as the entire thread below this comment devolves into exactly the same guilt deflecting "but they're evil" roundabout justification from absolutely every retard who didn't make it as far as this last paragraph. Or maybe slashdot will pleasantly surprise me (hahahhahaha).

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Lyrata]

I think one of the main issues with F2P games and other new business models is the realities that come with it that gamers aren't used to. Take Heroes of Newerth (HoN), for example. That game used to cost $30, with additional content for sale after that. League of Legends (LoL), free from the beginning (supported by paid content), became wildly successful and easily eclipsed HoN in terms of revenue and player base. The interesting part is when HoN changed to a F2P model in response. The floodgates were open, if you will, to a much larger - and much different - player base. A huge influx of foreign players (in this case, foreign being non-US) quickly and fundamentally changed the community. There is now a great deal of acrimony between players based on their nationality and style of play (they are linked, by the way, Starcraft 2 being a prime example). The game and metagame underwent changes that weren't nearly as significant in the older paid model. TF2, as you mention, is another example. Open to anyone, the average skill level has declined (my opinion) and the focus of the players is strongly leaning towards collection and customization instead of the original, fundamental concept of the game. Whether or not this is a good thing is up for debate, of course. I feel that it's an effective business model and definitely has potential, but you can tell how I feel about some of what I perceive as downsides.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Znork]

I buy more music than ever by using emusic, I just don't buy anything associated with the RIAA corps. On average I spend about four times as much per month these days.

Either way, even if the lies were true, disposable income spent on copyrighted entertainment means more spent on other activities as well as the converse - money spent on copyright cost jobs in other industries.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[bzipitidoo]

People like free shit

Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate. There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.

You also attribute piracy to the desire to "stick it to the man". Yes, but that's not the whole story either. I am offended that these psychopathic dinosaurs insist on wasting all kinds of resources and then insist on PASSING THE COST OF THAT WASTE ONTO THE CUSTOMERS. We should pay all this extra money to cover the costs of producing millions of plastic disks and delivering them to thousands of bricks and mortar retail locations, just so those miserable bastards can feel more comfortable that all this extra and needless friction makes piracy more difficult? When we can have the same music delivered via the Internet for a fraction of the cost and time? Why should anyone choose to pay for someone else's gross stupidity? Because if we refuse to do it their way, they try to force and browbeat us into it, that's why. They trash us all as evil pirates, threaten to sue us all, keep cooking up extremely offensively stupid legislation and laughably pathetic DRM schemes, lie through their teeth about the amount of piracy and damages allegedly suffered, cheat artists, manipulate the public with things like Payola, and seriously think they have the moral high ground and the justification to do all this and almost any other reprehensible act to preserve their very dead business model. They should have been ashamed that Sony tried to rootkit PCs, instead they defended it! They pay lawyers to go after the very most vulnerable and helpless citizens. If they had no power, we could just ignore them. But they're old and established, and still have enough power to hurt a lot of people. The revolution is ongoing, and they're throwing themselves against the wall. They're acting like Capt Bligh-- "it's mutiny I tell you, mutiny", only they say piracy in place of mutiny. Don't point the finger at us for rebelling, point the finger at them for causing the whole thing, for calling us all thieves and rebels whether or not we really are.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't bought a CD in the last decade. Not worth the cost considering the quality of the recordings you find nowadays.
Now I listen to the music broadcasted on the radio, or via streaming both of which are free. Or as a last resort I go back to my father's collection of classical and jazz music he built up during the eighties and early nineties.
But the RIAA will never again see a cent from me.

I'd buy music directly from the artists if they would release in lossless high definition 24 bit/96khz.
Otherwise what I've got will do.

I guess I have to be the worst kind of pirate. He who has stepped off the continual upgrade cycle.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[WillKemp]

I don't recall the major labels being quite so vilified in my youth.

I dunno how old you are, but they weren't exactly popular in my youth! The Sex Pistols song "EMI" kinda embodied the way people felt about them in the 70s.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[pxc]

There's a problem with your post in that you assume that music pirates only use the irrelevance of music sales to revenue for most artists as a dishonest rationalization. All of the behavior/psychology described in your post could be restated simply as ‘people are more interested in seeing through the success of the artist than they are in supporting the success of some salesman’. They may not necessarily feel any guilt about piracy to begin with. The younger generations certainly don't. The RIAA doesn't have to be evil to justify the view that pirating music is morally acceptable. The facts that (a) publishers are not artists, and (b) copyright law is, for the citizens whose interests it ought to serve in any democracy, purely instrumental, and only valuable to the extent which it helps introduce new art into the ecosystem (which was once-upon-a-time called ‘the public domain’) are enough.

This isn't a view which comes from a place of reflexive entitlement, either. In the case of online piracy, pirates ask nothing of the publishers — they download nothing from the publishers themselves. There is nothing about the view that I should be able to copy a recording from a friend which entails any obligations toward me, on the part of the publisher (or even the artist). The only demand made is one of rational thought: for all parties involved to recognize that ideas are not objects, and do not share the constraints of actual objects. They are not natural property, and the enormous legal efforts to make ideas emulate natural property have proven ineffective in the face of recent technological developments. But this is okay, because the goal of ensuring the production of creative works for the sake of the public good remains attainable by other means — and we can resume pursuit of that goal as soon as we abandon this sinking ship of ideas-as-property.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Skapare]

Actually, I have never pirated. But I have downloaded. What I did was use the downloads to preview the music. Then I discarded them. The only downloads I still have are ones from a few artists sites that were intentionally giving them away. I used the preview downloads to make decisions on which CDs to buy, and actually did buy CDs based on the previews. The rate was about 8%. That is, if I had bought a CD corresponding to every downloaded tune, that would be 100%. But most of it I didn't like, such as Electronica that had vocals injected somewhere (I much prefer instrumental music, but I do have some vocal music I like, too). The downloads helped me to actually buy CDs. Had the downloads NOT been available, these are CDs I would likely never have.

That said, CDs are today very impractical. It's physically too large. No one carries a player anywhere near that size. The RIAA needs to get that clue bashed into their stupid heads and figure out better marketing. Still, I have bought a couple CDs in the past few years ... and "ripped" them so they could be a part of my collection. If I can't "rip" them I can't play them. If I can't play them, what's the point in buying them.

Today, most of my music collection comes from Magnatune, a site I do believe the RIAA has tried to shut down by means of illegal tricks, because it's a business model (not be evil) that they don't like. One of the great things with downloads from Magnatune is that I can modify and remix them. A lot of the music has a faster beat than I want, and I can actually slow it down in mplayer (I have my own wrapper program to do it). I can't do that with music played by some proprietary player program. And I doubt it hurts the feelings of the artists if I play their music in a different way or even remix it for my own playing as they get their bits either way and they can't hear how I might have corrupted their art.

Sales of CDs has gone down for reasons very similar to the reasons that vinyl has gone done ... there's something better out there. Unfortunately for most big corporations, they didn't figure it out soon enough ... to actually give people what they want. The vinyl format was industry produced. The CD format was industry produced. Music files that can be downloaded was not, and they just can't stand that they didn't invent it.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I have never pirated. But I have downloaded. What I did was use the downloads to preview the music. Then I discarded them.

The RIAA and the courts doesn't care if you deleted them or not, to them it was still piracy and they still consider you a criminal.
You might just as well keep the music.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

People like free shit

Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate.

Yes, it is accurate, and there's nothing cynical in his statement.

There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate.

People donate for a few different reasons. Yes, some people are actually just nice and like giving back when they can. But most people who donate do it to deflect guilt, to look good to other, to get a tax break, or other reasons which are more selfish when you really look at it.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with people liking free shit.

There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.

Right, you're suspicious because you don't think it's free, and you want free shit not shit with hidden costs.

You also attribute piracy to the desire to "stick it to the man".

No he didn't. He pointed out that people use that as a rationalization so they don't feel guilty. They're doing it because of point #1: They like Free Shit.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[FireFury03]

They may not necessarily feel any guilt about piracy to begin with. The younger generations certainly don't

I don't recall feeling guilty about copying tapes when I was young... maybe the guilt is something that is acquired with age as we learn how the world works - if that's the case then I fully expect the RIAA's actions to counteract this tendency for people to acquire guilt.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Black Parrot]

I don't recall the major labels being quite so vilified in my youth.

I dunno how old you are, but they weren't exactly popular in my youth! The Sex Pistols song "EMI" kinda embodied the way people felt about them in the 70s.

And Pink Floyd, "By the way, which one's Pink?" And others.

However, I think they became much more reviled when the technology for production and distribution made them utterly useless middle-men (compared to the LP era), who insisted on maintaining their stranglehold on the market and their profits despite changing times.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

they consider ripping piracy as well, it's their Right to tell you what you can or cannot do (or what to pay extra) with their property. They say.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[AmiMoJo]

Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate.

This is diving off into philosophy and psychology now but there are many reasons people donate other than altruism. When we see starving kids on TV it makes us unhappy and creates feelings of guilt which donation alleviates. There is also the fact that giving money to a good cause validates a person's life to some extent.

In my case there is some self interest too because both my parents had cancer, so I figure if I give money to cancer research it might help me one day. I give money to cat charities too because I like cats, and I also donate to help victims of the Japanese tsunami, but I honestly couldn't tell you what percentage of these actions is down to altruism and what is something else.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[justforgetme]

Yep, I'm giving a monthly amount to somafm.com and get some great music from
their channels. Another upside to this particular radio is that they use a lot of indie
bands that operate disjointed from big distributors, so when you buy an album
from those bands or an LP, you know your money actually goes towards the
music.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[TheLink]

Speaking of the game industry. Some people get better quality sound/music from games (e.g. Guitar Hero) than from the CDs the labels try to sell them .

FWIW I think nowadays people have more different things to spend their money on. So unless incomes increase, there should be no surprise if they spend less on CDs or music.

Especially if CDs are expensive for what you get compared to the other options.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Serpents]

An industry's decline due to changing market factors is not necessarily a problem - it's just the natural way of things.

I think this particular industry is not declining due to changing market conditions - after all they change in all the industries all the time. The difference is most other industries adapt to market, while the entertainment industry tried to force the market to adapt to its model. With rise of digital media (lossless copies) and fast internet (instant worldwide distribution) they lost control of their distribution channels. Now they're trying to change the situation by lobbying for crap like SOPA/ACTA et al. and freedom of speech/civil liberties be damned. It's time they went the way of the dodo. This system cannot be changed, it needs to be rebuilt from scratch, including copyrights.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you increase income? US tried to. See what happened in the long run. And as population increases, income goes lower to everyone as there are more services available. And as the income decreases, everyone will try to do more and save more, so whole economy will suffer.

The funny thing is that this isn't really relevant to China or other countries that are developing now. And it's also the reason why China will dominate later.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Bert64]

I used the preview downloads to make decisions on which CDs to buy, and actually did buy CDs based on the previews.

And this is exactly what the RIAA don't want, they would much prefer you to buy CDs, and then find out that you don't like them... If people can try before they buy, then they have to actually make an effort to produce decent music that people will like.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any money, I spend it on rent and tuition.
I'll pay some of these artists back later.
"They're evil" just adds to my justification.
Lack of sale is not loss of sale.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Bert64]

Approach it from another point of view...

As you point out, people hate DRM and the various laws being pushed by these groups...

Any money you spend on buying music from RIAA affiliated labels will be used to push the above... How can you justify purchasing music, knowing that your money will be used against you in this way?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[GmExtremacy]

They assuage their guilt by familiarizing themselves with the evils of the recording industry and "stick it to the man".

It's interesting that you'd make this generalization, but can you prove it's true? Or can you not read minds?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[GmExtremacy]

maybe the guilt is something that is acquired with age as we learn how the world works

Maybe. But I do know full grown adults who feel no guilt about it whatsoever. They're also completely anti-copyright.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[dwywit]

About 75% of my music listening time comes from live365.com (I subscribe) - the remainder comes from looking up old favourites (that I don't already have) on youtube, and the small amount of music that's played on radio - honestly, I'd rather plug in my daughter's ipod while in the car - she has my well-developed sense of taste :-) as well as an appreciation of modern pop.....

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[dwywit]

I'd mod you up, but I've already commented.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[dwywit]

Ha! - I was >>- this far from donating/subscribing to somafm when I heard some rap/hip-hop on their Indian/desi channel. Pity.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[tao]

[RIAA] Of course it's still piracy if you delete if afterwards and buy it. If you downloaded it hundred times then RIAA^W The Artists will lose 100x the record cost.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[rtb61]

The whole story is one steaming pile of bullshit and crap. It's only aim to take over the internet and create a 1980 mass media version of it, where half a dozen corporations control what is allowed on it and 7 billion people are censored 24/7/365.

Want proof, http://www.castanet.net/news/Canada/72606/Experts-worry-over-household-debt, http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/3/20/business/10946706&sec=business, http://www.whocrashedtheeconomy.com/blog/intro/household-debt/, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/27880.html. Stories from all over the world of household debt at record unsustainable levels.

Just were in the fuck is are those RIAA and MPAA dickwads meant to be getting that money from, who are the imaginary folk left to spend money on content instead of food, or rent, or clothing or medical expenses.

Quite simply there is no money left in the economy especially for parasitical parts of it. It is gone and based on current economic realities it is more than gone the ability to generate further personal debt is gone. So the question to bullshit politicians and governments exactly which parts of the economy do they wish to crash to feed the insatiable greed of the pigopolists.

These corporations are basically trying to launch an economic and political war on the majority of humanity. Establish a global big brother internet, where the monitor, censor and control every man women and child that is not part of their elite circle of psychopaths.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Blasphemy:

Piracy will always occur when it is possible, but I think there is a profound reason why many if not most people don't have much of a bad conscience when doing it: People generally have a good sense of distributional justice. (...even in the US!)

If you copy a song by some unknown artist and later hear he's really a "starving artist" who is struggling to make a living with his music, almost everyone would get a bad conscience. But who seriously gives a fuck about Madonna's reduction in income due to piracy? Surely not me.

I know this sounds like blasphemy to many Americans, who often rationally believe that people are entitled to get as much money as they can make, but deep in their heart most people know that the excessive accumulation of wealth is not just. Once you're in the media and have reached a certain wealth threshold, you can basically accumulate money by literally doing nothing. A team of experts (composers, marketing people, agents, etc.) will ensure that. You'll get 500,000 $ just for showing up somewhere and could literally sell your own shit casted into synthetic resin on ebay for lots of $$$. Of course, being filthy rich is not just limited to media celebrities and many people have the same feeling that there is something wrong, a feeling of injustice, with other filthy rich people. You know, this Robin Hood feeling, etc.

The funny thing is that nobody on earth needs more than one million dollar a year. If there was an income cap to the effect that any more money earned would have to be invested immediately or given back to society where it comes from, the effect on the well-being of rich people would be Zero. But of course that idea is heresy in the US...

Anyway, I don't really endorse piracy but just wanted to point out one reason why people have no problem with piracy. For it looks a lot like the people that benefit from record and movie sales the most are the bosses of companies and studios as well as a few selected starlets as opposed to the real artists who can sometimes make a living off it, another times barely survive (e.g. some screenwriters, jazz musicians, etc.).

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Ihmhi]

Yet, I almost never buy music anymore.

I buy loads of it, both MP3s and CDs.

And the RIAA doesn't get a cent, because all of the local bands I support are smart enough to realize that a) they don't need to get involved with the RIAA anymore to sell albums (if they don't give away the music outright) and b) they're going to make the vast majority of their money off of touring (which you can't really "pirate" anyway, scalping and counterfeit tickets notwithstanding).

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[TheRaven64]

It's even worse than that. People are increasingly aware that the middlemen take most of the profits. Even when the music is by the archetypal starving artist, there is a perception that buying their music won't make a difference to them, it will just make some record industry executive richer. I've heard anecdotally that bands who sell their own CDs and offer downloads with a donation link do reasonably well (not mega-wealth, but a fairly high ratio of income to number of fans), because people know that paying for the music will fund more music that they like.

I don't want to pay for music, but then I don't want to pay for anything else either and by now I've accepted that it's pretty much a requirement if I want stuff. One of the main advantages I see in paying for things (other than the instant gratification of getting the stuff I want) is that it promotes the creation of stuff that I want. The layers of indirection in the entertainment industry destroy this. This is especially true of things like TV shows. The only way I can directly pay for them is to buy or rent the DVD. By the time the DVD is available here, the shows have often been cancelled. If the industry wants to survive then it needs to start noticing that there are a lot of people like me who want to exchange money for their products.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[TheLink]

Well basically Australia digs out stuff from the ground, or grows stuff on their land, sells it to China (and the world) who makes "real stuff" out of it.

Then USA sells to the world: software, music, movies, Team Fortress 2 hats, digital swords, smurf berries, virtual clothes. And uses the money to buy "real stuff".

If enough people want that stuff and buy it, the USA still can have high _average_ income. Whether some of the money goes to the poor in the USA is a different matter.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[kholburn]

> People can pirate music for free (we'll stick to just music, since TFA is about the RIAA), but feel guilty about the artist.

I have listened to music for free on the radio all my life and guess what, I've never felt guilty about it. These days I can borrow CDs from my local library if I want to. For free. Guilt free also. Could borrow from friends too, also free and guilt free. People want what they have always had, the abillity to listen to music for free.

The revenue of the music industry is increasing. It's just the revenue from selling music recorded onto plastic discs that is decreasing.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[arth1]

And this is exactly what the RIAA don't want, they would much prefer you to buy CDs, and then find out that you don't like them... If people can try before they buy, then they have to actually make an effort to produce decent music that people will like.

Of course you can try before you buy. Record stores have headsets (or similar) and will let you listen before you make a decision. While you examine at the nice 12.4" cover.
And if you only like one or a few songs, why, you can buy a single or a maxi instead.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I have never pirated. But I have downloaded. What I did was use the downloads to preview the music. Then I discarded them.

It's been a few years now, but the HMVs where I live used to allow you to return CDs if you didn't like them. I took advantage of this multiple times to buy a bunch of stuff, and I ended up keeping some of some and exchanging others for different CDs.

Then people learned about ripping music and HMV stopped. :(

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[MickyTheIdiot]

However, with the fact that the RIAA has just a broad definition of "piracy" (a word that has been misused to the point it is now meaningless for any precise usage) this becomes the classic slippery slope problem. The *AAs can just as easily start to call *in store* usage piracy as well. It would been shooting their own foot, but they have essentially already shot their own foot with demonizing music lovers with piracy witch hunts.

Copyright isn't about "intellectual property." It's about telling people what they can or can not do with property the legally bought or otherwise aquired. It's about controlling something that has made it out to the world.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[arth1]

I'm all for copyrights. But want to see them back to the terms they originally were, when they intentionally expired quickly to give the creator a prod in the buttocks to go produce more.

And since the world moves so much faster today, with world wide distribution in hours instead of months or years, and a much shorter shelf life, the only sensible thing is to reduce the copyright duration. So what was 7 years might work better as 7 months today.
If, of course, we are to honor the intent of copyrights, which isn't to make anyone rich enough to retire early and their children never having to work, nor pay the green fee for executives who have never produced a thing, but to increase the amount of art that flows from creators to the public.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never have bought a CD or any digital version. Neither I have pirated (or steal) them. But still I listen latest and newest music and I own those albums.

How so?

In Finland the copyright law say that private copying is legal. You can go and borrow a CD (or DVD or VHS) from library and make a own copy to home use. You can not distribute it or copy it anymore (no permission).
You can do same thing with your friend media what they have bought from stores. You or they can copy it to you. The owner of the media, has permission to do a "few" copies (10 in court cases) to family, best friends or for backup purposes. You are as well allowed to transform the format to other so you can see and hear it. That means you can buy a CD and rip it as MP3 files and copy those files to your friend or wife.

So how does music makers make their money? Since LP disks customer had no way to copy it. But when C-tape was invented, it changed the whole industry. People had C-tape radios and players and when Sony brought Walkman stereos it blow the copying among teens. Teens bought one tape and copied it to friends who before C-tape needed to buy own LP disk.

So were added to copyright law that few copies were allowed but every sold empty C-tape had fee for private copying. When a C-tape was about 4mk (Finnish mark) the fee was about 30 penny from it.
At that time, it was seen that private copying was not a huge problem for money incomes, but it was just to give some benefits for the copyright owners from it. But it was seen that it is more important that Finnish people has rights to copy and socialize with their friends with their purchased media.
And same thing is even today continued, but there are media pressure by Teosto and Kopiosto who are similar to MPAA and RIAA. And they want on these days to file every media under that fee, was it HDD, SSD, External HDD/SSD, USB sticks, MicroSD cards and not just DVD, CD and External HDD. They even tried to get smart phones under that fee but they didn't succeed on that.

But were are not talking big moneys here. The fee is just few euros depending the size of media. Like if you buy a DVD, you pay 20 cents per disk. But if you buy a 2TB HDD, you pay 7 euros (drive is about 120 euros itself).
But today teens whines about that a lot. And I mean A LOT. Because they feel that is ripping off and how music and movies are already too expensive.

But they do not understand that they can save LOTS of money just with that fee. Because the copyright law gives permission for private copying, they can save a lot of money just by loaning music from library and copying it. Or that they would borrow the music from friend and copy it.
And all that would be 100% legal. They could get as much music and even movies as they ever want, but they just want it free and NOW. 10-30 years old people are already so lazy that they don't want to go library what can be just 1km away (every town usually has library and closer than any mall or music store). And they could even get the music albums faster in best cases than download it trough torrents (if torrent takes 15 minutes download and at least one music disk is in library and all of them are not loaned to others).

The copyright law gives permission even for teens to cut music prices at least 50% but at most 90%. So you can go with your two best friends and buy a new album together. So everyone pays 33.3%. That is already 66.6% savings. And when usual album price is about 15 euros, you pay only under 5 euros so you save 10 euros! And all you three get high quality CD and any wanted format you just like. And it is legal to brake DRM to get your music to MP3 player or your phone or make a new CD copy.

Of course it is clear that people does not know this so well, it isn't marketed, it isn't even mentioned by pirate party or any other political party what drives customers rights. EFFI (EFF Finland) has mentioned it few times but only Helsingin-Sanomat (biggest news paper) wrote few pages about the rights when a new bill

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[WrongSizeGlass]

The "let me see what this is about" crowd is much larger than "gamers" and they have different wants, expectations and playing styles. The ability to try things out without an upfront purchase, or a monthly subscription, lets them vote with their wallets after they decide they like the game. The only after that traditional game makers are concerned about is that you buy more DLC after they have your money and that you don't sell your used game after you've had your fill.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[WrongSizeGlass]

FWIW I think nowadays people have more different things to spend their money on. So unless incomes increase, there should be no surprise if they spend less on CDs or music.

Are you saying that the recession the US economy has been in for the last several years has affected disposable income and the purchasing decisions people are making? Why, that could have a negative impact on the sales numbers for the music industry! Once the RIAA finds out they may sue economists and/or the government to do something about it.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[foniksonik]

The Backstrret Boys were at their peak in 1999 (Wikipedia). That was the beginning of the end for the music industry. The rise of manufactured pop music. Does anyone still listen to any of the heavily marketed groups they (the recording industry) put all their money into? No. The music industry cashed in on a niche that had no staying power and continued that policy until that generation stopped caring. In the meanwhile all the good musicians got tired of it and left, starting their own labels, accepting less revenue for more profit.

They killed their cow. Piracy had nothing to do with it.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[risom]

So how do you increase income? US tried to. See what happened in the long run.

Actually, the U.S. income hasn't really increased for forty years now. That's the main reason for the high number of mortgages (which led to the ongoing crisis) - a phenomenon not observable in wide parts of Europe.

And as population increases, income goes lower to everyone as there are more services available.

AFAIK those two do not correlate. Do you have some source for that?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[beckerist]

Actually, I have never pirated. But I have downloaded
Yep, and I've never smoked, but I have inhaled

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't pirate, and haven't in years. Yet, I almost never buy music anymore.

That just means you're old. The music industry's target market has always been 14-25 year olds. With the exception of the advent of CDs, when a lot of oldsters replaced their inferior LPs with CDs, young people are the ones who need to build their music collection. Older folks - many just stop attending to music as more pressing life concerns take precedence; many lose the old "passion" and find that selections from radio (or Pandora) satisfy; many just like what they already have.

The music industry failed to recognize how music discovery and consumption as changing in their narrow, critical market, and they've been trying desperately to enforce the old model on people who don't even consider physical media as an option for their music. The media companies should have been all over subscription services - it's just too much trouble (and too expensive) to 'buy' music one song at a time for $1, but if you can rent access to Capitol's whole catalog for a reasonable monthly fee, then Capitol gets a revenue stream and they get to steer you to their next big artist. But they failed, and now they look like buggy-whip producers.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[tibit]

There is quite a bit of stuff not available on iTunes, it was even worse years ago. The iTunes Store introduced in 2003 is somewhat younger than, say, original Napster from 1999.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[jvkjvk]

Are you sure it wasn't Indian rap or hip-hop?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[tibit]

People like free shit

Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate. There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.

Sorry but liking free shit is orthogonal to being altruistic. I think myself of reasonably altruistic but I like some free (or cheap) stuff nevertheless. I don't see where's the problem, except that you made it up.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[tibit]

I'd certainly like it if it were true that you can make it "just fine" without more than $1M, having to invest everything in excess. Alas, this would prevent, let's say, SpaceX from happening. Sometimes you have to accumulate wealth before you can start something big. Sometimes even you may not know what's there for you to do with the money. Now, I do know that many people who make over $1M a year are hypocritical jerks (of the Richard Guilt kind from Terry Pratchett's excellent Going Postal), but there are a few good ones thrown in for good measure. It'd be hard to know in advance who's who, you know.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[tibit]

7 months is too short, but 7 years IMHO would be just fine.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[bfree]

You may have reduced their revenue, but have you reduced their profit? The costs associated with digital distribution should be trivial compared to pressing, shipping, warehousing, picking and delivery. End result being that even with a huge drop in revenue the industry could still be making more profit then ever. When deciding if they need to cut more jobs they won't be basing it on revenue but on their bottom line.

Or in other words, lies, damn lies and statistics, no need to argue with them over the statistic they pick to best suit their arguments.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is exactly what the RIAA don't want, they would much prefer you to buy CDs, and then find out that you don't like them... If people can try before they buy, then they have to actually make an effort to produce decent music that people will like.

Of course you can try before you buy. Record stores have headsets (or similar) and will let you listen before you make a decision. While you examine at the nice 12.4" cover.
And if you only like one or a few songs, why, you can buy a single or a maxi instead.

What is a record store?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Idbar]

Also, I used to buy CDs for about $15, some of them contained as low as 9 songs, 5 of them that I didn't want in first place. So I was paying about $7 of unnecessary overhead, and songs weren't cheaper than $1. I could see why, only moving to "per song" sales, the revenues would drop to half.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[webheaded]

They certainly have modified their business model to battle piracy and they're failing at it. Is there a single game on the market that you cannot pirate? Other than perhaps an MMO? Hell, even then...don't people setup pirate WoW servers?

However, where exactly did you get the 90% number? I dare say that sounds like you're completely pulling that out of your ass.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[scharkalvin]

Also many sites that offer download purchases of music have samples you can listen to on line. I'm not sure how the RIAA feels about that, but these samples are only outcuts of songs not the complete thing. Also music can be previewed before purchase when it is played on a radio station, either over the air or over the internet.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's great and all. I'm guessing you live in the United States where these alternative services are available. You fit the "business model." For the rest of us, the album/movie/episode isn't available YET and the inline service isn't serving my country EVER. Hmm I can wait 1 year to see that or ... hey look there it is on the pirate bay!

AC

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at my CD collection you will notice that 90%+ of them are from the 90s, which is not so ironically the period in which I was most likely to have pirated music.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Losses are most likely due to the drop in product quality since 70's (junk music) and outdated business model. Same happened to Polaroid and public phone booth.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to validate you in any way, but I agree.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[residieu]

I think some of the losses probably are due to piracy, but I don't think we should just assume that they all are. What else has happened in the last 10 years? I bet the gaming industry funneled away a lot of the money that once went to RIAA members. And generally the internet has provided a lot of other distractions. Plus, technology has improved so that it's possible to produce music without the help of a label, so many fans may be bypassing the RIAA members and getting music directly from the source.

And there's that whole recession, isn't consumer spending in general down? People without jobs can't buy as much music...

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile I simply stopped buying CDs. I use to buy one or two every paycheck, but after seeing the dickish behaviour of the RIAA I decided to boycott the bastards.

That's a LOT of revenue lost right there. There's not even any piracy involved here - most of what I listen to is indy stuff, and have found an awful lot of free LEGAL music available on the net right on various band's websites.

Regardless of this, I still don't believe the claimed losses are valid. One thing that was going on around the start and life of Napster was the increasing popularity of the CD. A lot of people were rebuying music they already had purchased on audio cassette in CD form. Once they had that stuff rebought, obviously there was going to be a drop in sales again.

Also another big hit is that people are simply not buying CDs as much at all anymore, and CDs are having to be sold cheaper than before just to have people look at them. (average price of a new CD is down to 15-20 dollars instead of being upwards to 30 dollars - this DOES have an effect in those totals.)

The people not buying CDs anymore, are they pirating? No, not particularly. A lot of former CD buyers moved to purchasing legal digital music - but only buying the individual tracks they like from an album. A lot of people have started to notice that most of the tracks on a CD tend to be filler that just isn't worth buying. So instead of buying that 15-20 dollar CD, they're buying 1-3 songs from that CD for 1 dollar each.

But by all means, let's blame piracy for the drop in total revenue earned by the music industry instead of taking all these very real issues into account.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Sir_Eptishous]

It appears the only way to create a Spotify account is by logging into an existing FB account... Hmmm, the noose is tightening.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[b0bby]

Exactly. I used to buy a lot of cds; now for $36/year I use Pandora for most casual listening. I have ripped all my cds, but I like to hear new stuff & Pandora makes it easy. I'll buy a few mp3 albums a year from Amazon of stuff I really like, but that's about it. Piracy doesn't figure into this; my decline in spending on music is not because I'm pirating, but because I'm happy with listening to music in ways other than just buying it.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[X0563511]

Speaking of the game industry. Some people get better quality sound/music from games (e.g. Guitar Hero) than from the CDs the labels try to sell them.

So, you either like the different mastering and the codec artifacts*, or you simply enjoy the covers more than the original artist's version? That's fine - just don't forget those differences, which end up meaning you are wanting a different product (that is very similar to, but different).

Watch this if the below is something that interests you.

* Specifically I'm speaking of codec overloads, which with typical MP3 happens if you don't give it the 4-5dB headroom pre-encoding it requires. Nobody seems to do this... they maximize it all so the peaks hit 0dB, which is bad for several reasons:

1. It overloads the codec (eg suddenly gets much much more lossy)
2. Clipping! Analog peaks can and do go above the digital sample peaks! Oops! This causes nasty flat-top distortion.

Rambling rant over.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[andyteleco]

In Spain it is similar. We have to pay a fee on every kind of digital media (HDD, DVD, CD, etc) which goes to SGAE (spanish equivalent of RIAA).

The problem is, at least here, that this organization are no more than a bunch of crooks who pay no taxes (or hardly any) since they have a tremendously obscure accounting system (there have been several big corruption scandals among the heads of the corporation), and the way they distribute these profits among the artists is also very obscure and unbalanced (many artists have already broken up with them because they are hardly getting any revenues).

Apart from this, they constantly lobby the political parties (especially the socialists) to give them more and more rights and use mafioso methods to get what they want. For example, they are known for:
- breaking into weddings and other parties and sueing the performing band if they haven't paid a licensing fee (even though they have already paid for their records previously)
- demanding monthly fees from pubs, clubs and even hairdressers or taxi drivers for performing music or even playing the radio (!!) inside their business.

For these and many other reasons they have a very bad reputation inside the country, and I believe that with their arrogance and wrongdoing they are actually causing more harm than benefit to the majority of the artists.

And of course I'm not mentioning some other facts why there is a stron opposition to this fee:
- People who are using digital media to copy their own data (no music or movies or games) also have to pay the fee. It's like an implicit assumption of guilt.
- Copying is not legal in Spain if it's not for your own use (you cannot lend the copied CDs to youtr friends), so the fee doesn't give you the freedom you mention for Finland.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[mcgrew]

Same here, but I have so much music that buying more is silly, especially since KSHE broadcasts seven CDs uncut and interrupted every Sunday. Just plug your notebook's earphone to the PC's audio input and sample. On the rare occasion I do buy any music, it's from a local band producing their own stuff.

Odd that when Napster thrived, CD sales rose, but when the industry sued it, CD sales plummeted -- yet nobody seems to credit the organized boycott against the RIAA labels with any of those losses.

Also odd that studies show that pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates, which you and the GP confirm with your own examples.

Pirates aren't eating the RIAA's lunch, the indies are. Musicians no longer need the labels, and neither do the listeners. The entrenched music industry is now obsolete. Time passes, things get invented, and who will cry for the new candlemaking and buggy whip industries?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

... 24/7/365....

At least we'll have the leap-days!

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Gr8Apes]

The entire concept of revenue loss is a red herring. The music industry had a golden age of revenue after the CD came into being as everyone eventually bought CDs to replace their aging or crappy sounding LPs, since the latter tend to self-destruct over time. So the industry saw a really nice revenue wave of the expected sales of new music plus the additional sales of replacement CDs, coupled with a refusal to sell anything but full albums (singles were pretty much dropped for a long time)

This process had a natural bell curve, as people migrated to the new tech and discovered that yes, it did sound better, and replaced their favorite old LPs with CDs. The music industry, however, wants everyone to believe that the growth and level should have continued indefinitely, an obvious delusional fantasy for anyone that is even remotely logical/rational.

I'd like to see a full revenue graph from the 70s onward, with notes on CD introduction, CD mass acceptance, and a few other notations included such as the first Gold CD - Boston Third Stage, and the first Platinum CD, the dropping of 45s/singles, as well as a relationship to CD player sales and CD ownership percentages, and the beginning of iTunes sales, which returned the ability to buy singles. I think you'll see some interesting relationships, of which one result will be that the music industry was already peaked by 1999, and Napster, while potentially increasing the effect, was certainly not responsible for any part of the trend.

A last piece I'd like to see would be the number of new records and artists and their major categories released each year, which would be interesting for other reasons. My personal impression is that new artists/records in a large segment of categories have dwindled to very small numbers over the past 10 years.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[jamstar7]

RIAA considers 'sampling' even a single note to be piracy. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1397511/

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[swillden]

I don't need to copy files from one piece of hardware to another

Semi-OT, but I've found Google Music to be another nice solution (though one that does involve buying music). If you listen to music on PCs and Android devices it's really slick: Just upload all of your music (CDs, MP3s, AACs, etc.), up to 20K songs, and then it's all available on all your Android devices and any PC. For listening when you don't have a network connection you can have the Android app sync stuff to local storage ("make available offline"). When you do have a network, what's local vs what's streamed is transparent. Oh, no iOS app because Apple doesn't want competition. You can use Google Music on iOS via a web browser, but only for streamed music.

That said, I'm listening to Pandora right now, rather than my 15K-song Google Music collection. Why? Because it includes stuff I haven't bought and because it's low-effort. I use Pandora for most of my "background noise" listening and Google Music when I want to listen to specific songs, or when I'm off-line.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Maxo-Texas]

I'll pile on and say I havn't pirated a song since 128kb was the standard and allofmp3.com was active in Russia.

I used to listen to XM radio but it got to $14 so I quit. Then they offered it to me for $12, then $10, then $7, and finally $4.75 a month- so I resubscribed. When that term is up, I'll cancel it again if it returns to $14 (which it will). If it went to $10, I'd probably keep it.

I found the local radio stations to be plenty when I didn't have XM. I've never set up Pandora or similar sites.

I haven't put any of my CD's into a CD player for over 3 years. I was given a new harmonica CD as a gift recently as I'm playing with the Harmonica.

No piracy. I don't find new music (outside of Blue October) to be entertaining and I don't find listening to the same song over and over entertaining any more. I can go to a concert, hear the band's songs once that year and I'm done.

For movies, I use Netflix and Amazon Prime (tho less since it is harder to use than Netflix) and perhaps soon the comcast service.

I'm just not willing to pay what entertainers want for their entertainment. Some people are- that's fine. But I *would* be willing to pay $10 a month for on-demand music similar to Netflix. And that would be about $120 a year than I pay now. By pricing their entertainment so high, they lose me as a consumer. And the less I consume, the less interested I am in consuming.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[tlhIngan]

That said, CDs are today very impractical. It's physically too large. No one carries a player anywhere near that size. The RIAA needs to get that clue bashed into their stupid heads and figure out better marketing. Still, I have bought a couple CDs in the past few years ... and "ripped" them so they could be a part of my collection. If I can't "rip" them I can't play them. If I can't play them, what's the point in buying them.

Yes. Even Steve Jobs had trouble. In the end, he had to use the pathetic Mac marketshare (under 10% in the US) as a reason to try. Where else would a single digit marketshare be considered a good thing to launch a new venture? Ask any reasonable person and they wouldn't launch such a demanded product as Mac-only - they'd go after Windows with its 90% marketshare.

Face it - the only reason the RIAA is as stubborn as it is, it's because they don't care about it. They want control - total control. The Mac market is too small for the RIAA so if iTunes Music Store was a blazing success, they wouldn't lose control of the music. And of course it was a blazing success, because it offered what everyone wanted - a place to download music conveniently, easily, legally, and relatively "high quality". Jobs then pulled the rug out and released iTunes for Windows, thus offering to the public what they wanted. And with the iPod and clever non-licensing of FairPlay, it forced the music industry to open up since the only way to sell for iPod was ... sell DRM-free.

And the big question was - how could Jobs compete with free (pirated music)?

They have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

Same goes for the MPAA. Though this time they're a bit more sneaky and make only parts of catalogs available to every provider, so Netflix has to compete with RedBox and iTunes and all sorts of other services, keeping ultimate control with the MPAA. When one of these services gets TOO successful, they'll start doing the "you cannot show this for N days after release".

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you shop that you can preview everything available for sale? Usually its only 6 from each genre that are the top selling or best known artists.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[swillden]

You should check out murfie.com. You can buy a CD, but they keep the CD in their warehouse and you just download rips in the format of your choice. And you can often buy used CDs from other murfie.com users for far less than the normal price, and less than you'd pay for the same album on Google Music, Amazon or iTunes.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[jamstar7]

The fact is, the US has had down turns in the past. Historically, this type of entertain has done well because its far less expensive than other forms of entertainment. Likewise, booze typically sees a surge. This time around, however, only booze saw a surge. So we can safely throw out your entire theory. The fact its been moderated, "insightful" is laughable.

Yes, the US has had economic downturns in the past. The difference this time is, there's no infrastructure left to work with when 'the times turn around'. After the Great Depression in the 30's, all those idle factories were put to use at full capacity and more factories were built. Today, idle factories are torn down and the property is 'developed' as fast as the local city council can sign the paperwork. What factories are being built tend to be highly automated, needing a couple hundred workers where 5,000 workers were needed a couple decades ago. Robots don't form unions, take sick days, strike for better working conditions (yet...). And those new factories are granted tax breaks to attract them to an area because those couple hundred jobs create a thousand jobs in 'support' areas.

Problem is, outside of Toledo, nobody's building new factories in the US anymore.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[jmerlin]

It really makes you wonder, though. If you logically reason through the changes in technology and consumption, you immediately realize that $16.99 CDs that contain 1 good song and 11 awful ones are probably selling at under 1/50th of their rate from only 15 years ago. Yet more music is purchased today ($.99 for a song vs $16.99, we buy more because it's more affordable and easier to get than before). The losses claimed here are directly classified as losses in "the sale of music." But that's certainly not a valid container to encapsulate what we're talking about. A large majority of people now use online radio and YouTube (VEVO being the largest entity on YT) to consume music, though not necessarily exclusively. The last time I checked, *ALL* of these services provide enormous ad revenue. So to make a valid comparison to 15 years ago, the actual revenue stream from their music channels should also include this ad revenue that results from zero work on their part (literally, which means costs are also down). I would imagine with that factored in, they'd be making far more money today than they were 15 years ago, and because they need people to deal specifically with these advertisers and to look for new opportunities, they've probably actually created jobs.

The constant whining about piracy is a joke. I can't really take anyone who says it has an impact at all seriously. I listen to music *CONSTANTLY* throughout the day. I don't have a single MP3. I haven't pirated a song in over 10 years. But I do recall I bought no less than 15 CDs in the mid 90s. With a very modest estimate at $.05/hr from my consumption today, I would claim at 8 hours a day, that's $12/month = $144/yr. Those 15 CDs are $255. So in just 2 short years, I've generated more revenue for them than I ever have in direct purchases. Considering the popular songs on YT having 100M+ views, I'd imagine they have a far larger user base with similar consumption habits than they ever did selling CDs, and I'd imagine their profits are literally through the roof. But you'll never see them mention ad revenue when talking about music sales, ever, because if we realized just how profitable they are despite the "massive amounts of piracy" that is happening, we (everyone it impacts, not just the /. crowd) wouldn't take their copyright trolling bullshit nor their push for legislation seriously.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[TheLink]

I'm talking about this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/sep/17/metallica.guitar.hero.loudness.war
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/09/does-metallicas/

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[jd2112]

(Game company exec) I don't like how this jello keeps slipping out of my hands. every time I tighten my grip more slips out of my fingers. Obviously I'm not gripping tight enough...

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[X0563511]

... holy shit!

At least they gave it the headroom for the codec. But that's insane. Why the hell.... do they ENJOY ear fatigue?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[X0563511]

In addition to my other reply:

This at least makes me feel better. It wasn't the poor engineer who did it.

"I'm certainly sympathetic to your reaction," said Ted Jensen, head engineer at Sterling Sound, quoted on the Metallica forum. "I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case, the mixes were already brick-walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here."

"Believe me I'm not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else."

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[pxc]

I think it may have to do with the fact that the youth have little or no income, and so their choice is between copying music and just not having it.

But what does 'learning how the world works' really mean here? Which part of learning how the world works might bring this sense of guilt? Is it becoming more familiar with societal expectations? Is it a richer understanding of how laws like copyright seek to support the arts? Is it a more altruistic idea of fairness?

You may be right, but I do wonder just which part of learning how the world works may produce this effect.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[V for Vendetta]

Also, I used to buy CDs for about $15, some of them contained as low as 9 songs, 5 of them that I didn't want in first place.

I never understood this argument. I buy albums, not songs, from bands I like. Granted, there's always those 1-2 songs on an album that are just average "fillers", but they're part of the album and it's not that I don't like them. It's just that the other songs are better.. I've bought (albums of) bands which I don't like, based on reviews or recommendations. But that's just because I was too lazy to listen to a couple of songs before purchasing the album. My fault - no one else's.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[pxc]

I could support this view. Copyright, with some corrections/restorations, can stay as a part of the new plan to encourage creative works. It should simply be acknowledged as a temporary monopoly on distribution (rather than property, which it is not), and recognized as a tool rather than an end in itself.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[jsfs]

Sure, piracy hurts the labels a bit. But you know what really takes the revenue away? Artists can now afford to set up a recording studio in their own homes, or rent them for practically nothing, and make albums by themselves. Studio engineers have been fired in droves over the last few years, no new ones are being hired, and the ones mixing the albums were almost always independent contractors anyway. The engineers no longer have a reason to support the labels, so music production is evolving away from the labels. It's pretty common now to have an artist record something in their bedroom or garage and bring it to an engineer to mix, edit, master, or some combination of those, then take it to a CD duplication company and walk out with an album to sell. It's trivial to send in a copy to the Library of Congress for copyright purposes, and as long as you have five to thirty thousand dollars to invest none of this is particularly difficult. The second album is even cheaper.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[arth1]

Where do you shop that you can preview everything available for sale? Usually its only 6 from each genre that are the top selling or best known artists.

Um, is this a trick question? You bring the items to the counter and ask the clerk to play them?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[SecurityTheatre]

There are a lot of albums where I enjoy a single song, but the remainder is terrible.

Maybe our taste differs, but I find myself often buying 1-3 songs from an album and skipping the rest.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[mcgrew]

It's not acquired with age; I'm 60 and have never had a problem taping friends' records and copying their CDs. It's acquired by amoral propaganda that falsely labels it as wrong. Hell, in the '70s the RIAA tried to get congress to outlaw cassette decks, and they responded by writing a law that specifically legalized taping.

It's from lies like "copying is theft!" and "you wouldn't steal a car, would you?" No, I wouldn't steal a car but if I could make a copy of a car I sure would. I'm not taking anything away from you by copying your car.

The "downloading is stealing" is especially annoying to me. If crack your computer and copy some of the files, well, you may construe that as theft (even though you still have the files and have lost nothing, it's a stretch), but if I buy and pay for a CD and send you copies of its rips, how are you in any way stealing? It was given to you!

The first indication that a person is a sociopath is his or her bald faced lies. How many truthful lawyers, politicians, or CEOs have you ever heard of?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[e_hu_man]

last i checked (and it was a long time ago, so i could be wrong now), the costs of producing millions of plastic discs was a very low on the riaa expense list. most of their "waste" is in talent development, which is not what it used to be, but still requires resources. basically, if they find some talent worthy of a deal, they have to record the artist (cheaper with digital technology, but still very expensive) and promote the artist. the problem is they only make their money back on a small percentage of artists (i think roughly 10%, but like i said, it's been a while).

this is not to say the riaa doesn't do evil. many of those up-front costs are carried by the artists all the way to (in some cases) bankruptcy, so even after a new artist's single goes platinum, he/she/they may still owe the label money. and everything you said about suing their consumers is, of course, well documented. i guess all i'm saying is even if labels weren't evil, it always appears that they are wasteful and taking advantage simply because they sink so much money into artists that go nowhere (eg daniel johnston, great as he is, was a commercial flop for the label that signed him first).

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[suutar]

"You know what we need? A giant battlestation. With a big laser. Yeah, that's the ticket."

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

no clerk is going to open the cd, making it a used cd.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until pirates begin to deal with this basic reality of economics and scale

like when a product is near infinite, therefore causing its value to plummet to almost zero?

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Idbar]

And I won't be critic to your choices. You may hear the whole album and think is good or some songs may just grow in you later. I just don't think it's the overall mentality nowadays and people, having the opportunity of paying for a single song they want, to go ahead and buy the full album.

My point being that having the chance of buying just a couple of songs (and I'd assume most of the time just one), may lead to people just not buying the whole album. I'm thinking for each person that stop buying the whole album and enjoys only half of it, there needs to be at least 5 more people that buys a single song, or another that buys half of it to make for the revenue.

This math... seems to be overly simplified, but may show a drop in revenue without even including piracy in the picture.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[GmExtremacy]

You're blissfully ignoring reality again, as most pirates do.

You say "most," but again, can you prove this? I generally don't make sweeping generalizations of pro-copyright people.

But a loss it is.

Indeed. It's an unquantifiable loss of something that they never had.

And its very irrational

Is it not typical to say this about someone you disagree with? Personally, I'd be careful about thinking that you're 100% correct lest you become closed-minded. My opinion.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[FireFury03]

But what does 'learning how the world works' really mean here? Which part of learning how the world works might bring this sense of guilt? Is it becoming more familiar with societal expectations? Is it a richer understanding of how laws like copyright seek to support the arts? Is it a more altruistic idea of fairness?

You may be right, but I do wonder just which part of learning how the world works may produce this effect.

I think young people tend not to think so much about the consequences of their actions (especially when the consequences don't directly cause problems for themselves). So as you get older, you may start to realise that by copying you are depriving an artist of income, that this is a bit unfair to the artist, and potentially makes it impossible for some artists to dedicate their working life to the art (with the long term effect of reducing the amount of art available to you).

On the other hand, I'm sure that watching the artist's representitives actively trying to screw over your peers probably goes a long way to counteract any such feelings of guilt.

Re:Losses, but due to piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is when a person calls to mind the cow of wonder.

I am sure you aren't comparing apples to apples

[hashish]

Pun intended btw.

Pirating music maybe part of the drop but there are many other factors. The world has changed, people play youtube music at parties now.

Re:I am sure you aren't comparing apples to apples

[wierdling]

Ah, but don't you know, all YouTube music is pirated. Even the butterflies.

Re:I am sure you aren't comparing apples to apples

[Black Parrot]

Ah, but don't you know, all YouTube music is pirated. Even the butterflies.

I've been wondering why YouTube apparently isn't being hammered with take-down notices. You find a published song or bootleg recording, watch it, and it's still there several years later.

Maybe the labels tacitly acknowledge that it's good advertising.

Re:I am sure you aren't comparing apples to apples

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been wondering why YouTube apparently isn't being hammered with take-down notices. You find a published song or bootleg recording, watch it, and it's still there several years later.

Maybe the labels tacitly acknowledge that it's good advertising.

They can leave it there, claim it is theirs, add adverts, and make money off the adverts, instead of taking it down.

The boss of SONY was complaining that the music rights organisation in Germany was just taking down videos, instead of doing this: http://torrentfreak.com/sony-music-boss-censored-youtube-videos-cost-us-millions-120224/

Re:I am sure you aren't comparing apples to apples

[icebraining]

Google essentially made a deal, they spent a lot of money creating Content-ID to please the copyright holders.

I found the other $50 billion...

[ATMAvatar]

Clearly, it's coming from all the economic losses suffered at the hands of DRM and additional copyright enforcement.

Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see these losses reported to the IRS.

Re:Taxes

[Ihmhi]

Anyone else notice how Rob Reid "rounds" $6.8 bn to $8 bn? I mean, jeez, talk about fuzzy math!

You kind of lose a fair bit of your credibility when you're being that disingenuous. $1,200,000,000 isn't exactly what I'd call a tiny margin of error.

Re:Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article again.
$14.6 billion minus $6.8 billion = $7.8 billion.
Rounding 7.8 to 8 seems fair to me in this context.

Re:Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the "drop" he's rounded to $8 billion (the drop being from $14.6 to $6.8 billion - i.e. $7.8 billion)

Re:Taxes

[Ihmhi]

Whoops, you're right! I still think $200,000,000 is a pretty big chunk to be rounding off, though.

Need more coffee...

Re:Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Reid does not round $6.8 bn to $8 bn. He rounds $14.6 - $6.8 bn = $7.8 bn to $8 bn.

Re:Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the Summary again. He rounds the difference between the two numbers to $8 billion. 14.6 - 6.8 = 7.8

I'd say that's a lot closer to $8 billion.

the quality dropped

[Anonymous Coward]

While I have _a lot_ of vinyl from the 60's and 70's I slowed down buying at later years. Now the CD recordings are unpleasant to listen because of loss of dynamic range (loud mastering) I don't buy them. One reason for the growing sales of vinyl. I don't download either. If the music industry can come up with artists and quality of the past I will not buy anything (new). I believe I am not alone on this.

Re:the quality dropped

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no. You just have to buy the latest audio equipment with golden cables and this stuff. This brings back the full dynamic range of your audio experience.

Re:the quality dropped

[bobv-pillars-net]

+1 Funny.

Re:the quality dropped

[Hognoxious]

the latest audio equipment with golden cables

Be sure to connect them the right way round, or you'll actually make the sound worse.

Re:the quality dropped

[fermion]

While I don't agree that CD are unpleasant to listen to, there is a generational shift, and I think if the numbers are looked at in an objective way, this shift is what is responsible for decline of sales.

The fact is that record sales boomed for a few generations, I would argue to due to radio and good marketing on the part of the labels. We see tens of millions of albums selling records in the 1970's and 1980's(the Beatles and other started the trend in the alte 60's). That's it. The drop of new albums began in the 90's. The CD stalled the drop, but we have virtually no new album topping 40 million for the 1990's, and there has been 20 years for it to happen, and public that is growing and kids with more money.

There are still a few big artists, but when the recording companies blame piracy, it is because they can't blame what they really want to, which is a loss of entitlement. They want to make money just because they made money before.For a generation they made huge amounts of money by selling a product a generation wanted, and now they want to foce the next generation to consume the products in the same way that maximized revenue. It is silly. It is like the state mandating that online sales are illegal because they deny the right of brick and mortar store to make enough profit to keep the inefficient model in tact.

This applies to movies and everything else. There is not right to profit, just the pursuit fo profit. And if the market sees no value in a product, then so be it. The value in music, movies, etc is not what it was. The suppliers need to adjust.

Re:the quality dropped

[mea_culpa]

Don't forget that Monster also makes some headphones that are endorsed by a doctor.

3 hours of entertainment daily

[Anonymous Coward]

I watch and read what is freely available world wide.. that fills my 3 hours daily.. feel sorry for someone who pirates in a global world of entertainment..

losses...what losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never downloaded music or Vids. I have brought used CDs and DVDs from a couple of local stores. Also checked out CDs and DVDs from the local library. And have ripped most of them to my HD. Is this illegal? If so, sue me...I'm tort proof as I have no assets.

Re:losses...what losses?

[wmbetts]

Oh that's fine if you don't currently have anything, because they'll make sure you stay that way for the rest of your life.

It's not piracy

[Hackysack]

There is a fundamental shift in the underlying business models. (Thank goodness)

a) No longer is the only source of getting a song, buying an album. Now, if you like a song, you buy the song for 1.29, rather than the album for $20 from HMV or wherever.
b) Social media and word of mouth trumps advertising and corporate presentation. It's much harder to convince your audience to spend the $20 for the album with 1 mediocre song, and it's much easier for your audience to talk amongst them selves and realize that the album isn't worth it.

c) Thanks to the digital age, the industry is shrinking. Same for newspapers.

A large portion of the size of the industry was the overhead necessary to distribute physical media. I'm not sure what %, but I'm certain it was significant. This business value is gone and/or going now. What you're left with is the value of the purely creative side, some marketing, some overhead.

If the value of a newspaper in 1990 was $100M, and $60M of that could be attributed to the capital & overhead required to actually produce and deliver the newspaper; now it's 2012, and after inflation the same company finds itself worth $40M because they've lost the need to maintain the infrastructure to do the physical delivery. The same is true for Music (tho not yet for movies, although coming) A very large portion of the value of a music distribution company was the distribution part. That's gone now, thank goodness.

We just need the industry to adapt to the new mode where creation is harder than delivery, because right now I feel like we're not being served well by record company A&R.

But that's just me

Re:It's not piracy

[AdamWill]

"a) No longer is the only source of getting a song, buying an album"

I'm always vaguely bemused at this canard, which is constantly cited over and over by both sides of whatever argument you happen to be having at the time.

'The only source of getting a song' has _never_ been buying an album. At least in by far the most common case, which is 'wanting to buy that popular song that you keep hearing on the radio'. All those songs on the radio are called 'singles'. And you've _always_ been able to buy them...as singles. CD singles, record singles, whatever - you get the song you wanted, and a couple of tracks of filler, for about 1/8th the cost of the album.

Until recently, when digital distribution changed everything, singles massively outsold albums. I'm just not sure where this phantom image of millions of sad people buying entire albums just to get single tracks comes from, because it's never actually been the case.

Re:It's not piracy

[fredprado]

Singles weren't a common practice everywhere around the world. Maybe they were easily available in US and Europe (I don't really know about that), but they have been quite rare here in Brazil from the Vinyl Era to these days..

Re:It's not piracy

[mojotooth]

Who said we're only allowed to like the songs that the record companies release as singles?

Re:It's not piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you are mentioning this fact as well...

Take into account how much money they spend to buy off ISP's, how much they spend for lobbyists to buy off politicians, and the hoards of Lawyers and legal fees.
Are they taking this out of there gross profits, so the number they are "publicly" (wink wink) giving is false.

I would agree with your assessment, the author of this article seems to be more of a horrible blogger then an actual fact finding free thinker.

Re:It's not piracy

[MisterMidi]

Ok, what if you wanted a song that wasn't released as a single? What if you wanted the album version instead of the single version because it was edited to fit within 3 minutes and you really liked the long guitar solo?

Re:It's not piracy

[Black Parrot]

Until recently, when digital distribution changed everything, singles massively outsold albums. I'm just not sure where this phantom image of millions of sad people buying entire albums just to get single tracks comes from, because it's never actually been the case.

Possibly the Slashdot demographic isn't the run-out-and-buy-the-latest-top-40-hit crowd. I probably bought one single for every 10-20 LPs I bought.

And never a Super-Dooper-Deluxe-Remaster of a single, though I'm embarrassed to admit that they suckered me into buying a lot of SDDR albums.

Re:It's not piracy

[thegarbz]

Except singles weren't released for $0.99. No you couldn't just buy the song. You had to buy the Single, which had 5 different versions of the same song for about half the price of the entire album if the single was still in the charts, and still about $5 if it was not.

There's nothing good to be said about the overpriced distribution methods the industry is trying to hold on to. The fundamental problem is that these like many things were priced as high as the market would bare, however the market changed, as did consumer expectations and the price did not.

Re:It's not piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Until recently, when digital distribution changed everything, singles massively outsold albums. I'm just not sure where this phantom image of millions of sad people buying entire albums just to get single tracks comes from, because it's never actually been the case.

Yes, actually that's been the case for quite a while. I worked at a major music retail store in the 90's so I have a little bit of an "insider" view of this. First, keep in mind that none of what I'm saying is 100% universally true, there are always exceptions.

Most of the time, a song will be chosen for "placement" on the Top 100 charts. This is done by adding the song to the mandated radio playlists, which pushes consumer interest in the song. At the same time, a "single" of the song would be released ahead of the full album, usually a few weeks prior, in the form of a "single" which was produced in limited quantities.
Then the album itself would release, and most of the people who bought the single would be back to buy the full album. Once the singles had sold out that was usually it.
Now, if another song off the same album started trending, OR if the industry wanted a song to trend, it would get released as a single as well.

Only in rare situations will you see a song from an album released as a single after the album debut, and most of the time such singles will have remixes, live versions, or some other re-hash which isn't on the main album to attract buyers.

Most of the songs on an album never actually get released as a single. Or at least they didn't use to. Now days it's more common to see artists release multiple singles, and then after they get enough they might release an "album" which in reality is better described as a "compilation of singles".

Re:It's not piracy

[gl4ss]

yea 10-15 euros for a single or 15-15 for an album...

very few singles sold in 2 euros range. mostly punk.

Re:It's not piracy

[Hognoxious]

Not all songs are released as singles. You must be a 12 year old Justin Bieber fan to not know that.

Re:It's not piracy

[amck]

Possibly the Slashdot demographic isn't the run-out-and-buy-the-latest-top-40-hit crowd. I probably bought one single for every 10-20 LPs I bought.

Is there still a Top40? I mean, that people can name musicians on, rather than a manipulated sales list up on a website somewhere?
Once upon a time, "Top of the Pops", giving the top40, was one of the biggest programs on BBC TV. Ok, it lost its market to MTV,
but really it died when the labels dropped their midlists in the late 1990s -early 2000s. They dropped over 80% of their _profitable_ artists, concentrating on the few big earners. Now, there aren't enough new songs out there to stage a Top40 show every week, least one that people want to watch (rather than fill the hours on MTV).

If RIAA gave me vouchers for 4 new albums from 2011 or 2012 for free, I couldn't name any music I would want.

So, I go to gigs and buy CDs there if the band is any good. RIAA should be ashamed of themselves for how bad a job they are doing at promoting and selling music. Their top-5 only model collapsed on them, and they should stop blaming piracy.

Now, I may not like X-factor, etc. but there would have been _something_ out there. I used to cringe at some of the "oldie" material that made the Top40 in Ireland etc when I was growing up, but it was bought by people. The equivalent music isn't there for someone who doesn't want the top 3 songs that make RIAA the most profit.

Re:It's not piracy

[dogmatixpsych]

Further, singles were almost always $3-$5 (usually closer to $5). I purchased one single in my life back in the 90s (it was a song not available on an album) but generally would purchase an entire album because I could get the album for $10 (this was when there were starting to be reasonable CD prices). Now singles are inexpensive but back in 90s or earlier, if a song was available as a single, it was still pricey.

Re:It's not piracy

[dj245]

There's one more shift in their business too. In the 1990's, the industry (not including independents) signed a lot more artists and pushed a lot more albums. Since then, they have been trying to reduce the number of signed artists and push what I would call "manufactured" musicians. Less artists, but more blockbuster albums seems to be the prevailing business model.

In high school (late 90s, early 2000s) I wrote a report which found strong correlations between the reduction of artists and the reduction of revenues.

I would try to dig up some modern sources for that kind of data but I need to be somewhere this morning (gym in 26 minutes etc).

Re:It's not piracy

[Idarubicin]

'The only source of getting a song' has _never_ been buying an album. At least in by far the most common case, which is 'wanting to buy that popular song that you keep hearing on the radio'. All those songs on the radio are called 'singles'. And you've _always_ been able to buy them...as singles. CD singles, record singles, whatever - you get the song you wanted, and a couple of tracks of filler, for about 1/8th the cost of the album.

I call bullshit, unless the typical album was selling for $30 or more where you lived.

Actually, I call bullshit on the rest of your comment, too, unless you can back up what you're saying with sources.

Brick and mortar record stores are disincentivized from carrying all but the most popular singles, and it is in their interest to make even those relatively hard to find on their shelves. They'd much rather stock and sell a $15-20 album over a $4 single, especially given that both take up the same physical space, and both have the same labor and handling overhead. Listeners who didn't want to wait weeks for mail-order or special-order singles were stuck with whatever limited selection their neighborhood record store happened to carry. Not everyone who buys music lives in a city with large, well-stocked record stores.

Moreover, for the casual home listener, physical singles were a nuisance to listen to. Unless you wanted to listen to the same three tracks ad nauseam four to six times an hour, you had to keep changing tapes (or discs) or you had to compile your singles into mix tapes (or mix CDs), or you had to acquire a large multi-disc changer and program it to pick out the 'good' tracks from the filler. A lot of manipulation of physical media was required.

I'm just not sure where this phantom image of millions of sad people buying entire albums just to get single tracks comes from...

Probably from the millions of people buying singles on iTunes instead of albums, now that they have a clear, unencumbered, sensibly-priced choice.

Re:It's not piracy

[Sancho]

Yeah. The singles were about $4 where I lived, and the albums were about $10. If you wanted more than one single on the album, you were probably better off getting the album.

Though the "singles" were inaptly named, because they usually included 2-3 songs. Mind you, the other two songs were rarely popular--occasionally they were alternate versions of tracks on the full album. I bought the single of Amish Paradise" because it included the alternate "The Night Santa Went Crazy".

Re:It's not piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm too old, but I thought singles were always about $1, but then I'm talking about 45 RPM singles on vinyl. But back then Tom Petty was rebelling against the record company for wanting to charge $7.99 for his new album instead of the usual $6.99 (or was it $8.99 vs. $7.99? - can't remember).

And to those saying 'but what if you liked a song that wasn't released as a single', I say that at least for me if that were the case I usually liked the music enough to pay for the whole album and maybe, just maybe there would be 1-2 songs on it I didn't like that much.

Here's an idea...

[viperidaenz]

Perhaps the people who stopped buying music because it was available free through Napster started spending more money on other entertainment industries, since cable tv, movie sales, box office sales and pretty much everything except music grew much quicker than historic figures would have predicted.

So maybe RIAA lost a few billion. MPAA looks like they have gained more than what was lost.

Re:Here's an idea...

[Zocalo]

The movie studios (the MPAA & RIAA are just lobbying bodies, they don't actually make any money off media sales) have almost certainly eaten into the profits of the music studios with the advent of the market for home movies to buy/rent. The same can also be said of the video gaming industry, which didn't exist until the early 1980s and only really started making serious money by perhaps 1985 or so. OK, the video and game industries have probably also grown at the expense of other entertainment businesses - cinemas, arcades, bars, bowling alleys, etc. - but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a correlation between the growth of movie and game sales and the music industries post-1973 decline. They are all competing for the same disposable income, after all.

Re:Here's an idea...

[TheRaven64]

CDs were probably partially to blame too. With CDs, you can visually inspect the surface and if it's not too scratched then you know that it will probably sound just as good as when it was new. In contrast vinyl gets slightly worse every time it's played (a lot worse every time it's played on a player that doesn't have the arm balanced correctly) and so buying records second hand is a bit more of a lottery. Around here, there are a lot of second-hand shops that sell CDs for under a tenth the price of a new one. They very often have recent releases as well as classics (and, of course, trash that no one wants to buy), so there is now an alternative to buying music new that simply wasn't there before.

Re:Here's an idea...

[gknoy]

That's interesting. I'd be interested in seeing a chart with the industry revenue for movies, music, and video games all stacked together.

Apple killed it

[dbergerson]

In 1999 CD's sold for $15-20. You can thank Apple for the pricing shift. We have gone from paying that much for the physical media to 9.99-12.99. We have also gone to a "45's" model of selling singles. The 99 cent song has done more to bastardize the sale of the physical CD than anything. The music industry tried to replace the 45 in the past with cassette singles, but never had a true CD replacement.

Re:Apple killed it

[dogmatixpsych]

The shift in CD prices started earlier than 1999. I only rarely paid $15-$20 for a CD at that point, most of them were in the $10-$12 range (purchased on "sales" and online). What Apple did was solidify that price point without having to scour around too much for a deal on an album.

vs Bankster Trillions

[Anonymous Coward]

If the banksters don't get away with stealing trillions, then people will have jobs again and buy more music. But as it stands now, no banksters have seen jail, no money clawed back, just more profits for the REAL pirates at the top printing FRN's from pure imagination.

Until the Constitution is restored, the music industry will fuck itself to death, stripping all our rights along the path.

The only people that give a shit now are the actual bands who can't sell much swag shit cause people are out of work, but the MPAA doesn't represent their own bands. The bands are treated like contract signing golden sac muppets.

MPAA, the people don't give a shit about your numbers or your claims of piracy. Only your treasonous pirate enablers in the government will be happy to swallow your hot dogs all in one sucking while leaving the people with the shit like usual. I got only one question for you, when the civil war starts because of your bullshit, do you think sales for music will go up or down?

Autotune to blame?

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I hate seeing compression artifacts in so-called high def video - it causes me to think about the display rather than the story. The same thing happens to music when processed with Autotune. To my ear, it sounds like a machine - not a human. The same thing happens with poorly remastered CDs. I've pretty much given up buying new CDs or any modern digital music from big companies because the sound grates my ears.

Re:Autotune to blame?

[TapeCutter]

Don't take this personally but I wonder if this is similar to what happens in Autistic people. An autisic brain interprets it sensory input at face value whereas a "normal" brain interprets it alongside what "should be" and tosses more of the noise away, making it literally non-existant to the owner of the "normal" brain. As the owner of a "normal" brain my comprehension of the written word is pretty good but my proof-reading sucks because my brain regularly auto-corrects mistakes and fails to inform me. As I understand it, the owner of an autistic brain has the opposite skill set

Re:Autotune to blame?

[Nyder]

I hate seeing compression artifacts in so-called high def video - it causes me to think about the display rather than the story. The same thing happens to music when processed with Autotune. To my ear, it sounds like a machine - not a human. The same thing happens with poorly remastered CDs. I've pretty much given up buying new CDs or any modern digital music from big companies because the sound grates my ears.

You should (maybe you have) seen the HDTV that Comcast puts out. If there is no action, it looks great, but as soon as people start moving? I'll swear i'm watching a 640x282 divx, instead of whats supposed to be a HD 720p signal.

The Ultimate Fighter is a great example of how horrible it is. Because of this, I download all of my TV shows, because I have a 1080p TV and I can't stand to see compression artifacts. And yes, I have an HDTV tuner. (i know someone would say something stupid like, your probably using the wrong tuner. comcast shill)

The truth is, some corporation is going to fuck up what you like, some way or another.

I wonder if I bitched at the people who produce the shows I like, and let them know (not that it does any good) that Comcast is purposely screwing up the quality of their show and making me now wanting to watch it, if that would do anything?

Re:Autotune to blame?

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

Interesting. I am not in a position to judge this for myself - I guess it's like a computer trying to see if it is rooted, while the rootkit is operational. I was exposed to a lot of chemicals and toxins (PCB, organic solvents, and the Louisiana public school system) over my 55 years, so this might be related in some way. But I'm pretty sure it is simply knowing too much about the process. As a coder/IT guy/photographer/videographer, I am trained to look for flaws in my work (and others). Things like macro-blocks in video compression are annoying to me. I pointed out macro-blocks to a friend on his new HDTV and now he is annoyed. He never noticed them before and now sees them everywhere.

Re:Autotune to blame?

[TapeCutter]

As a coder/IT guy/photographer/videographer, I am trained to look for flaws in my work (and others).

Ditto and I'm also in my 50's, but I find/fix bugs using traces and testing more easily than I do by proof-reading the code. The guy who sits next to me is the opposite, like you he finds them more easily by proof reading. And yes, once something is pointed out I can't help but see it.

Jobs and Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

The argument that piracy results in job losses is bunk on its face.

Imagine that the MPAA is right, and millions or even billions of dollars really are lost due to piracy. Now imagine that piracy doesn't happen and that all that money goes where the MPAA says it should. The companies of the content industry now have extra billions of dollars in revenue and profit.

Where does this money go?

Do they give all their workers a raise? No, they're not a charitable organization. As publicly-traded corporations, it would even be illegal for them to do such a thing out of the goodness of their hearts.

Do they hire more workers? No, what would they hire more workers for? The jobs they provide are already enough to make these untold billions in profit. Extra people employed (beyond the necessary few extra for shipping&handling of the increased volume in CDs, etc) would just be a drain on the balance sheet. Again, not a charity providing make-work jobs.

Do they pay out bigger executive bonuses, pay out stock dividends, execute corporate takeovers, bribe, erm, lobby congressmen? Yeah, these things seem quite a bit more likely.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Pentium100]

A better question is where the money comes from.

I mean a 160GB MP3 player can hold about 40k songs, so that's $40k if you buy them on itunes. So, the guy with a mp3 player full of pirated music:
1. Has spare $40k in his drawer (or safe),
2. Has spare $40k in a bank account,
3. Bought something else with those $40k.
(or the money was divided between the three options).
So, if it's #1 then great - more money in the economy. If he takes te $40k from his bank account, then it's a loss for the bank (not a big one though). If the guy decides to fill his mp3 player with legal music instead of buying something else then it's a loss for the whatever industry that has his money now (when he decided to pirate the music and buy something else instead).

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Skapare]

If the RIAA ran banks, they would be whining that people are withdrawing money to buy stuff.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

A better question is where the money comes from.

I mean a 160GB MP3 player can hold about 40k songs, so that's $40k if you buy them on itunes. So, the guy with a mp3 player full of pirated music:
1. Has spare $40k in his drawer (or safe),
2. Has spare $40k in a bank account,
3. Bought something else with those $40k.

4. Didn't have the $40k in the first place, and wouldn't have had the songs if they weren't free.

Otherwise, I'm gonna start "pirating" music FOR PROFIT!

Re:Jobs and Profits

[TheRaven64]

Very good point. Of course, the bank won't just be sitting on the money, they'll be investing it. Some of it in mortgages, but a significant fraction in stocks and shares. This means that option 2 means pulling some fraction of $40K out of investment in another industry, which makes it harder for other companies to grow and reduces the number of people who can afford to spend $40K on music.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

> but a significant fraction in stocks and shares.

Which is a fucking travesty. Banks should not be allowed to do this.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[TheRaven64]

Why? What would you rather they did with the money? When someone puts money in the bank it is just removed from the economy until they withdraw it? I'm sure that'll work well...

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Pentium100]

I was replying to the post that assumed "what if piracy did not exist and everyone bought stuff they pirate now" The guy who does not have the money for music would not buy it, breaking that assumption. However, the situation "did not have $40k in the first place" is quite likely, which means that the RIAA (and similar organizations) is pulling numbers out of its ass. "If nobody pirated the economy would be better" assumes that people have thousands, if not millions (that they "saved" by pirating) just lying around. Spending the "saved" money would mean that the money is already in the economy, so it would not improve if the person bought music instead of whatever else he bought now.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Bigby]

Or they bought audio books or free speeches/readings

Re:Jobs and Profits

[e70838]

It is very difficult to assess if the MAFIAA has really earned less money because of piracy. Maybe the opposite is true.

What is sure is that piracy has been used as an excuse to pay less the artists and to spend a lot of money to buy politicians, lawyers, ...

All this money means more jobs that would be useless if the MAFIAA was not trying to preserve its obsolete business model.

Definitely, the MAFIAA has no excuse and all this nonsense cost a lot to society.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

As publicly-traded corporations, it would even be illegal for them to do such a thing out of the goodness of their hearts.

[citation needed]

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

So, your logic is that, not putting money into the economy, you are helping it?

Hey, if Barnes and Noble start giving out all their books for free, then everybody will have all their book money to spend on other stuff. Same thing with food. If I can get free Big Macs, then all my Big Mac money can now go to other stuff.

You're a genius, you've solved the economy crisis! Can we elect you as president of the treasury?

Re:Jobs and Profits

[Yvan256]

Stop assuming that all music costs money.

www.ocremix.org

There's probably enough music on that website to fill a few dozen AAC players.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[ngc3242]

Buying stock rarely benefits the company the stock represents directly because the stocks are usually purchased from third parties. Strong demand in a stock will increase its market capitalization which will lead to the company having more power to borrow or to generate income through the sale of newly issued stock (at the detriment of current stock holders), but that ability to increase cash on hand is only useful if used. Many companies are already sitting on record hordes of cash but can't find useful ways to spend it.

The people who benefit most from the purchase and sale of stock are disproportionately people who already have so much money that they don't have to worry about how much money their teenage daughter is spending on Lady Ga Ga albums.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[PeanutButterBreath]

Presumably, people spent that money somewhere, thus creating the same revenue and some jobs. If we are supposed to worry about piracy from the perspective of lost/created jobs, we should evaluate whether funneling money through the content industry is the most efficient way of creating them.

Re:Jobs and Profits

[DrVxD]

If the RIAA ran banks, they would be whining that people are withdrawing money to buy stuff.

If the RIAA ran banks, they'd sue you for withdrawing money from your own account...

Not due to piracy

[metacell]

The decline in record sales has nothing to do with piracy. It's roughly outweighed by an increase in sales of downloadable music. The only difference is that the revenues end up with other companies such as Apple (or directly with the artists), instead of with the record companies.

Really, this is nothing new. Just comparing the raw numbers is likely to mislead you if you don't have knowledge about the music market.

Re:Not due to piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

The decline in record sales has nothing to do with piracy. It's roughly outweighed by an increase in sales of downloadable music. The only difference is that the revenues end up with other companies such as Apple (or directly with the artists), instead of with the record companies.

Really, this is nothing new. Just comparing the raw numbers is likely to mislead you if you don't have knowledge about the music market.

Although I still think piracy is making some impact on their sales, I agree with you whole heartedly that much of the decrease in music industry's sales is due to the increase of downloadable music (coupled with what other people have pointed out, that we can buy individual songs now).

I remember being forced to buy $20 CD's where I only ended up liking 1 song, and 2 different greatest hits albums with 60% similar contents because the other one were missing songs I just gotta have (the original albums weren't always available where I grew up).

Once this option stopped the music industry from stuffing their fucked up pricing down our throats, they are bound to lose revenue.

I for one vow to pirate music as much as I can, being ripped off heavily in the past.

Re:Not due to piracy

[metacell]

Don't forget to include ASCAP revenues (or the equivalent in your country) in the total music sales figure. They've increased a lot during the last decade.

Re:Not due to piracy

[will_die]

So all those local record stores and places like Walmart and Best Buy did not make any money off of sales of music?
Of course they did and so did the distributors and other people in the supply chain and all those amounts along with the money Apple or Amazon make are factored in or not depending on where the chain you are getting the numbers from.

Re:Not due to piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Music in the 80s and 90s had limited competition. We heard a lot of different stuff on radio, not just the 5-10 songs a channel plays in between the current verbal diarrhea we have today, which basically meant the music industry had a lot of adverts. Today, that's gone, but not only that, we have TV and Movies available on DVD for the same price, plus the gaming industry has become the largest entertainment industry, ranging from consoles, hard-code PCs and almost a billion hand-held devices. People don't have time to listen to music, they're watching more stuff, and playing an awful lot more games.

Re:Not due to piracy

[aaarrrgggh]

Local record stores made money, but they were undercut by BB abd Walmart, who used music as loss leaders to get people in the store. As downloads grew, the retail market shrank, and hit the people making profit first. Downloads then further increased, making the loss-leader less effective, and leading to a decline in shelf space and therefore a further drop in retail sales.

The record industry needed to lower prices in the late 90's, but they raised them instead. They needed to embrace digital music at about the same time, becoming leaders rather than followers. Music became a commodity as a result.

My wife actually buys music-- a fair bit of it. (She is a spinning instructor and needs it for classes.) But she has enough of a base that she likely spends under $20 per month. She would have needed to spend 5x that to get the music she wants or needs if she bought by the album.

Re:Not due to piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

This got modded up? Really?
 
Claiming that the decline in sales has nothing to do with piracy is just as foolish as claiming that it has cost the economy as much as the GNP of Canada. Let's at least try to be semi-honest here.
 
As for the question of who distributes the media and who gets paid? Again, really? If you don't understand the physical media supply chain than you really shouldn't be discussing this subject at all. Maybe it's time you sat back and learned instead of acting like you have something to say.
 
You clearly have no knowledge of the music market or you're choosing to disregard it. Either way, it's pathetic to see this kind of post get modded up.

Re:Not due to piracy

[will_die]

The OP reason for loss of money is that people started buying from download places like Apple and that those companies took money that use to go the record companies.
That is complete BS. Other companies use to take a greater cut than what Apple or Amazon do for the music sold.
Like you said some of the loss of profits has come from the decreased sales of higher priced complete albums (what do you call them now a days) with the current abaility to by a single track. Then again you use to beable to purchase a single track for top songs but at a higher price then is charged by Apple.

Re:Not due to piracy

[metacell]

I'm sorry, it may be counter-intuitive that piracy has a zero or positive effect on music sales, but we can't ignore the facts.

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales - An Empirical Analysis:

Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.

The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada:

Among Canadians who engage in P2P file-sharing, our results suggest that for every 12 P2P downloaded songs, music purchases increase by 0.44 CDs. That is, downloading the equivalent of approximately one CD increases purchasing by about half of a CD. We are unable to find evidence of any relationship between P2P file-sharing and purchases of electronically-delivered music tracks (e.g., songs from iTunes). With respect to the other effects, roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs and roughly one quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase. Our results indicate that only the effect capturing songs downloaded because they were not available for purchase influenced music purchasing, a 1 percent increase in such downloads being associated with nearly a 4 percent increase in CD purchases.

I don't understand what you mean with your comment about the physical media supply chain.

Re:Not due to piracy

[metacell]

So all those local record stores and places like Walmart and Best Buy did not make any money off of sales of music?

Not sure what you mean by this comment. Yes, they made money, but Apple is taking a much larger margin than those stores typically did. Today, many artists completely bypass the record companies, producing their albums themselves, which means the record companies lose the revenue from those albums, and the artists and the distributors gain it.

Re:Not due to piracy

[softegg]

Where is all this money that is supposed to be going "directly with the artists"?

I've tried selling the music (bandcamp, downloadpunk, indiestore, cd baby, amazon, google play, direct sales, consignment shops).
I've tried giving it away (personal websites, last.fm, myspace,IUMA, garageband, handing CDs to random people).
I've tried doing shows ($300 for the venue, or sell 30 tickets at $10 a piece so that your friends can come see you play 20 minutes at 11pm on a Tuesday).
Selling merch? If I'm lucky, I sell maybe 3 CDs in a night. Usually zero.

The only way I make any money off music is by selling a Nintendo DSi/3DS application for making it...

I suppose there is the possibility that my music isn't any good (look up "Timon Marmex" and let me know), but all the best musicians I know aren't making a dime...

Re:Not due to piracy

[metacell]

I'm sure both you and your colleagues are good. There are just too many people who want to be musicians. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of music albums created more than doubled. (Michael Geist)

In general, there are too many people who want to live by doing creative work. I spend a lot of time writing fiction, and send it out to friends and acquaintances. I hope to earn money from it one day, but I'm not counting on it.

Re:Not due to piracy

[metacell]

Hm... my unsupported assertion in the OP gets modded +5 Insightful, but when I support the assertion with references to academic studies, I don't get a single mod?

Re:Not due to piracy

[will_die]

They don't take a much larger margin, it is slightly more then what the stores got.
However you are ignoring everything Apple brings such as distribution. Just adding in distribution and sales Apple takes in far smaller amount.

Re:Not due to piracy

[metacell]

Ok, let's assume the record stores' slice of the cake has disappeared, because distributors such as Apple handle both sales and distribution and take out just a slightly larger margin. Where's the problem? It just means consumers get the same music for a lower price.

Consumers still have better access to music than ever (both legal and pirated), there are more music albums produced than ever[1], and the individual artists make more money than ever[2]

[1] According to studies made in the USA
[2] According to studies made in Sweden and Norway.

You don't have to work for the RIAA anymore.

[Undead Waffle]

I buy a decent amount of music. I'm just finding that most of the stuff I listen to is not on an RIAA label and tends to be from other countries. The RIAA stuff I do listen to are bands that have been around a long time (like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden). The internet made it possible to find good music from all over the world rather than buying whatever is on the radio, and it turns out people on the other side of the world aren't as eager to move to Hollywood to get screwed over by a big record label.

Ever tried considering that times changed, too?

[Opportunist]

Let's take a look at the record industry's main customers: Teenagers and young adults. I hope it's no secret that the people who buy the most music are in the 14-25 age bracket.

Now, what did teenagers have to spend their dough on before the 2000s? Well, I was in that precious age bracket just before Napster came into existence, so maybe I may talk about it: Music, fashion and ... umm.... I guess computers counted only if you're a geek. Music and fashion WAS pretty much what teens blew their money on before the millennium rolled over. Throw in a few movie tickets and the odd night out with friends in the local teen bar (yes, such things exist in Europe where you may drink before you may drive, but I digress) and you got what teens wasted money on.

Fast forwards to the present. Now, I'm not a teenager anymore, but I "fortunately" have to suffer from having contact to them. Sidenote, never volunteer for anyone. But I digress again. So I see what they have to pay today. Cellphone bills, online gaming, gaming in general (mostly console outside of WoW, actually), iPod accessories (ok, they double as fashion, actually), ... you get the idea.

In other words, the companies that vie for the teens' money multiplied. It's no longer Diesel jeans and Sony music alone. I don't want to claim that this, in turn, doesn't make them copy music instead of buying it ... but then again, so did we when we were young. Ok, it was tape-to-tape copying rather than downloading it, aside of that, well, you cut corners where you can when your money is tight. And there's hardly a teen who isn't short on cash constantly.

Re:Ever tried considering that times changed, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be too cynical... But another part of the issue is that (for the most part...) today's new music is just not that good. For many teens a large part of the music that they listen to was released in the 70's and 80's. So a large part of what they want to listen to is the same music that their parents listened to 20 years ago, which in many cases is already accessible via there parents CD rack or iTunes library.

When I was in my teens I could not imagine listening to my "fathers music", but today things are very different. I'm a person who is willing to pay for music, either on CD or through downloads, but it's depressing when I consider the rate at which truly "good" new music is being released.

Oh... and the CD's that I do buy are for the most part used from Amazon... so no real benefit to the RIAA there.

Re:Ever tried considering that times changed, too?

[khr]

is that (for the most part...) today's new music is just not that good

You know, I'll bet every generation since the beginning of music has been saying that once they hit middle age... My parents thought the stuff I listened to as a teenager wasn't any good, their parents thought the stuff they listened to was terrible and so forth...

Re:Ever tried considering that times changed, too?

[PeanutButterBreath]

You know, I'll bet every generation since the beginning of music has been saying that once they hit middle age... My parents thought the stuff I listened to as a teenager wasn't any good, their parents thought the stuff they listened to was terrible and so forth...

FWIW, I think that the music that I listened to as a teenager isn't any good, and I have a much better appreciation of what my parents and grandparent's like.

I suspect that there are a always a few exceptional artists that stand the test of time and come to be conflated with the entirety of their era by future generations. I think that country from the 30s-50s is way better than what is being made today, but it could be that the vast majority of music at the time was just as bland as it is today, and my impression of the past is skewed by what has endured.

Re:Ever tried considering that times changed, too?

[almechist]

Now, what did teenagers have to spend their dough on before the 2000s?

Well, I don't know about you, but in my school we spent it mostly on drugs. Hell, cocaine was friggin' expensive back in the late '70s and early '80s!

Silly media people

[future assassin]

thinking that because they created it everyone should be buying it and because it didn't sell now they have the "internet pirates" to blame. Maybe they should talk to Ford about the Edsel. Every second movie being a remake and every pop song sounding the same has nothing to do with people not wanting to buy the shit and just download it to see how horrible it really is.

I use to buy tapes and cd\s blindly because I wanted that new album or wanted to discover something new just to find out it was shit work which I just wasted money on. This was improved a bit in the late 90's when some record shops let you listen to the cd's before you bought them. At that time my hit to shit ration improved but by then Napster appeared and I was set to save money and only buy good works. Unfortunately this led to downloading madness which revealed just how bad lots of the music out there was.

Re:Silly media people

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. I thought they were pretty catchy, myself.

Our house, in the middle of our street.

Re:Silly media people

[DeathElk]

Welcome to the house of fun, now I've come of age. Welcome to the house of fun.

Great stuff [pulls up iTunes store]

Revenue vs Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, Let's say that revenue should never ever change for any industry ever unless it rises. A pretty faulty premise but what the heck. What has happened to their costs over the same period? I don't know an awful lot of people who buy their music on physical media anymore. Digital media simply does not cost as much as any physical media so there must have been some savings there. What are their margins like now compared to back then?

Re:Revenue vs Costs

[trout007]

Wish I had some mod points. You hit the nail on the head. Sales does not equal profits. Everything about creating and distributing a song has gotten cheaper over the years. A person can create and distribute their own album for thousands of dollars.

Comparing sales when they had a natural monopoly to now when the only have a legal monopoly is absurd. When you have a natural monopoly you can get away with charging high prices and margins. Once technology destroys your natural monopoly you are left competing in a market and prices and costs both come down.

Boycott

[thestuckmud]

To Whom it may concern,
Please count the lack of revenue you are receiving from me in the boycott category. I do not pirate music, but I'm sending another dime to companies that gang up to alienate me.
My grudge goes back a ways - highlights include: Lying to me about CD price hikes in the '80s; taxing my computer media in the '90s, intentionally distributing malware laden CDs in 2000, and now the outrageous legislative attempts.
Sincerely,
One bitter ex customer.

Re:Boycott

[Black Parrot]

highlights include: Lying to me about CD price hikes in the '80s

Don't forget the early period panic-mongering, "there's only going to be one limited run of your favorite album on CD, so you'd better buy it while it's on the shelves".

Re:Boycott

[91degrees]

Do you believe that boycotting customers is a substantial factor in the sales then?

How many people are boycotting the record industry?

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

If I count myself, and GP, at least 2.

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone please mod the parent poster to 5.

I won't fund RIAA or MPAA any more. I am sick to death of these organisations and their underhanded tactics.

Let's put it simple, the best way I can kill you is by not supporting you. It's GAME OVER. NO MORE PURCHASES.

Now please p*ss off and die.

Shame you had to set the FBI onto MegaBox - now the concept of money to the artists without a middle man who does nothing? That I can buy into.

AC

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

one here...

Re:Boycott

[91degrees]

So, so far we're ion about 4. So rather than losses of $7.8 billion, we're looking at losses of $7.799998000, because I'm sure you each would otherwise spend about $500 a year on music.

Re:Boycott

[pete.zhut]

Count me in. Haven't bought a CD in over a decade.

Re:Boycott

[TheRaven64]

I'm not boycotting music buying, but I am boycotting RIAA-affiliated labels. I still buy a reasonable amount of music, but I always check the publisher first and make sure that they're not a member of the RIAA, or owned by a company that is. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large overlap between people who like music enough to spend money on it and people who are aware of the RIAA's actions and avoid them...

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

So, so far we're ion about 4.

Wow, that's some RIAA math right there!

by 91degrees (207121) Alter Relationship on Wednesday March 21, @04:54AM
by 91degrees (207121) Alter Relationship on Wednesday March 21, @06:04AM

So everyone in the world who does not purchase or buy music from labels is expected to reply to your burred Slashdot post in a 1 hour 10 minute time period before most people in the west are even awake, and if they don't reply they don't count!

Somehow I even expect you to quote that "There are only 4 lights, er I mean music boycotters!" stat in the future too

This is why you and the RIAA count me as a pirate costing them millions of dollars, despite the fact I haven't downloaded or bought music from a label in almost two decades now, and why your entire argument is bunk.

Re:Boycott

[Bert64]

Which only serves to further justify piracy, how can you purchase media that's not for sale anymore? Your only option is to find a copy from somewhere else.
With physical goods, supply can often outstrip demand, causing a price increase...
With digital goods, the supply is infinite, trying to artificially limit it is ridiculous and just results in someone else stepping up to cater to that demand.

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people with this attitude (including myself) are a significant reason for the decline. The dirty business practices of the **AA, the attempts to manipulate legislation to sacrifice our privacy (etc) for their gain, and so on, are why I will never intentionally let them have another dime of my hard-earned cash again.

But will they admit that their customer base is pissed at them? If so, how do they measure that?

Re:Boycott

[91degrees]

Why are people responding in the first place?

My point is more that it's meaningless for individuals to claim to be boycotting the RIAA, since we can make no estimates of the number of people doing so. My reply is illustrating how ridiculous this is.

I consider it completely ridiculous to suggest that any boycott even accounts for a rounding error on this data. If you want anyone to believe that the boycott is working, or even thatit exists in any meaningful way, then convince me. A handful of responses stating that they are doesn't actually convince me particularly.

Re:Boycott

[Kidbro]

You overestimate your importance to us. We don't really care if you're convinced or not.

What is absolutely clear though, is that there are at least some people that do boycott big entertainment media, due to their behavior. And it is not really our job to prove that the boycott accounts for large amounts of money. We honestly don't care if the companies understand that that's why they lose (our) money. However, if the companies are upset about incomes not living up to expectations, maybe they should spend some time trying to figure out why, rather than just making up excuses, as that certainly won't help them (even if they get their ridiculous laws passed).

Re:Boycott

[91degrees]

You overestimate your importance to us. We don't really care if you're convinced or not.

That's fair enough.

I'm sort of curious though. Why are people even mentioning that there's a boycott that could conceivably affect the piracy figures if not to convince others?

What is absolutely clear though, is that there are at least some people that do boycott big entertainment media, due to their behavior. And it is not really our job to prove that the boycott accounts for large amounts of money.

No, it's not. But then you're in no position to complain if they ignore the effect of this boycott in their piracy calculations.

However, if the companies are upset about incomes not living up to expectations, maybe they should spend some time trying to figure out why, rather than just making up excuses

They have figured out why. Piracy. Personally I'm inclined to agree that this is a factor. I'll even accept the possibility that this is the only substantial factor.

Re:Boycott

[HTH NE1]

With digital goods, the supply is infinite, trying to artificially limit it is ridiculous and just results in someone else stepping up to cater to that demand.

Disney.

Re:Boycott

[HTH NE1]

To me, there's clearly a connection between piracy and privacy, and not just the obvious that you want your piracy to be secret to avoid prosecution, but that some piracy is motivated in remaining a private person, especially in the face of corporations and their associations that seek to make you not, for their own benefit.

They want to find those consumers with low standards and meet, not exceed them, with as little effort as possible.

In an information economy, a cash sale is considered a loss.

That money and jobs are not lost

[future assassin]

consumers just gained a way to even the playing filed with not getting stuck with worthless music and movies. Now that money has shifted to help out other industries and created new jobs in those. Unless that money is taken out of the country by corporations using off shore accounts and tax heavens that money went back into the countries economy so nothing was lost.

Re:That money and jobs are not lost

[Bigby]

And even the money in "tax heavens" winds up coming back to employ people or it will employ people in other countries who needed jobs as well.

I bought 200 CDs when I was younger

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe 30-40 a year for 5 or 6 years And so did my wife.

Then we had enough and stopped buying, even though we have 10x the money now.

Now we are in our 40s and we listen to the stuff we already own. We buy maybe 2-3 a year now, and mostly via iTunes or direct from the artist (self published).

So we spend 95% less on music and none of that is attributable to piracy.

One word

[vikingpower]

Correlation is not causation.

Re:One word

[Black Parrot]

Correlation is not causation.

Are you sure the drop in revenues didn't cause piracy?

Re:One word

[TapeCutter]

One word? What kind of math do you use? I count 4 words using traditional math and my fingers, -1.702e^9 words using copyright math and excell, and 11 words (including those in hidden dimentions) using a popular version of string theory.

Re:One word

[Dodgy G33za]

If you are going to be picky about counting you might like to consider that mathematics is a plural noun, so it should be maths not math.

Re:One word

[vikingpower]

Wow.

Are YOU sure my remark did not cause you to be a smartass ? ;-)

Re:One word

[CaseCrash]

so it should be maths not math.

What are you, British?

It's not hard mate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forecast what the growth in the music industry should of been from 1999 till 2012, then do you're numbers.

I'd suggest that across content, 50 billion is an amazingly reserved figure.

Other content providers aren't quite as susceptible to piracy. In the case of games it's the risk of piracy (time delays, risk of virus, broken content, online bans) v the desire for instant gratification and the percieved value to a user. In the case of movies its quality vs perceived value.

Music has almost entirely has no drawbacks to piracy, probably since the mass take-up of MP3.

Re:It's not hard mate.

[tibit]

I'll feed the troll. How the heck can nayone know what the growth "should have been"? The world doesn't sit still, things change. If you expect to make more money then you don't and you whine about it, the person to blame is usually to be seen in the mirror...

Not a valid comparison...

[Garble Snarky]

You take (sales in 1999) - (sales in 2010) = $8B, the loss in sales for one year, and compare it to $58B, which is over an unspecified time period. This comparison does not make sense. Maybe it's more clear in the video, but I didn't watch it, because I can't skim it.

I'm no fan of the recording industry, but come on, don't be disingenuous about this.

Re:Not a valid comparison...

[Anonymous Coward]

and compare it to $58B, which is over an unspecified time period.

A quick Google brings up a PDF from the MPAA site claiming that "$58 billion in economic output is lost to the U.S. economy annually". If the guy's research is as thorough as he implies in the summary then it probably was explicitly mentioned in the video.

Total content spending up

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to be adjusted for total content spending.

There is a major new type of content that was not available in the original timeframe: Video Games.

There are also some modified versions such as streaming services.

I think the TOTAL spending on content has likely increased, but it is also being re-distributed, as people just don't have enough personal discretionary budget available to spend the same that they used to on music & movies and add in video games.

Re:Total content spending up

[Black Parrot]

It has to be adjusted for total content spending.

There is a major new type of content that was not available in the original timeframe: Video Games.

Also, in 1970 every teenager didn't have to have a cell phone and all the other portable electronics that are de rigueur these days. It's possible that the music-buying demographic spends a smaller portion of their disposable income on music. (OK, that's what you were saying.)

Inflated Numbers Due to Price Fixing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that the sales numbers from 1995 to 2000 were inflated due to the 'minimum-adventised pricing' that the record companies got sued for. I'm not sure it's fair to compare sales figures now against numbers from that period.

Re:Inflated Numbers Due to Price Fixing?

[Tjebbe]

Yup, as it happens, 1999 was not just 'the year of napster' but the year the industry got slapped for price fixing. So the 8 billion there may very well have been caused by that. And even if it's not the only real cause, it's still highly inflated or plain wrong to attribute that 8 billion only to 'piracy'.

in a totally unrelated topic...

[nomad63]

did you know that, this dude is married to Morgan Webb of Tech TV and G4 fame ? :-)

Piracy =/= loss

[WillKemp]

The main problem with music industry figures seems to be that they estimate how much piracy there is and then claim that as a loss. However, that's based on the flawed assumption that if people weren't pirating the music they'd be paying for it - which they wouldn't, they'd just go without it most of the time. Just because someone downloads a song for free doesn't mean they would have bought it if it wasn't available for free. A lot of people who download pirated music also buy music. There's only so much money available to be spent on music anyway.

I'm sure a part of the reason why sales went down is because the music industry resisted the move to downloads. If they had half a brain and they'd embraced downloads from the start, sales probably would have been stable or maybe even risen a bit. As it was, their troglodyte attitudes forced people to turn to piracy.

Efficiency, not losses

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not $58 million in losses. It's $58 million in efficiency savings being delivered across the economy thanks to new technologies driving productivity improvements.

Re:Efficiency, not losses

[Skapare]

Think of the RIAA members as banks. Instead of depositing $58B into accounts and letting it sit there, people are withdrawing that money and actually spending it on stuff. So the RIAA member banks are whining about loss of deposits. Want some cheese with that?

It's a changing business model, and piracy accounts for only a small percentage of the drop. No one wants CDs, anymore. MP3s may have artifact noise, but they do have a higher dynamic range than CDs. Even though a CD can range out to 96db, it has too few bits at the lower levels because it is linear PCM, so the dynamic range comes quantization noise, making it effectively just 48db usable dynamic range. Neither media is perfect, and people deal with it. High end audiophiles are trying to get things in 24 bit 192k samples, which does sound better. But, it cannot ever be on CD that way.

How do you know it's piracy?

[FunkDup]

There are definitely concrete and quantifiable piracy-related losses

How do we know these losses are piracy related? I tend to think a lot of it is because no-one has to buy an album they don't want just to get two or three songs. Here in Australia that means a $10-$15 song drops to to $1.50. Market correction related losses?.

I personally am spending more than ever on music but it's all from Beatport etc. I'd be surprised if the RIAA is counting much of that money.

Uhm, yes, but...

[Black Parrot]

The Recording Industry Association’s website has a robust and credible database that details industry sales going back to 1973, which any researcher can access for a few bucks (and annoying as I’ve found the RIAA to be on certain occasions, I applaud them for making this data available). I used it to compare the industry’s revenues in 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010 (the most recent available data). Sales plunged from $14.6 billion down to $6.8 billion — a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk. This number is broadly supported by other sources, and I find it to be entirely credible.

OK, you find it credible twice. Any particular reason?

Also:

Are you claiming that Napster has something to do with this? If so, how much, and how do you know?

How do you take the economic melt-down into account?

How do you account for aging Baby Boomers who are losing the ability to justify shelling out for yet another remastering of LPs they bought 40 years ago?

Why calculate on revenues rather than profits?

How much of those revenues are the inherent cost of pressing a CD and putting it in a plastic box, which was *much* more common back then?

Who's losing jobs? Are musicians giving up because they can't find a gig and a sharecropper contract? Or do executives just need to hire fewer people to count their money?

These raw numbers are meaningless.

Re:Uhm, yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's losing jobs? Studio musicians, recording engineers, producers, arrangers, song writers etc... Although part of this is due to other technological developments (more sophisticated softsynths, sampling, home studios with computer-based DAWs) - then again I work in the music industry (as a recording/mix engineer at a rather large Los Angeles studio)... But I do see a lot of my colleagues who had great careers no longer able to find steady work (no musician can recoup what it costs to really make a well produced album.) Obviously there will be outliers who can truly do it themselves at a high level - but to me it's sad to see my art-form decay due to lack of industry. /rant

Re:Uhm, yes, but...

[Black Parrot]

Who's losing jobs? Studio musicians, recording engineers, producers, arrangers, song writers etc... Although part of this is due to other technological developments (more sophisticated softsynths, sampling, home studios with computer-based DAWs) - then again I work in the music industry (as a recording/mix engineer at a rather large Los Angeles studio)... But I do see a lot of my colleagues who had great careers no longer able to find steady work (no musician can recoup what it costs to really make a well produced album.) Obviously there will be outliers who can truly do it themselves at a high level - but to me it's sad to see my art-form decay due to lack of industry. /rant

I sympathize with that, and indeed I feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of multi-track tape recorders.

But in the context of this article, how many of those job losses would you attribute to piracy?

Re:Uhm, yes, but...

[Attila Dimedici]

No, these raw numbers are not meaningless. If, as the RIAA reports, record sales have only fallen (for whatever reason) $8 million since the advent of Napster (the beginning of digital download piracy), then it is not possible that RIAA members have lost $58 million a year to piracy. Which is the point being made in the summary.

Re:Uhm, yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see 2 big potential factors that could likely explain the losses. The first is the bursting of the dot-com bubble, as you pointed out. The other is that in indeed could be attributable to napster, but not in the way suggested.

Napster really brought the idea of digital distribution of music to people attention. Yet there were no means to legally aquire music in that format without going through the laborous task of ripping all your cds yourself. The record companies were not providing music in the format that users were demanding, so it's not small surprise that people went to the only place they could.

Not due to piracy?

[RedWizzard]

It's a mistake to assume that the $8 billion drop in music sales is entirely due to piracy. DVDs appeared in 1998 and by 2004 DVD sales were $14 billion. VHS sales were never that high so much of that money must have been coming out of other entertainment spending. I think a lot of people stopped buy so many CDs when they started buying DVDs.

Re:Not due to piracy?

[MadKeithV]

What didn't help is that a movie DVD on the whole was (and probably still is) cheaper than most CDs to buy. DVDs have more content, the original content is much more expensive to produce, and yet a DVD movie costs less money to buy than a CD. For any economically savvy person that was a clear indication that we were being gouged on CD prices.

How much does the way we buy music affect things?

[91degrees]

Claiming that there's absolutely no effect on sales from piracy is as hopelessly naive as claiming that every pirated copy is a lost sale, but can we put the entire difference down to piracy?

Online purchasing makes it a lot easier to buy. However, it also makes it possible to buy a single track. Perhaps many people are shunning albums.

Are mp3 downloads also cheaper? Do online services like Spotify affect sales?

Alternatively, is piracy an even bigger problem than the raw numberws suggest, and the easy of online purchase mitigating this somewhat?

Two likely causes

[Kohlrabi82]

Dwindling sales of the RIAA labels could have two probable causes:

1. With Spotify and similar streaming services, most people can get all the music they need for 5$ a month. The offers there probably satisfy most users.

2. The CDs that get released by major labels are produced so poorly that I entirely stopped buying any major label releases (also because my taste evolved). It's completely retarded marketing on the majors end. The people buying CDs today are actually not the young people, but rather in their late twenties and thirties. Those actually know how properly mastered music sounds, and current CD releases are far from that. It's totally schizophrenic to still put out CDs, but to treat your own product in such a poor fashion that it's simply worthless.

BAH

[Anonymous Coward]

The plunge in sales is simply because modern music is crap. Everyone knows that - even your grandparents!!!

Fabbing

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until fabbing takes off in a real way. That's when the real IP battles heat up.

The Problem is Digital Music

[amiga3D]

I believe that since music became digital people only buy it once. I have some albums in Vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD. Once I went all digital though I only buy music once and then have it forever. I bet I've bought some albums on cassette 3 or 4 times as tapes got lost or deteriorated and the same with Vinyl LP's. I know I"ve bought Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffitti album at least 10 times in various types of media over the years. It's on my server now and I"ll never have to buy it again.

Assuming

[Anonymous Coward]

Asuming apple made its profit in those last years only on the hardware it sells.

Ummmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets get it right here. Calling copyright infringement "piracy" is the RIAA/MPAA and other's attempt to make copyright infringement sound like a much worse crime than it really is! The real pirates (both past and present) murder, rape, sink ships, all for profit. How does copying a CD for a friend or downloading a few mp3 files compare with that?

It seems that the MPAA/RIAA want everyone to think that all of their shrinkage of income is to be blamed on copyright infringement. Actually people are buying less CDs for a variety of reasons such as:
Poor quality of mixing, overcompression, and just plain lack of good music. As far as I am concerned, there has been very little good new music realeased since the mid 90s.

There have also been very few good new movies released since the mid 90s. Most of today's movies are crap, rehashes of older movies. Same with TV shows.

The RIAA/MPAA are killing themselves and can't seem to realize it. The sooner that they die off the better!

Enertainment Industry as a Holy Cow

[nukenerd]

I believe it is similar in the USA, but in the UK the story went like this :-

1) First the motorcycle manufacturing industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

2) Then the electronics industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

3) Then the shipbuilding industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

4) Then the mining industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

5) Then the railway equipment and train building industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

6) Then the car making industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

7) Then the steel making industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

BUT

8) Then the entertainment industry was in trouble and the Government said "OH MY GOD WE CANNOT ALLOW THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY TO FAIL! We must give them tax breaks, subsidies, knighthoods and do everything we can to keep this luvvly bunch of luvvies in the manner to which they are accustomed!"

I put this down to the fact that the vast majority of politicians are "humanities" people. They have degrees in history, English, fine art, psychology, PPE; hardly ever science and technology. They (like most people) see entertainers face-to-face, they are charmed by them. Unlike ships, cars and electricity which are "just there".

So politicians love the entertainment industry, which is why its pronouncements are so dangerous.

PS: Some might point out that Mrs T , about the worst offender in this, had a science degree. Very unusual for a politician. There is a different explanation for her. Having changed careers she wanted to justify it by destroying what she left behind, and getting her own back for being the junior in the lab etc.

Perhaps the lesson is that there can never be intelligent support for technology in government, except in wartime or for fads like wind generators, the workings of which any humanities guy thinks he can understand more than a nuclear power station for example

Re:Enertainment Industry as a Holy Cow

[s-whs]

3) Then the shipbuilding industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off. 4) Then the mining industry was in trouble. The Government told them to f#@k off.

I used these as as examples against the similar whining of airport Schiphol. I believe the whining (I mean the way it's being done and who is being blamed) about declining profits shows the attitude in a company. In Schiphol as wist most businesses related to airtravel industry they have some sort of superiority complex and believe it their God-given right to annoy people with noise, not to have to pay taxes, not to have to pay sound insulation etc.

With the sound recordings there is something similar going on, they have a 'we are fantastic' attitude which is just ludicrous.

The decline of sales was already moaned about long before napster, as they have an attitude of 'enough is never enough'.

In NL, prices of CDs were high (much higher than records) when first introduced, it was said prices would go down when the cost came down. That never happened. Of course not. People like me remember that and buy little.

The music industry also reached a boom, from people who replaced their record/tape collections with CDs and the young generation with lots of money in the 1990s.

Both these sources dried up: The first had almost all what they wanted, the latter went for other stuff: Games, mobile phones, whatever.

For myself: I haven't bought music in a decade or so, I download some music, but very little. Most of what I liked, I already had (bought, loaned), so why buy anything? And yes, then sales will drop, not because of piracy but because of natural market development.

Re:Enertainment Industry as a Holy Cow

[TheMathemagician]

Wow you've completely mis-characterised what happened in the UK. Most of it is not germane to copyright discussions in any case but in the late 70s and 80s the Conservatives shifted state-owned industries to the private sector (often breaking them up and losing jobs in the process). These weren't industries "in trouble and going to the Government for help". They were already state-owned and haemorraging money. The music/entertainment industry has mainly not been state-owned (although the BBC is) so your analogy is misleading. Furthermore although showbiz is able to get its message heard more easily I wouldn't say the UK government has been particularly accommodating (so far) to their absurd demands.

Re:Enertainment Industry as a Holy Cow

[nukenerd]

Having been an engineer myself in the UK through much of that period, and seeing innumerable companies in those areas ceasing to exist or being snapped up by foreign buyers, often just for the name, I don't think I am misrepresenting anything.

By referring to the state-owned industries moved to the private sector you are thinking only of the tip of the iceberg. But for every big state industry there were many private suppliers who's fortunes were geared to their big customer.

There are plenty of examples of private companies going to the wall since 1970, not involved in state-private movements.

Metro-Cammell for example, once builders of London Buses and Underground trains, and The Gloucester Railway Carriage Company. [I have been a railway engineer].

In shipbuilding, Cammell Laird (although the name was bought by another company) and John Browns [I have been in shipbuilding too].

Ruston and Hornsby diesel engines and gas turbines, now owned by Siemens and MAN, and mostly moved abroad. [I have also been a power station engineer]. Practically every part in any older power station (built pre-1975) was made (by private companies) in the UK, but to replace parts such as high pressure valves and steam drums today it is necessary to buy from France, Germany the USA or Japan.

Names most people will be more familiar with are Rolls Royce Cars [and almost every other make of British car), Pye [TVs], Bush [electronics - the name sold off].

Whether these companies "deserved" to fold is beside the point. My point is that the UK Government let them fold whereas in Germany or France the government would probably have intervened. I am not saying that is good or bad, just that the UK government is likely to intervene on behalf of the entertainment industry if it asks nicely

Correlation != Causation

[Bert64]

So music sales have gone down, why is piracy automatically to blame?

Perhaps people consider all the manufactured pop music coming out these days trashy?
Perhaps the current state of the economy means people have less disposable income to spend on cds?
Perhaps people simply have something better to spend their money on?

Drug accounting?

[lawrencebillson]

Have they employed a bunch of guys that used to calculate the 'street value' of drug seizures?

OR...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else also happened during 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010?

The EXPLOSION of the internet. Moving from primairly a geek speciality thing. To AOL everyone has the 'internet' and the huge commerical exploitation of anything and everything online. The dotcom 'bubble'.

Anyone who does anything in the world suddenly had to deal with the internet if they wanted to keep up. Billions of companies adapted themselves and their products in some way.

The mpaa and riaa really didnt. They dragged their feet every step of the way into the future. Adapt or die to changing business evolution. They didnt choose adapt for a decade...

But yeah. It's totally all piracys fault. Piracy that prevented any online content sales from growing.... Oh wait. no. not any. just most of those music and movie related... Do you see a pattern maybe? :P Stick up the ass stubborn entrenched industries that don't really add much value to a product... Found they were nearly irrevelant... But its someone elses fault they didn't adapt.

Piracy is only a part of the problem.

[Sique]

The underlying problem is, that creating (nearly) perfect copies of a work used to require a high investment first in the copying machinery, be it the printing press or the vinyl press or the polycarbonate press, and then in creating the master copy, be it a proofread typesetted one or the matrix for pressing vinyls or CDs. But the actual copy, once the copying machinery was installed and the master copy created, was cheap.

Thus there was a business model in investing heavily in copying machinery and then look for works of which a large number of copies could be sold. The only risk was that one created a master copy of a work which didn't sell. Everyone was thus looking for works which were already bestselling and created their own copies of them. Because of that the copying enterprises which first started to copy a work seeked protection from competition, thus the institute of copyright (or imprimatur) was installed already at the end of the 15th century. Before one could start selling copies, one had to get the permission from the authorities to do so. Only in the 18th century, with the Statute of Anne in 1710, it was recognized that not only the people investing in copying equipment and creating master copies should profit from a work, but also the actual creators, which then could either be hired to create the work or license their own works for copying.

Now the business model was complete. It was founded on the fact that creating a single copy of a work was nearly as difficult as creating hundreds and thousands of them, thus people creating multiple copies could always undercut people creating a single copy in price, making it thus attractive for nearly everyone interested in a copy not to copy themselves, but buy a cheaper copy from a copying enterprise. And it encouraged people creating works which were easily to copy and thus being sold in large numbers. Finally a legal framework was created to fend of competitors by making it unattractive to invest heavily in copying equipment and copying exactly the same works that were already copied by others.

But this whole business model of being able to create cheaper copies than those interested in actually owning a copy is shaky, because now the investment necessary to create a single copy is less than go out shopping for a copy. Copying equipment is cheap, $100 will be sufficient, and can be used for as many works as one likes. Every copy can be a master copy. The big price advantage of the guys with the copying machines is gone. And thus also the main income stream for creators of copyable works breaks down. They had a quite strong negotational position as long as there were only a few entities able to create affordable copies, because they could sell exclusive copyrights to only one of them and were able to police all the others trying to create unlicensed copies. Now they have to basicly negotiate with each single person interested in a copy, because each person can create the copy for themselves, and policing unlicensed copies is nearly impossible.

It might be, that the business model of creating an easily copyable work and then selling as many copies as possible is gone forever, because creating copies itself is no longer a business model. There is no compelling reason anymore for the consumer to have the act of copying done by someone else, because everyone can create perfect copies for cheap.

Re:Piracy is only a part of the problem.

[steelfood]

You pretty much summed it up.

Note that business models that revolve around creating things is alive and well. It's just that copying things already created no longer has any value.

Re:Piracy is only a part of the problem.

[Sique]

I should have formulated the last paragraph somewhat more carefully.

The business model of offsetting the cost of creation by selling as many copies as possible is no longer feasible, because everyone is able to create cheap and perfect copies for himself, thus there is no perceived value anymore in having someone else performing the copying.

Actually, here's another idea

[Moraelin]

Actually, here's another idea for where at least a part of those 8 billion are coming from. Now probably none of them accounts for 8 billion by itself, but I do believe it adds up.

1. Just the economy and more importantly how it impacted culture. In 1999 it was in the middle of a bubble, and everyone who got some of that money was flaunting it somehow. Buying stuff to show you can was expected.

Nowadays we're still on the tail curve of a depression, where a bunch of people lost their homes, unemployment is still very high, a bunch of people ARE having less disposable income (the median family income didn't follow the GDP per capita, so pretty much everyone south of the median is getting shafted) and most importantly this creates uncertainty for the future. It's looking like a lot less of a good idea to blow all your money on entertainment and luxuries when you're not sure if next year you'll be able to afford the essentials (medical care included) and/or keep your home.

A bunch of other industries are feeling the same pinch, so I fail to see why the RIAA would think they're exempt from it and should see the same income as at the apex of a bubble and of economic optimism, if it weren't for those pesky pirates.

2. Less free time for that entertainment. We just had a front page article yesterday about how overtime demanded is steadily climbing.

3. Competing with other forms of entertainment. You can see the movie industry and TV having the same problem. Less people are going to the movies when they can play WoW or TOR or whatever for a month instead. And it's not just games. Social networks for example also sink a heck of a lot of the time left after that overtime.

It's stuff that was still regarded as (borderline) stuff for socially dysfunctional nerds in 1999. The idea that if you play Ultima as an adult you're probably one of those 40 year old virgins living in mom's basement was flung around by many a lot more seriously than nowadays.

Internet access also was spotty and slow, and frankly there wasn't all that much to do on the Internet, compared to nowadays.

The whole culture was more favourable to sitting and listening to a record as a way to pass the time, while nowadays it's at best something you use as background music while doing something else. And not just while you sit at home but also...

3. Share of the MOBILE entertainment. Frankly there was not much more you could do in 1999 on the road than listen to some music on your walkman or CD player or, if you were really high tech, MP3 player. Sure, you could use a gameboy, but see again, a lot saw that as stuff just for kids, and it also didn't help that most of those mobile games WERE made for kids.

There was a lot of music bought just to have something to listen to while you're on the bus or train or plane.

Nowadays even kids have phones capable of doing much more than that, including again Internet stuff. That's got to mean less albums you need to buy just to keep from being bored out of your skull on the road.

Which in turn sets the stage for the next point...

4. A different culture among the youth. Which, honestly, was always a big target demographic there.

It used to be that music was a major topic in high school, and buying the same records that the rest of the lemmings were persuaded by marketing hype to buy, was the way to fit in. There were a lot of Britney Spears albums (chosen as an example because she had her first album in 1999) and whatnot bought just to fit in with the cool kids who were listening to Britney Spears.

And don't kid yourself if you were all counter-culture, the same applied there. There were a lot of The Cure and Sex Pistols albums sold to kids who wanted to fit in with the goth and respectively punk gang. We were so independent and defying convention and totally unlike the rest of the sheeple, and whatnot... that we bought the exact same clothes, music, etc, as a group we were trying to fit in. Yeah, different and independent my ass.

Nowa

Re:Actually, here's another idea

[CannedTurkey]

I think you're spot on. Perhaps the only thing I'd add to the competition for entertainment time would be satellite radio. I'd guesstimate that 90-95% of my time listening to music happens in the car, and having access to consistent, high quality radio eliminates the need to bring my own CD's on trips. I still occasionally buy new CD's when I hear music new to me and I'm curious about a band, but not nearly to the extent I did 10-15 years ago.

Re:Actually, here's another idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Amusingly enough on 2, demands for overtime actually increases my demand for music. Its one of the few sources of entertainment that can reasonably be used on the job.

Re:Actually, here's another idea

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't kid yourself if you were all counter-culture, the same applied there. There were a lot of The Cure and Sex Pistols albums sold to kids who wanted to fit in with the goth and respectively punk gang. We were so independent and defying convention and totally unlike the rest of the sheeple, and whatnot... that we bought the exact same clothes, music, etc, as a group we were trying to fit in. Yeah, different and independent my ass.

"Make no mistake about it, every single one of you is wearing a uniform." - Frank Zappa (quote may not be verbatim, but close enough)

Where are these numbers coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't anyone here take physiology?

Bad data

[Hentes]

So he tries to test the claims of RIAA with data bought from them and we are supposed to believe him that those numbers "can be trusted"?

Media replacement and remaster glut - format shift

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason music sales are down since 1999 is that everyone who wanted to replace LP, cassette, 8-track, etc with CD finished by 2010. The 2000s were a decade when format shifting concluded. Anyone who wanted to replace old media with CDs did it. What the RIAA members are seeing now is NORMAL SALES without the artificial boost from format shifting. The days of going into Circuit City and buying The Police back catalogue for $9 a CD are over.

Also, the music industry created their own problem with remasters and re-remasters. The continual release of new remasters in the 1990s and 2000s caused a huge glut of used CDs. I probably replaced half my cassette collection with used CDs, and bought a gigantic number of used CDs in this time period. Selling the same albums over and over hurt the RIAA members in the long run by creating a glut of secondhand CDs.

Yes, I did use Napster/WinMX/torrents/etc heavily - to get non-album tracks, rarities, etc I COULD NOT BUY FOR ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY. Napster was incredible in the first year or so. Collectors had digitized almost every rarity I could think of.

In fact, I bought a lot of CDs in the late 1990s just because I used Napster sampled some newer music I had not heard.

Sham Shame Show Shill

[flyneye]

I'll tell you how to increase income amongst the unemployed and shit-workers!
Quit buying music altogether. Sound counter intuitive?
Here's how this works so you can imagine how many can prosper:
Everyone finally gets a blast of intelligence and quits funding the corrupt ,thieving music industry and it languishes.( I wish)
Musicians promote themselves by distributing their recordings, free, take over their own publicity via modern resources (internet).
Musicians make money playing live. the biggest moneymaker, this time tour is funded and profited by musician not industry.
Imagine talented musicians rising like cream for all to see rather than getting the powdered creamer from industry picks.
Picture prices for live shows dropping with no industry cut. Pepperland will fill with music again if you only get rid of the Blue Meanies.
There is no need for a parasitic, unwelcome, unneeded industry for this scenario and so many MORE people will find a new avenue of income doing what they actually LIKE to do. The world needs a bit more of that, don't you think so.
The industry, just let it die. Quit buying music. Music is free (intangible). Performance/labor is paid (concrete).
Wanna see why musicians need the industry like worms need jet engines? http://www.negativland.com/albini.html Educate yourself and understand the true nature of the industry we fight to kill.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[i_ate_god]

"Musicians make money playing live. the biggest moneymaker, this time tour is funded and profited by musician not industry."

I guess you've never performed live, or had to deal with venue owners/managers in any capacity whatsoever.

For large scale productions, you need large venues that charge well over $10,000/night to rent. That's JUST the rental fee.
For small scale performances, you need to deal with owners/managers who feel that by giving you the privilege to play, they are doing you a favour, sometimes CHARGING YOU to play at THEIR venue.

Do you know why small venue owners get away with it? Because everyone wants to be a rock star and they'll do anything to achieve that status.

life is not as simple as you make it out to be

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Fauxbo]

For small scale performances, you need to deal with owners/managers who feel that by giving you the privilege to play, they are doing you a favour, sometimes CHARGING YOU to play at THEIR venue.

Do you know why small venue owners get away with it? Because everyone wants to be a rock star and they'll do anything to achieve that status.

If everyone wants to be a rock star and they only let you play that night, aren't they doing you a favor?

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Young Master Ploppy]

For small scale performances, you need to deal with owners/managers who feel that by giving you the privilege to play, they are doing you a favour, sometimes CHARGING YOU to play at THEIR venue.

Seconded. I spent about fifteen years gigging pretty constantly, on average maybe once a week over that whole time. I lost count of the number of times venues would charge us to play, and give us tickets to sell in order to make it back. They'd even take a cut of the ticket sale price. As long as there were more acts than venues, they could get away with it.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[abigor]

A lot of musicians don't perform live, and for those that do, the great, vast majority make no money at it. You are ridiculously naive, or you only listen to big-budget, Top 40-type music.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually with you for the most part but there are some things to consider.

Not all musicians make money playing live. XTC, a fairly well known band that has been around for decades can't play live because the lead singer has massive stage fright so they rely entirely on album sales and merchandising. Other bands have since broken up and will not/cannot play together ever again.

Neither of the above examples should be held against the artists but neither should we have their situations used against us for all the other artists who are plenty capable of touring, etc. What's the answer? I don't know but I know it's not as simple as saying that artists make all their money live...

[edit: bonus, my captcha is "patrons"]

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[madison_hotel]

An owner doesn't have a reason to let any garage band kid play in their establishment (is that the word?), in their venue I mean, just because someone thinks he should be paid to do it. If you really should be paid to play, then the job offers will fall all over you (yes, playing music is also a job), because owners know you move a large crowd. If you're nobody, you need to show yourself to the world, and pay for the time and infrastructure you're using. I don't see anything wrong with this. It is not a favour: it is business.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[b4dc0d3r]

You misunderstood the post, and took one line out of it that you had a personal exception to.

The people who would make deals with record labels are the ones that don't need them, and would make money playing live. If you're not good enough or visible enough to be noticed by a record label, you are not in the position to decline a label offer, and are not really the intended audience for that particular bit.

The remainder stands - if you want to do your own promotion, you can. IF you want to make a deal with a label so they do the hard work and take your money, you can also do that.

Ticketmaster does a lot of work with their infrastructure of participating venues, and they get paid in the form of the ticketmaster tax. The labels do work and get paid by claiming you're not profitable.

Not everyone will get enough steam to quit their day job, this is true of any group, label or not. When you have a name and can draw crowds, the money will follow.

I'm caught in the loop where the people I want to see are expensive because of the label and ticketmaster costs, so I've only seen a few live shows. I'll catch the random guy in a bar, who gets money based on a percentage of alcohol sales and doesn't have to sell tickets. And I'll throw some bills in his hat to make it worth his while, if he's good. Lots of people in the area have fun, play good music, and get paid well enough to keep their equipment in good shape without dealing with either large or small scale production problems you list here.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Endo13]

Ah, but see, that's the thing. If you get rid of the industry, you change everything. It puts the market in control instead of a handful of moguls. Everything we currently know about what you just posted goes out the door.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Endo13]

That's odd, and I find it fairly doubtful, as I've always been told that's about the only way musicians make any signficant money.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of woodworkers never make money building furniture. The difference between them and musicians is that the woodworkers understand they are just hobbyists.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that we have an over-abundance of supply and not enough demand. So according to basic economic principles the cost of music should be on the decline working it's way to free.

Remind me why i should care about music industry profits again??

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[V for Vendetta]

A lot of musicians don't perform live [...]

I won't call them "musicians" then. You don't call watching porn "having sex" either, do you?

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[GuB-42]

I think you got it backwards. What you are describing is the point of view of the consumer (the client).

Are you implying that musicians that perform live are like prostitutes, and the others are like porn actors ?

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[airdweller]

Never had to pay anyone to play. Didn't get paid for playing on some occasions, but never had to pay myself. Not saying that it never happened, but I've never heard of that happening.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[airdweller]

I think you didn't get what he said at all. That's not what he implied :)

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[flyneye]

NINs Trent Reznor seems to have done well with value added packages while giving away the mp3s.
Market what you can.
Current artists get to make up their mind at the end of their contract. Would I give up a better world to wait for those who fed the machine to make a living to the end of their contract so we could then change the world when they are good and done? Where do you draw the line at us all getting analed for some stock holders? The world ain't a nice place, it's been a fight for food, shelter and the next lungful of breath since before recorded history. Some get a raw deal as evolution happens. I suspect they will survive or maybe you could start a charity to let them sleep on your and your friends couches till their contract expires.
It's so far being past fair or repairable,it's really an inevitable revolution. There is a world full of discontent over copyright. Shit will change or history will repeat itself. Prep up! Don't feed the industry. Quick and painless is humane.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[flyneye]

I guess you've never performed live, or had to deal with venue owners/managers in any capacity whatsoever.

Not only have I performed in venues from bars to arenas, but I have booked acts for them (being an opening act is always nice serendipity), booked tours both for myself and others. I've also been a journalist and still operate my own studio.

When you can fill a barn you'll be able to afford to.
Meanwhile I suggest putting together "mini-fests" with other bands sharing expenses if you just can't manage to raise some investment capital.
Small venues? Do club owners owe you a fuckin livin? Do Music shops owe you instruments? Grocery stores owe you food? They sell beer and when some clown with your attitude shows up, they figure they're gonna get to host some teeny bopper party, sell no beer and clean up a big mess. Get some business chops before you make your next deal.

Live is simpler than I make it out. RTFM or quit blaming others for your lack of motivation or success.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[flyneye]

Those that don't perform live either have no interest or stage fright. Stage fright would be a disability to work. So moot point.
The great vast majority live under a delusion, mostly propagated by the illusion put forth by the industry, as to how musicians make money.
You are ridiculously naive and haven't studied your field.

Re:Sham Shame Show Shill

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know why small venue owners get away with it? Because everyone wants to be a rock star and they'll do anything to achieve that status.

So kill the organised music industry, kill the idea of the obscenely rich rock star, and leave music to the people who love it for its own sake, rather than for the money.

Losing Money?

[whisper_jeff]

So, claims are regularly made suggesting that the music industry is failing, usually followed by claims that tougher laws are needed to protect the hard working people in the music industry.

Small problem - it's not true.

The music industry is not in as bad a situation as claims would suggest. Here are some interesting statistics:

Music publishing revenues are on an upward trend.
Worldwide Music Publishing Revenues (2006 - 2011)
http://grabstats.com/statmain.asp?StatID=69
$8.0 billion (2006)
$8.3 billion (2007)
$8.6 billion (2008)
$8.9 billion (2009)
$9.1 billion (2010)
$9.4 billion (2011)

Live music (concert) revenues are on a upward trend.
Worldwide Live Music / Concert Revenues (2006 - 2011)
http://grabstats.com/statmain.asp?StatID=70
$16.6 billion (2006)
$18.1 billion (2007)
$19.4 billion (2008)
$20.8 billion (2009)
$22.2 billion (2010)
$23.5 billion (2011)

The entire industry's revenues (*) are on an upward trend.
Worldwide Music Industry Revenues (2006 - 2011)
http://grabstats.com/statmain.asp?StatID=67
2006 ($60.7 billion)
2007 ($61.5 billion)
2008 ($62.6 billion)
2009 ($65.0 billion)
2010 ($66.4 billion)
2011 ($67.6 billion)

* The "entire industry" is defined as "Revenues are for record labels, music publishers, recording artists, performing artists, composers, concert venues and merchandise, companies; includes revenues from sales of physical recordings, digital music services (online and mobile), music publishing and live music."

What is most interesting about these numbers is it supports what I have felt for a long time - the major players in the music industry have realized that CD sales are nice but that's not how to get rich - the big money (almost 2.5 times the money...) is in concerts. That is why acts like 'N Sync and Britney and Beiber and U2 and Lady Gaga and damn near everyone are regularly on tour. They've realized that people are spending more and more on actually going to the concert to experience the music. They realized that the be financially successful means touring a lot. CD sales makes one wealthy but a concert tout makes one rich.

These numbers show that the music industry isn't failing. It isn't even shrinking. The _industry_ is growing, across the board. Yes, there are individual companies that might be suffering and there are individual bands that are suffering and there are probably specific geographic regions that are suffering but the industry, as a whole, is thriving - it is growing.

One thing I do agree with the music industry, however, is that the internet is a big reason for this - we just disagree on the direction their profits are headed...

Consider the times we live in

[windcask]

I believe that the ever-declining revenue streams from the music industry have just as much to do with the shift in youth culture as anything else.

From the 60s to the 90s, kids only had two forms of entertainment that they could "own," so so speak (that is, take to their bedrooms and experience themselves): reading (comics, books, magazines, etc.) and music. If they wanted to watch something, they had to fight over the TV. Considering the amount of time kids spent listening to music, it's no wonder they consumed so much of it and how much of a role it played in their lives. Now, any kid of modest means has his own smartphone and tablet: he is just as likely, if not more likely, to spend all night watching Youtube videos, playing games, or chatting with his friends as he is listening to music. Do you think today's kids ever really just lay on the bed with a pair of headphones and listen to an album all the way through like we did? Probably not.

This is a joke

[Life2Death]

Blame canada since they clearly pirate the most, since they are not patriotic Americans!

http://xkcd.com/552/

I as well have not purchased flimsy, breakable, huge CDs for years. I do however buy music on Amazon and later am using spotify mobile.

Kids have changed

[clickclickdrone]

When I grew up, everyone I knew as music mad, we spent every penny we could on vinyl and later CDs. It was the soundtrack to our lives and it meant something to us. We bought the best HiFi we could afford to play it and would just sit in each others bedrooms playing our new stuff and reading lyrics etc.

Fast Forward to 2012. All my nephews, nieces and they friends barely care about music. It's just something they dance to in clubs or listen to on a tinny mobile phone speaker. None of them have a HiFi, none buy any music, none care. As someone said, in the rare case they want to hear a track, they'll fire it up on YouTube.

Most older people have all they want, having bought the same albums on LP, CD and maybe SACD. They rarely buy anything new.

IMO, the reason music sales are down is because the world has changed and NOT because of piracy. Music habits have changed.

Re:Kids have changed

[couchslug]

We have computers now and music is incidental. Before PCs life was boring and music filled that space.

Re:Kids have changed

[gknoy]

I'm tempted to say that we have Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter (and the Internet in general), and mobile devices that allow constant access. We had computers before, but not like this, and that fundamental change in the ways we communicate, collaborate, and stay in touch with what's happening to our friends is the driving force for making computers such a central part of our lives.

I only like 22 songs.

[kikito]

I don't need to pirate, or buy, anything else, thank you.

follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 80s and 90s the bulk of musis sales in Western Europe came from teenagers. In the 2000's these teenagers have a new destination for their limited budget: cell phones (& serivce contracts). To assume the drop in the music industry's turnover is only 'caused' by downloading music products is incorrect. The teen budget is simply channelled elsewhere.

Didn't think slashdotters were this bad at math

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to see where the $58bn comes from. If we assume no growth of the industry between 1999 and 2010, and we assume that piracy is responsible for all the losses in the recording industry, then we can easily calculate that the industry has been shrinking by ~6.7% a year over the 11 years of the study. Evaluating the sum over x from 1 to 11 of (14.6bn-14.6bn*.933^x) gives the lost revenue, in this case around $52bn. You can get $58bn by assuming that the industry actually grew by half a percent a year during that time period (not entirely unreasonable), but that that money, too, was siphoned off by losses to piracy (You can also get there by assuming a higher projected growth rate and higher rates of piracy leading to lost revenue). I'm not saying that their facts are straight (I think easier access and less hardware to be manufactured has likely lowered the fair market price of a song significantly, and will likely continue to do so), but we can't say that RIAA/MPAA is making numbers up simply because Rob Reid refuses to do any math more complicated than subtraction.

Download Album 1000X = Huge Losses

[Tokolosh]

I downloaded the same BSB album 1000 times. If everybody is doing the same thing, music industry losses must be astronomical!

I doubt it

[mattr]

I doubt piracy really is such a big reason for any decline (and not sure there is in fact a decline).
When I was very young I had copies of tapes from friends, and when I got some money then I bought tapes and CDs until I was in college and started feeling that CDs were way overpriced. I actually remember being very angry about it and thinking about whether I can do without them.
As it happens I can. I also do without a TV.
I hear music on the radio or on the Internet, I can buy just the songs I want though there are very few good enough.
The easy disposable money goes more toward paying a monthly mobile phone bill and going to movies in theaters I would say, as far as entertainment goes, and also buying books.
If I buy a video recording it likely is not one from the MPAA.
I did not buy Blue-Ray I am happy to say.
I do discover and watch music videos on YouTube.

A major part of my decision to do without is the underhandedness of the music industry. I really felt nauseated by the idea of buying a DVD/Blue Ray player that would police my use and disallow my use cryptographically.
I bought a Sony Vaio laptop once (well used, for 2000 bucks) and used to own Sony TV, walkman, voice recorder and other players. But I really don't like the way Sony treats customers and won't buy Sony if I can help it ever again.

If I buy music I buy a song at a time.
If I buy a film it is a new one not registered with MPAA probably.
Maybe I would rent one in a rental shop.

There also are now purchases from Amazon (I even bought some books through my new Kindle which even though I hate DRM can easily be ripped and is instant gratification) and I have consumed a lot of content paid for by ads, you know the way Google made all its money.

My guess is that what is called piracy actually has a small effect and not clearly negative or positive. In fact people back in the day used to always copy and share between each other, before the Internet, and I doubt people have changed that much. People are willing to buy things if they think it is well priced and desirable.

More likely the reasons for any decline if there in fact is one, is the competition for people's time and disposable income which comes from the Internet (ad-related content, news sites, social networking, and so on) and more expensive monthly payments for mobile Internet capable devices. Also it appears that the quality of products has declined, and that much effort is wasted on sequels and remakes for new formats (blu-ray, 3D theaters, etc.). In addition, the negative karma of the studios is more visible whether it is unconscionable lawsuits against customers, installing malware, ripping off artists with rapacious practices, etc.

Of course, there can be no other causes

[SmallFurryCreature]

While the fact that less music is being sold is fairly straightforward, the reasons for it are not. Especially if you don't compare it to the previous year but look at long term trends.

Cause 1: The switch to CD had ended, in previous years, people often re-bought music they already owned on LP in the new fangled CD format. This caused a sales spike with the industry selling not just new music but also old re-released music. The norm should be years in which the industry had to mostly rely on NEWLY released music for its sales.

It would be like comparing sales figures of cars with a year in which the law demanded that old inefficient cars were to be scrapped. Or comparing building figures in a country with the year before and after an earthquake.

Cause 2: A shift in musical tastes. It is no secret that musical tastes change and that the music industry tries to cater for only a part of the total population. The number of classical recordings has gone down. The number of rappers has gone up. Which audience has more to spend? The music industry limits the number of different NEW musical releases and then wonders why they sell less? Gosh, why not run 1 movie in all theather all the time and then wonder why people stop going?

Cause 3: More targets for disposable income. When I was a kid, I did not have a phone. Now kids do. They get the same pocket money, they can only spend it once. So, less will be spend on X because Y is now taking the money. Record stores have closed, mobile phone stores have opened up.

Cause 4: Musical taste stagnation. If you play an LP. you got to change it or you go mad MAD MAD I say! With a modern media player, you can have a collection of your favority songs and not have them repeat until you can sing them backwards... and then you stop adding to it, because it is good enough. When 10 CD changers became available for cars, how many people ever replaced them? Further proof? Okay, more and more specialized radio stations that repeat the same limitted play lists over and over again to the point I have noticed that some people react with near violence to a generic station that dares to play something not a 100% suited to their tastes.

Cause 5: Economic down turn. Less money to spend, so people spend less. Confused?

Not definitive evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk. This number is broadly supported by other sources, and I find it to be entirely credible. But this pattern just isn’t echoed in other major content industries.'"

Yes, but is this due to piracy, or the more likely fact that Hollywood and the content industries have been producing remakes and crap for the last decade?

Gah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Has the author of this post considered that the reason why music sales have dropped $8B in the time frame mentioned is because most movies these days are suckage derivatives of other stuff, and most of us are not interested in paying to hear this sludge? I pay as much in a year now as I ever did in the past for music CD's, but mostly directly to the artist, who I also pay for the live experience and opportunity to meet them and talk about their art! In the past 2 months I have paid for local performances of both well-known, and obscure, musical acts, and in all cases, my wife and I have purchased one or more of their CD's. No through some intermediary, but directly from the artist!

I pirate

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of what comes out of Hollywood and the music industry is trash. Therefore, they deserve exactly what I pay them: nothing. (Yes, I pirate very little, because very little of it is worth having at all.)

Re:No Guilt

[Phrogman]

I certainly didn't feel any guilt when I was recording songs off the radio so I could listen to them later. In fact, if I liked the song I often went out and bought the single or LP.
Fast forward to the present, I feel no guilt about ripping music from CDs I have bought. Why should I? Because some useless and offensive RIAA executive wants to maximize sales by trying to make it illegal?
I also would feel no guilt about downloading music - since if I like it, I will go buy it eventually in some physical form - or off of iTunes. However, I am in general so sick of the entire music industry and its attempt to strongarm the world into the image it wants it to be, that I instead no longer buy any music, I don't download it, and I really don't listen to it, unless its on the radio (and mostly if my favorite radio station (CBC up here in Canada) plays music - I turn it off.

Re:

[davide marney]

As a part-time musician who would love to be full-time, it takes all my free time to hone my craft and keep developing new material. I'm not that good at marketing, setting up tours (a monumental task), or even keeping up with fans via the Internet, frankly. I would gladly pay for people who ARE good at these things, which is supposedly what a major label would bring to the table. But as Paul McCartney discovered, the labels really don't have any good ideas about how to engage an Internet-fueled fan base -- even if you give them millions of dollars to work with.

The change that needs to happen is for the labels to recast themselves as fee-for-service organizations, instead of vertically-integrated companies that own everything in the food chain. Vertical integration only works if you completely control ALL the supply chain. The Internet has effectively thrown that business model onto the ash heap, but we musicians still need the services that labels can provide.

worldwide?

[__aaltlg1547]

If they're just talking about the USA, it would mean the average American steals $193 per year.

And what are there lost jobs? You don't employ PEOPLE to distribute content any more.

Musical Globalization

[sandytaru]

I haven't pirated music in many, many years. I haven't bought any US based music, either. I usually listen to podcasts and radio shows imported from Europe, because I like it. The last song I bought on iTunes was from a Japanese composer. The last album I bought was from Armin van Buuren, and that was more out of a wish to contribute to the artist than a need to have the music (since I already had the album in podcast format!) This means my "music library" is deleted and recreated on a regular basis, sometimes as frequently as once a week, without ever downloading anything illegally - as free podcasts are meant to be downloaded and the DJs and artists encourage it.

The RIAA just needs to realize that in today's modern world, like all globalized industries, their customers are going to sometimes prefer products from other countries. Tough noogies.

Losses, Time and Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It is hard to compare loss without using technology or external economy markers . I would like to compare entertainment media of Vinyl records, CDs, DVDs or video Tapes or even Laser Disc and their fate to Typewriters or dot matrix printers. Who can remember Epson or Smith Corona or even IBM Selectric Typewriters. The typewriter/DMP were massive industries which were quickly obsolete as Laser and quality Inkjet techologies became available. If we look at typewriter/DMP industries in 2012 money, there were thousands of people out of work and Billions of dollars lost by this technology change.
This monetary element needs to be removed from the equation. And we should solely focus on income loss by artists and basic production. This is still a large amount. But the amount which goes to the artist is miniscule compared to the other parties of production. The artist can be compared to the farmer who grows wheat for bread. Bread may cost $3USD per loaf but the farmer only receives $.08 of the $3. The production costs of the music is where the majority of profit lies. But this would be true whether it is CD or Download.
In the end, I find holes in some of the logic presented about amounts lost.

On the economic side, I think a recognition that the economic impact of the Global recession made considering streaming or sampling downloads over purchase of physical CD over that same time period. I am not saying Piracy was enhanced by economic conditions. According to things I have read, Piracy was more rampant during the Usenet days and early Napster days. This was when the economy was really healthy.

Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

Two record companies owe a friend of mine $2mil and $3.5mil respectively. They haven't paid up because they claim they don't know how many copies of his work they have sold on the accounting side, yet on the marketing side they claim several million copies. Gotta love Hollywood/Music accounting!

early 2000 was the peak of the CD bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC from my senior thesis the sales around 1999-2001 are at the peak of the CD sales bubble, buoyed by mega pop stars like NSync, Eminem, B Spears, etc. In fact some ridiculously high % of overall CD sales came from just the top 10.
Comparing current sales to those numbers and determining the difference to be due to piracy is crazy.

MPAA/RIAA bubble...

[TemporalBeing]

Don't you know that an economy can only grow? We did multiple billions of dollars in the past and should be doing that plus all the inflation since then. It's jus the laws of economics. Once you get there you never go down. Seriously - that was the thinking that caused the Housing Bubble - prices will only ever go up, so buy buy buy. And i'd be surprised (given the information put out) that the MPAA and RIAA didn't think likewise, despite the facts that:

• * the quality is not what is has been in the past
• * the prices are more expensive then ever
• * the economy is down, so higher prices mean few sales
• * they're sue happy and alienating their customers as a result
• * the world is moving on without them in many more ways than one

Where is the data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the data on how much more modern music sucks compared to music from 20+ years ago.

I'd estimate it's about 8 billion dollars worth of suck, based on the numbers in the summary.

Lobbyists

[DarthVain]

Lobbyists make up numbers to justify positions, this is not new people. You can probably apply this to just about any lobbyist anywhere, at anytime. Politicians may or may not look closely at the numbers depending on if they plan on supporting whatever it being put in front of them or not. If they ever have to flipflop on that decision they just blame it on being misled by the lobby.

The REAL question is why do politicians make the decisions they do to support one lobby over another? The numbers? Doubtful, unless the politician is a real moron. Bribe, or "future considerations", etc... is more probable than that. There is also blind ideology as well, which usually involves believing in something based on faith, or ideal, and is not too overly concerned with "facts", or "truth".

Anyway the "numbers" are just a justification of a position (but the position is likely not based on those numbers).

Causation again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see, music profits are down, possible reasons:

1. Piracy is so big (however, piracy was big 20 years ago too, if not bigger than today since NO-ONE considered it bad). -- I spent some time in a small town back then, the entire town would hear someone had the new "X" tape, within days the whole town had a copy of it if it was good (and I mean copy, as in pirated, not bought (100-150 homes; 500-1000 people!)).
2. The percent of population consisting of teens has been dropping significantly in the same 20 year time span (And teens are MORE likely to buy without thought and be into the new "shiny" thing to increase mating chances (welcome to biology))
3. Disposable income has been dropping since the 1970's and thus people are FAR more choosy as a whole.
4. Gifts, 20 years ago getting a Tape/CD for a birthday present (even random music) was great! (I could trade it if I didn't like it) -- Today, you just DON'T go there for gifts since everyone has different tastes and the thought of just "trading it" is treated like "oh, they must hate me since they got rid of my gift".
5. Time, families now have 2 working parents, then kids/teens to take care of, then have to do financial planning every night to just stay ahead - if you have less and less time for "play" then that will change your spending habits.
6. Convenience - I know for myself, yes just ancendotal, but I buy about 1 CD per year now, versus dozens a decade ago. But, I listen to the radio all the time and just switch channels when the "blab" starts... One click of the button on the remote control moves me to the next station; even 10 years ago I would have to manually go over to the radio, turn the knob to tune in the next station, and thus radio was NOT convenient or worth the effort versus popping in a CD.
7. Treatment - MY BIGGEST PET PEEVE - those damn little stickers they put RIGHT on the CD album to "lock" the CD; even though it is completely wrapped in plastic as well! The number of times I have wrecked a label, cracked a case, or had left over sticky stuff on the CD has put me off buying CDs as I assume I'll have to deal with this "shite" again!
8. Dishonesty - Truthfully, the amount of BS they have been spewing about copyright, laws, illegal use, non-fair-use, piracy, loss sales, etc, etc has put me off wanting to deal with them; so if I have $X per month to spend on entertainment, it does sit in the back of my head that "I'm supporting this" and thus it has to be something EXTREMELY AMAZING for me to want to spend money on it (and thus why down to 1 CD a year now).

Some info:
1. I do not copy/pirate anything (haven't since I started working full time 20 years ago) -- Interesting that I bought far, far, far more when I was actually copying/pirating stuff as a teen...
2. I spend $30 to $100 a month on entertainment (Books, CDs, DVDs, Theater, Games etc) -- I cancelled Cable ($70/month) and just started buying everything I wanted to "consume".
3. I could easily double the amount spent on entertainment but I generally don't have enough time and/or can not find enough media to bother buying; especially when I am finding more and more negativity about movies/games from friends and family (which is the criteria I use to decide if I'll bother purchasing something). I assume this is a "age" thing (movies are not targeting for my age group (35-40) and/or my genre of entertainment is currently out of favour type thing).

Anyways, hopefully food for thought.

Less profits != loss

[txibi]

Even less expected profit is not equal to loss. Just wanted to say that.

Re:

[flyneye]

I hear you about time. I'm petitioning for the 36 hour day.
We all sacrifice to get anything worth having. Have you explored any local resources? Friends with marketing skills are nice. Check your local magazine rack for Maximum Rock and Rolls " Book Your Own Life" listings of venues updated yearly. Also a large city library with phone books of other cities is a nice cache of phone numbers and addresses. Failing that there are booking agencies in most cities that have a fair amount of venues. Agents aren't your friends but good ones will book you a nice tour. Got a facebook fanatic in your life? A little reward could go a long way toward drafting an internet P.R. rep. Who does your P.R. now? Do you make up your own P.R.kits? Just like making a band work or building your own business it's all going to amount to your motivation and passion for what you want to get out of life.
In the way I suggest above at least you get to be master of your own destiny on a level playing field. Would you deny yourself that? Others? Don't support the industry, support the talented individuals around you. Even if music isn't their talent, they may have what you need. Like I said in the parentish post this is how to put people to work. Everything they can do, you can do now. Computers and internet make it possible from recording to booking to promotion to printing P.R. mat'l. to communicating with fans.
Keep honing, it'll come.