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Despite Drop In Piracy, French Music Industry Still In Decline
New submitter Hentes writes "France has one of the strictest anti-piracy laws. After 17 months of operation, Hadopi has released a report, claiming that illegal P2P downloads have been reduced significantly in the country: the studies they cite measured 43% and 66% decrease in copyright infringement. But that huge amount of 'lost revenue' doesn't seem to show up in the French recording industry, as the overall recorded music market has decreased by 3.9% in 2011. Even more interesting is that digital music sales have skyrocketed in France. Could it be that it's not piracy killing the traditional recording industry but digital distribution?"
French music sucks.
NEXT!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Of course it's the digitable distribution model that is killing traditional music sales. Every week, I get 10 hours of free music in the form of podcasts from my favorite DJs. Why would I go out and pay for music when I can legally get it for free? And the DJs rake in their big bucks not from CD sales, but from their world tours.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Or maybe it's simply crappy music that's killing the traditional recording industry.
The reporting on this issue has been pretty crappy.
What I want to see:
1) Rates of sales decline for the previous couple of years
2) Rates of sales decline for neighboring countries or otherwise similar markets
Without information like that, we can't even begin to have a meaningful discussion as to whether or not HADOPI is "working" or not. So far its all just been hand-waving over half of an equation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The industry died over 30 years ago with the VCR
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's called Youtube
Come to my house. Bring a few bottles of wine and a blank hard drive. You will leave with more music than you can listen to in decades. Heck - a decent sized thumb drive can provide months of musical amusement. Online is dead. Offline is the future. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with terabyte hard drives...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I know that France had laws to push French content, so I can see a shift to digital distribution would undermine local content laws and hit French artist that way.
But I would guess that young people are just not used to paying for music. I mean, more young people, if they were to buy music, would do it online. But a lot of them just won’t.
Which makes the summary off. Who cares if there is a large percentage increase in digital music - from a low base. That just means people who are buying music are switching for one format to another. Maybe buying a top single track is more cost efficient than buying an album? That goes too for the monthly subscription / rental model. (For a bad analogy, after I got Netflix my movie going dropped, so my total dollars spent on “movies” dropped.)
But that huge amount of 'lost revenue' doesn't seem to show up in the French recording industry,
But it does. Right there in the decline. Check with a hundred of your closest friends if the following sentence is true: "The more exposure to new music I have, the more likely I am to go and buy some."
Music isn't like food. You don't notice its absence much. If you go without your iPod for a month, you're not going to miss it all that much after the initial adaptation is over.
If you reduce the amount of music that people have available, you reduce the demand for music.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They already have. Many, many videos are blocked here in Germany because the GEMA or SME or whatever other crappy music-mafia content parasite organisation wants to be paid for every view.
And it's not just music videos, including official band channels. It's also videos where you hear a song in the background.
They probably held a brainstorming session on how to make the general public pissed off most efficiently as an April Fool's prank and then nobody noticed that the notes were found by a secretary and sent down the chain of command to be actually implemented. It's the only rational explanation I have.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Presumably TFA is referring to the fact that the de-facto bundling of physical distribution($15-$20 for 1 CD worth vs. $1/track) is much harder to push for digital product. The 'chart topper + 14 tracks filler' is now worth ~$1, rather than ~$15...
Sarkozy is going to be sleeping on the couch for a week at this rate.
This is simple to understand, the majority of torrent users would not buy the music if torrents werent around anyway, they download stuff freely to try stuff and often delete it. The music industry has changed, its not enough now just to sell music, its about getting embedded into the current cultural trend and doing tours! Artists need to work for their money now by travelling and giving a deeper experience to the fans! its as simple as that!
You mean the RIAA was LYING to us?
I just cant believe that!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You could almost say the French music industry is...retreating.
It's poor reasoning to think that a reduction of piracy will mean an increase in market shares, as though those two variables are causally linked and somehow have inversely proportional growth. I would be surprised in the rates of growth of these two variables are not causally linked, though. But that's because loss in sales in the music industry is calculated by estimating the total volume of pirated music, and then multiplying that by the music's marketable value. So 100,000 albums pirated at $10 a copy means the industry "lost" $1 million. But it doesn't follow a certain percentage of those who pirated the album would have purchased it - many would rather not have the album at all than pay the costs to own it. So the labels are still at a loss - they need people both NOT to steal the music, AND to purchase it. Anyways, so if you stopped 80,000 of those 100k pirated copies from going out, it necessarily follows the industry's monetary "loss" will go down as well. It does not translate to a growth in profit or market share. Those variables aren't even linked for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't make sense to staticize them or correlate them in a way the industry itself isn't even doing. This isn't rocket science, people. It's not even high school algebra.
From Rob Reid's TED Talk (http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/):
"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."
Let's try a quick run-through on the "switch-to-digital" math:
iTunes sales in 1999 (the first year cited above): $0.
iTunes songs sold in 1999: 0.
iTunes songs sold in 2010: 6b.
Music Industry Sales in 1999: $14.6b
Music Industry Sales in 2010: $6.8b
Track Cost in 2010: $0.99
Album Cost in 1999: $14.00
Now suppose that people only bought the good tracks, instead of whole albums -- the new iTunes way of buying music. Suppose also that piracy had zero impact on sales. What would the above sales figures imply about the number of good tracks (tracks that sell) per album?
Albums Sold in 1999 = $14.6b / $14 = 1.1b
Tracks Sold in 2010 = $6.8b / $0.99 = 6.8b
Tracks sold in 2010 per album sold in 1999 = 6.8 / 1.1 = 6/1.
So, what that says is that if all music sales had become digital single tracks, we would now be selling 6 single tracks for every album we used to sell.
Bear in mind that this is an upper bound case, assuming all sales have become digital. That is not realistic, but it gives us our first measurement. Let's see if we can refine it a bit with some estimates from iTunes.
iTunes is the single biggest seller of music and sold 6 billion tracks worldwide in 2010. Suppose iTunes sold 2b of those tracks in the US and all digital vendors other than iTunes sold another 1b combined in the US. In that case:
Album Spending 2010: $6.8b - $3b = $3.8b
Album Price in 2010: $16
Albums sold in 2010: $3.8b / $16 = 237m
Tracks sold in 2010: 3b
Albums sold in 1999: 1.1b
Missing Album Sales: 1.1b - 237m = 0.9b
Tracks Sold per Lost Album: 3b / 0.9b = 3 / 1.
These numbers are still estimates, but that calculation shows that one reasonable estimate is that we are now selling three digital tracks for every one album we used to sell, if we assume that Internet piracy had exactly zero effect.
It is within the reasonable bounds of the data I could find quickly that the entire reduction in US music sales is due to migration to digital single tracks.
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Not necessarily, those people now buying digitally may have previously acquired music from p2p, but they might also have previously bought it on cd...
A lot of people who used p2p did so because they could not afford to buy music... They still can't afford to buy it, but also cannot run the risk of losing their internet access so they just do without. I know several people who fall into this category.
Many people cannot afford to buy much music, but will buy some... The lack of p2p takes away an avenue by which they could try new bands. I certainly wouldn't spend money on something i wasn't sure was going to be any good.
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They have lied about everything since the beginning. With every new technology, they fought it and lied about it. They have lost here and won there. We lost out on consumer DAT (a huge loss) but won big with the CD. The ability to burn perfect copies of CDs, for example, was supposed to destroy the industry. They made profits in the "worst of times" enough to pay all of their politicians as much as they wanted, wrote and funded the DMCA.
They continue to walk a fine line, but without exception, the publishing industries have made fantastic claims which have invariably failed to come true. It's time for this story to be told and retold over and over and over again until people accept the **AAs for the liars and cheats they are. If the politicians are told the truth, repeatedly and enduringly, they can't claim to have not known. And if they continue to accept the **AA's money, their corruption can be without a doubt.
could it be? piracy drives music sales up?!?!?!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloaders-spend-the-most-on-music-says-poll-1812776.html
let's also ignore increase in concert/merchandise revenue from new fans who didn't pay for the music they tried out. i'm not sure that money even goes to the labels.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Why would you "assume that Internet piracy had exactly zero effect"?
The purpose is to test the hypothesis that Internet piracy had a net effect on music sales.
It has had a huge effect.
Yes, that is the hypothesis I am testing.
In this case, I did so by observing empirical data, analyzing it quantitatively, and showing my work. It seems your approach is more based on a gut check and appeal to ridicule. I do not believe your way is a beneficial part of a healthy discourse on public policy.
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