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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?"
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.
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
Alizee?
I am John Hurt.
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.
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.
Daft Punk?
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
And before that, Jean-Michel Jarre.
I would agree, I am french educated and I have a perfect french(more or less), and been living here in France for the last 4 years. I can't say I ever heard something worth it.
Long live classic rock!
Well, there you put your digit upon it .. by now we've had decades of music of many genres, forms, alloys and so forth .. more songs than have probably been written or sung in the entire history of mankind. We've even experimented with awful music, where some people have become major stars and quite rich as a result of the public's appetite for something different.
Where I have a decent collection of classic rock, I find my interests have wandered from todays desperate offerings to music of incredible craft from the 1940's and 50's. Amazing stuff, when you can find good recordings. Even heard Edith Piaf's "La Vie en rose" from 1946 and was quite impressed with her talent.
With digital preservation of music we've got a lot of it and interests are no doubt diverging. People will listen to whatever, once they break free of following what the crowd does.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm sceptical that you have heard much French music.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
IMO, France hasn't made a decent contribution to the musical world since Debussy (and some would debate that, even).
Sir, I beg to differ.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
French music sucks. NEXT!
Yeah, French music is contrived, but their culture is so superior. Maybe they just don't have to throw themselves into music. Maybe they're just happy with their society and don't have enough angst to churn out the most emotive music. It takes real misery to make good music, as almost any artist's life will show you. France has a lot less misery than the US, so their music is flat...And they can just buy ours, so who cares really?
See, folks?? THIS is why we can't have universal healthcare in the US: It would kill our creativity!!!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I can't say I ever heard something worth it. Long live classic rock!
Or any music played with actual instruments, for that matter.
Another good French band:
Air (French band)