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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?"
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.
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.
...digitable distribution model that is killing traditional music sales.
The industry shouldn't exist today period. There is no 'killing', it is dead, and the music executives are corpse camping.
Why do we make art? It's not for money. It's not for social prestige. We make art as an act of self expression and as a way of passing the time when we're not engaged in activities necessary for our own survival. Art has no survival value -- and yet it has persisted since before recorded history. Cave paintings and such, jewelry, etc.
The recording industry couldn't exist until it was possible to capture audiovisual events. When the technology was first invented, it was expensive to record, duplicate, and distribute it so that people could observe the art of others. Music didn't start with the invention of the phonograph, anymore than acting started with the invention of motion picture.
But what has happened is that the technology has gotten cheaper, and cheaper, to the point where audio-visual recording equipment only costs a few dollars and reproducing those recordings costs nothing. The industry's raisin de etre is gone.
The advent of digital technology is what killed the recording industry -- they are no more relevant today than horse shoe manufacturers. The only reason they still exist is because they are sitting on massive piles of cash garnered because the technology decreased the business cost, and they pocketed the difference; They can afford to spend millions, even billions, convincing countries worldwide to rewrite their laws to create artificial markets and monopolies under the guise that if their industry disappears, the art will too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Alizee?
I am John Hurt.
You could almost say the French music industry is...retreating.
Daft Punk?
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Horse shoe manufacturers are still pretty relevant. It's just that we now use horses more as pets and luxury items than as tools. Horse shoe manufacturers evolved to meet current customer desire. The recording industry did not, and that is their problem.
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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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.
But I would guess that young people are just not used to paying for music.
Heck, OLD people are not used to paying for music. I've had access to thousands of songs for near zero cost my entire life. It's called a radio. And I've probably spent a few hundred dollars total my entire life on products advertised on the radio, of which only a tiny fraction in the millicents range made it to the artists that created all that music. I have a few CD's, but nothing close to the amount I've consumed via radio over the years while paying peanuts. Music has always been cheap, and the record industry has always tried to invent ways to pretend that it isn't. There may be a future in creating custom listening mixes and radio-like streams. But $0.99 per song? Get real. It would be a rip-off at $0.01 per song.