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What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing
Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid has an interesting look at file-sharing. It all started with a review of a Phoenix study that was used to promote SOPA. Wilson says that the study was long on wild claims and short on fact. While most writers would simply criticize the study and move on, Wilson took it a step further and looked in to what file-sharing studies have really been saying throughout the years. What he found was an impressive 19 of 20 studies not getting any coverage. He launched a large series detailing what these studies have to say on file-sharing. The first study suggests that file-sharing litigation was a failure. The second study said that p2p has no effect on music sales. The third study found that the RIAA suppresses innovation. The fourth study says that the MPAA has simply been trying to preserve its oligopoly. The fifth study says that even when one uses the methodology of one download means one lost sale, the losses amount to less than $2 per album. The studies, so far, are being posted on a daily basis and are certainly worth the read."
Cost the music distribution industry, perhaps. What about the statistics on the actual artists?
And for every few albums I've downloaded, I've heard an musician I never would have otherwise, bought their album and gone to see their show when they come to town.
So the mediocre loose... but the talented, perhaps unappreciated, artists who don't get corporate radio airtime win.
Yes, but filesharing also means many people were exposed to music they might not have been otherwise, and of those there is a group who despite downloading an album will still go buy it (or buy a special limited edition version for an upgrade) to support the artist they are now a fan of.
Those extra sales will counteract the losses of the "I don't pay for anything" pirates.
File sharing didn't cost the Mafiaa cartels anything from me, their own actions have.
I will not EVER pay for their produced/distributed content again, because by doing so I would be helping fund a war on the free internet, lawsuits waged on their own customers, and bought legislation to stifle innovation.
Plus p2p file-sharing gives a better product without bullshit like unskippable ads, DRM, and idiotic FBI warnings on legally purchased media.
This is science at its best. Not only can you not cherry-pick your data to make a conclusive paper, but you also really shouldn't cherry-pick papers to make a conclusion (or vice versa) in life.
Keep in mind that the conclusion you are the living counter-example of is from one study out of many, and that the final study which directly relates one download to one lost sale (the most conservative estimate you can make) arrived at a loss of less than $2/album sold. So that means that even if not everyone were like you, the loss really becomes a sliding scale from $0-$2 per album.
You take all of the papers into account, and a larger pattern does emerge: Yes, any record that goes gold (500k sales) or platinum (1M sales) will see roughly ~$1M-$2M in losses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_recording_sales_certification )
At the same time, we know that artists are thriving in this environment http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/labels-may-be-losing.html
What does one do with these conclusions? Well that really depends on who you are: If you're the corporation, you obviously tighten your group and try to squish indie label companies for the sake of the bottom line (and in spite of artistic creativity). If you're the musician, you could "sell-out" because being well known, even if via overproduction and sheer marketing and autotuning, was your life goal, or you can maybe find a nice indie label that will help develop you for you. If you're Fox News, you defend the corporation because they're people too, who cares about our neighbors!
And as the average consumer? Well I guess I'm always impressed by the number of people defending corporations and what they think is "capitalism" in this day and age, when it's really resembling more and more a conspiracy by all the companies to screw over the consumers, rather than a competition to win their favor.
I'm just the opposite. By obtaining music through alternative channels, my CD collection eventually quadrupled in size (now over 300 discs).
One benefit was that I was exposed to a huge number of artists who receive little to no airplay by traditional terrestrial radio broadcasting. I'm not a fan of the soulless generic music that dominates most of the airwaves, so this was a very significant thing for me. When I discovered a new group I really liked, I'd go hit up an online retailer. Their recommendation system would then steer me towards other similar artists I had barely heard of. I'd then go back to the well to grab some of their music. Rinse and repeat.
Another benefit was identification. There used to be a huge number of songs from the '70s - '90s I really liked, but never knew their name. Thanks to an ID tag on a digital music file, I now knew the name of the artist and song and could go buy the album through a retailer. No more mistaking the music of one artist for another.
As online retailers have moved away from 20 second 32kbps previews to song clips of longer duration and better quality, it is just getting easier to use their sites to preview. But nothing beats the convenience of those alternative channels.
Thankyou, for stating the obvious :). I know that statement seems sarcastic, but it is the one thing people seem to so easily overlook. Not only is the music distribution industry redundant, the only thing it seems to be good for in my mind is promoting gutter trash like Justin Bieber, which most likely would never fly on its own.
Piracy may not be 100% right, but neither is expecting to get mega rich off the back of the general scumbag population just because you can do something that resembles actual music.
The music industry isn't that bad in terms of freedom
In the late 90s, the RIAA asked researchers in the security community to evaluate SDMI, essentially a DRM system for CDs that was supposed to be built into every music player:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDMI
Researchers who attempted to publish their work on SDMI, even those who did not agree to the confidentiality requirement, were threatened by the RIAA. Thankfully, SDMI ultimately died and the researchers were able to publish -- after the government assured them that the DMCA protected their ability to publish their work.
So where is the RIAA today? Pushing for every more restrictive copyrights and paracopyright laws. Attacking other countries for not having restrictive copyrights. They have toned down their attacks on file sharers because the attacks were a waste of their money and were losing them whatever public sympathy they had left. The RIAA is as bad when it comes to respecting freedom as the MPAA.
Palm trees and 8
No, that's still a poor analogy. Deaths from jaywalking are quantifiable. Jaywalking poses a clear risk to human life in some cases. On the scale of actual damage, jaywalking causes far more harm to society than non-commercial piracy.
It's more like the police creating an entire special crimes division to prosecute the unauthorized sale of lemonade by schoolchildren. In theory, restaurants are harmed because people buy fewer drinks. Therefore, the unauthorized manufacture and sale of lemonade reduces restaurants' potential profit. Further, those unauthorized producers consume and provide resources without paying money back to the government in sales taxes, so the government loses money, too, and they're violating the law. It is in almost every way an accurate analogy; the only real differences are that the composition of a glass of lemonade is not particularly creative and that the copy is not likely to be exact.
The cost to restauranteurs across the nations from these unauthorized lemonade sales is probably huge, possibly even on the order of tens of millions of dollars annually, worldwide, assuming that you quantify every child-sold glass of lemonade as the lost sale of a $3.50 glass of lemonade from a restaurant. Yet although the cost is high in aggregate, the cost per infraction is negligible, and the cost of enforcement would vastly exceed the amount of money you could possibly hope to extract from the destitute kids committing the acts of lemonade piracy.
Now, to take the analogy one step further, I'll describe how the restaurant industry could ostensibly overreact to match the music and movie industries:
You get the idea. To describe the current copyright policing in the U.S. as utterly ridiculous is perhaps
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.