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Canada No Pirate Nation: Global Leader In Music Download Sales
An anonymous reader writes "The IFPI, the global recording industry association, recently released
its Recording
Industry in Numbers 2012,
which provides detailed sales data from countries around the world.
While CRIA talks
about
'rebuilding the marketplace,' the industry's own data indicates that
Canada already stands among the global leaders in digital music sales.
Michael Geist digs into the
data and finds that Canadians purchased more single track
downloads than Germany or Japan, and more than double the sales in
France, despite the fact that each of those countries has far larger
populations. In fact, Canadian sales were larger than all the sales
from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, the
Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden combined. Not only is the Canadian
digital market far larger than virtually every European
market, it continues to grow faster than the U.S. digital music
market as well. In fact, the Canadian digital music market has grown
faster than the U.S. market for the past six consecutive years."
And the recording industry is still hungry for money.
As a Canadian, I think I can speak for the country when I say that the reason we're a global leader in music download sales is that we feel so damn guilty for pirating all that stuff that we make amends by buying it.
Plus, how else can we push Justin Bieber to the top? Don't tell me non-canucks actually purchase his stuff, too?
We're just so damn polite. Sorry for the cuss words.
cheers,
cheers,
So you mean that if you respect the privacy of your citizens (Canada has the best privacy laws in the world) and don't treat them like criminals...that they won't generally act like criminals?
I'm freakin' shocked.
Where in TFA is it suggested that this has anything to do with a lack of piracy?
Good point. Maybe we just need lots of indoor entertainment for, like, 8 months of the year or something like that...more than we could handily pirate :)
Arrr...eh!
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
We are.
Sincerely, a Canadian Parent.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
We have incredibly lax laws compared to many places; the reason that such services don't tend to work here is simple.
Negotiating the licenses and contracts costs some money
Canada has 1/10th the population of the U.S. so it often isn't worth it.
Netflix, for instance, works perfectly well in Canada but has 1/10th the library of the U.S. version.
Piracy = increased sales? Canadians are one of the few who are protected under the law and can download as much pirated product as they like. The studies suggest that piracy leads to more purchases of the same type of material (music, movies, etc) so it can be true that we both pirate and purchase at the same time.
There are Canadian Content rules which specify material which is deemed Canadian Content (% written/produced/performed by a Canadian) must receive x amount of airtime. It's been complained about for a number of years by people in the music industry, however it has given airtime to great artists like The Tragically Hip, Paul Brandt, I Mother Earth, and George Canyon so it's both good and bad.
Personally, I find CBC (especially CBC Music) to be a goldmine for music - free streaming of a pile of concerts, podcasts, you name it.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I know people who pirated movies or video games the first time that were there on opening day to buy the sequels. People will support what they know is awesome because they want it to continue and they know that it will not continue if the makers can't feed their families and pay mortgages.
They have rather less interest in keeping rich executives rich. Or for that matter, even in keeping rich artists rich.
I predict a epic fail. Lots of discussion about morality and ethics of downloading / sharing by country, no discussion about availability in the marketplace.
A lot more chopsticks are sold in .jp and .cn than in .se or .fr. That doesn't mean the people in .jp rarely pirate chopsticks and everyone in .fr prints stolen 3-d printer copies of chopsticks or relies on gray market imported chopsticks. I'm guessing that most of the online available music appeals to .us and by extension (since their govt is just a lapdog of the us, etc etc) the music appeals to .ca. On the other hand Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chix don't sell so well in Paris.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well now, perhaps studies like this will help motivate the other large US music sellers (Amazon, Google) to get off their collective asses and start porting their services to Canada. Have been (not so) patiently waiting for this for, what, five years now?
I am no fan of Apple, but right now that's the only large-scale digital music purchase option available to Canada...at least they provide iTunes cards so I don't have to, you know, enter any real personal information for an iTunes account. The interface and bloatiness still sucks, though, and I'd hop on Amazon or Google in a heartbeat (well, once my current credits are used up).
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Err, thank god for artists that can fill an album with 40-50 minutes of music that we want to listen too.
Since apparently the legit digital market is growing leaps and bounds, would it be a good time to suggest repealing any CD-R and SD type card taxes the CRIA managed to get passed into law? It only seems fair and makes sense to me.
Piracy = increased sales? Canadians are one of the few who are protected under the law and can download as much pirated product as they like. The studies suggest that piracy leads to more purchases of the same type of material (music, movies, etc) so it can be true that we both pirate and purchase at the same time.
Bear in mind we're "protected" because we pay a levy on blank media - effectively it's impossible for a Canadian to "illegally download" material because we've already paid for it when we bought the hard drive.
IP enforcement in Canada chases after the seeders, because that part is still illegal.
I'd account a fair bit of the sales increase to people ditching cable - between iTunes and Netflix, I can watch every show I want for substantially less than what cable would be. (I still get my internet and phone through the cable company because I loathe Telus with a fiery passion, so the cable company is content.)
Nearly all of my friends and family buy their music. Probably because we're not assholes.
There's no excuse not to pay for the multimedia you use these days. I can get any show/song I want on iTunes. If I didn't want to pay $3 an episode or a buck a song, I just wouldn't bloody own it.
Unless you use Linux where iTune and Netflix doesn't have a native client. Remember not everyone here likes Apple or Microsoft and some of us want a OS that works they way we want it to, and gasp would also like to be able to consume media. some of us don't want to support monopoly abusing patent trolls.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
IP enforcement in Canada chases after the seeders, because that part is still illegal.
Citation needed. Have you heard about any uploading cases in the last 5-8 years?
;).
Seems like the prolific US propaganda and lobbying on the subject has skewed your view (as with many Canadians). A precedent was set saying it was not illegal (BMG Canada Inc. v. JohnDoe). The appeal (which passed) stated that the legality still needs to be decided in court. To my knowledge it hasn't been tested yet (most likely due to the current legislation giving it a chance to go through as legal).
The Royal Canadian Mounted police's policy is: "Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted".
We covered this quickly in a law class (back in 2007) and the current state then was "not illegal". In order to make it illegal would require a risky court case (which I haven't heard of to date) or legislation (which the RIAA keeps trying to push in Canada and the Conservatives address periodically).
In conclusion: you have no excuse to be a leecher. Start seeding like the rest of us
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
If only the issue was so simple! Hammer, meet nail.
We, the people, demand a share in the incredible exposure and savings our technology has brought to music. I don't see the entertainment cartels thanking us, and perhaps more to the point paying us, for the invention of the camera, microphone, speaker, electric guitar, synthesizer, radio, TV, vinyl record, mylar tape, VCR, CD, DVD, huge hard drives, fast consumer grade computers, sophisticated music composition, scoring, recording, mixing and playback software, digital mastering, pitch correction, and most of all, the Internet. No, instead, they have the nerve to whine, complain, snivel, cheat, and even fight and vandalize over the advances that have enriched us all and made possible their industry. They have demonstrated over and over that they are fools who would rather kill their business than move with the times and the technology. Remember that Hollywood itself started as essentially a pirate operation, purposely located in a place distant enough that Broadway could not easily assert their supposed rights. They don't fool us. We know all their talk of rights is really a cover for sheer greed.
We are NOT going to pay 19th century expenses for entertainment!
Copying is NOT stealing! There are many crimes that are not stealing, and many actions that should not be criminal. The world is more complicated than that. We can't draw boundaries around concepts, can't divide the universe into lots and assign ownership, can't dictate every use. No one owns the air we breathe or the water we drink, yet we obviously have an interest. Except for a few private toll roads, we all own the roads. Therefore we use more mechanisms than property rights to manage air, water, roads, and other things. The concept of property rights as applied to real estate or physical goods should not apply to data because, like air and water and roads, they are fundamentally, qualitatively different things.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
When I first read the summary, a red flag went off for me - and it was the fact that we're *only* talking about digital sales - and even worse, the summary talks about one subcategory of digital sales: "single track downloads". The summary seems to have ignored physical sales of music and whole album digital sales. My first thought was to question how the Canadian balance of physical to digital sales differed from other nations.
Also, talking about how the Candian digital sales is growing faster (percentage-wise) than the US could also be a red herring if the Canadian market for digital sales was very low five years ago. (Example: if you start with 10,000 digital sales per year five years ago, you can get 100% growth each year and still have lower overall digital sales than a country that was selling 1,000,000 sales five years ago and had 10% growth each year.) In fact, the MichaelGeist information confirms that this is what happened - i.e. that the Canadians digital sales numbers started much lower - when he says "Canada seems likely to pass the U.S. on per capita single track downloads in about 18 months". So, the chart Michael Geist produces showing six years of faster-than-US sales growth in "single track downloads" is really a chart showing that Canada is still playing catch-up. Also, I wonder how "single track downloads" differs from "digital sales" in general.
According to the Norway sample data (http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/RIN-samplepage-2012.pdf), digital sales account for 45% of total revenue and "single track downloads" accounts for 18% of digital sales. This means in Norway that "single track downloads" accounts for only 8.1% of revenue. This also raises a red-flag for me because it makes me think that "single track downloads" was a subcategory that Geist could seize on to paint a rosy picture, even if the total picture was different.
I've also noticed that a lot of comments on the Slashdot thread seem to think we're talking about "total sales" when were talking only about one component of music sales: "digital music sales" or "single track downloads".
As much as I hate when the music industry spins numbers (for example, assuming that one act of piracy equals one lost sale to calculate the amount of money lost to piracy), we should also acknowledge that the pro-piracy crowd spins their numbers as well. I'd look at the actual numbers, but the entire report is only available if you pay.
Canadians face similar limitations when it comes to sharing music that other nations do. For example, it is illegal to share music covered by copywrite. While I believe the receiver is not considered to be at fault, the sender is. Those using bittorrent are just as guilty in Canada as they are in the US.
First, it's copyright. Second no they don't. In the above linked court decision the judge equated placing copyrighted music in a publicly shared folder (specifically citing P2P) is the equivalent of a library placing a photocopier in a room full of copyrighted books. The library is not authorizing you to copy a book, if you do that's on you. However, if you do copy something digital from a P2P network (or any other source) you have no way of knowing if the source is a legal one or not so you cannot be held libel for it.
The studies suggest that piracy leads to more purchases of the same type of material (music, movies, etc) so it can be true that we both pirate and purchase at the same time.
You're jumping to conclusions. [snip]
No, there are actual studies like: http://www.scribd.com/doc/93891327/Hammond-File-Sharing-Leak
Well, there's this:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6456/125/
But did you also know that the Conservative Party of Canada lobbied the US government to bump up Canada's position on that list?
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1048993--leaks-show-u-s-swayed-canada-on-copyright-bill
The cables, from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, even have a policy director for then industry minister Tony Clement suggesting it might help U.S. demands for a tough copyright law if Canada were placed among the worst offenders on an international piracy watch list. Days later, the U.S. placed Canada alongside China and Russia on the list.
Facts are fun!
Was the nasty gram from RIAA? I got one of those while working as a sys-admin in Germany. A quick "we are not in the US so suck it" usually is sufficient to deal with those.
Piracy = increased sales?
A couple of years ago (I wish I could find the link) a book publisher wanted to know how much piracy was costing him, so he commissioned a study to find out. Since books don't hit the internet for a few weeks after it goes on sale, the researchers watched sales figures from the time of release to a point after the book hit the net. The researchers and publisher were astounded that rather than a drop in sales, there was actually a sales spike! Having it on the net, they hypothesized, generated "buzz".
Cory Doctorow credits his standing as a best seller to the fact that he puts his books on boingboing for free download.
As he points out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. I believe this is the real reason the RIAA is against the internet -- they have radio, their independant competetion doesn't, and relies on the internet and P2P to escape obscurity.
Especially considering the case of Roger McGuinn. His band, the Byrds, were a huge success in the early sixties, but by 1970 his label condidered him "too old" and by 1980 he was pretty broke, playing in bars. Since the advent of the internet, he's successful again. "[the old outlawed] Napster ressurected my music career," he claims.
There is one group that piracy hurts -- those whose work sucks. These are perhaps the most vehemently anti-piracy folks; they can no longer fool you into buying a shitty album with one good song that gets lots of airplay.
Free Martian Whores!
Bill C-11 (formerly C-32) strikes a pretty good balance with the exception of the digital lock rules. There will be a constitutional challenge to the digital lock section of the bill and it will most likely be struck down. The rest of the bill is actually fairly well balanced and clarifies exceptions for satire/education/etc which were previously in a legal grey area but generally accepted to be fair use.
I've gotten a few of those. They are pretty meaningless. What happens is MGM or some studio tracks a popular torrent of some movie they own the rights to. All you can get from a torrent though is the IP address of other people sharing it. You can trace an IP address to the ISP but that is about it, so MGM sends a letter off you all the ISPs saying their users are hosting their content illegally. Now being in Canada and not the US, we play by a different rule book and frankly, ISP don't answer to movie studios. What they will do is send you the user an email saying basically, MGM as notified us that your IP address has been detected for hosting content "movie title here" who owns the rights to said title. We like to remind you that breaking the law is against the law and it is illegal to do illegal things and you should look both ways before crossing the street.
If you actually read the email they send you, there is no threat of action being taken against you by either the movie studio or your ISP, just a scary looking notice.