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The RIAA Says 1500 Streams = 1 Album Sale (riaa.com)
AmiMoJo writes: The RIAA is modernizing its gold and platinum album certifications to include streaming. An album must reach 500,000 sales to go gold, 1,000,000 for platinum and 2,000,000 for multi-platinum. The RIAA set the new Album Award formula of 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams = 10 track sales = 1 album sale. Also effective today, RIAA's Digital Single Award ratio will be updated from 100 on-demand streams = 1 download to 150 on-demand streams = 1 to 'reflect the enormous growth of streaming consumption'.
It's not bad for a technology that they tried to ban once.
What the RIAA say. They've already discredited themselves to the point that I won't trust a single thing that comes out of their mouths.
The day these dinosaurs finally go extinct will be a glorious one for music.
That their damages for streaming pirated material go down too? No? Oh how hypocritcal we are. Bastards!
How does this add up with 1 illegal download = 1 missed sale?
Who gives a flying fuck about them anymore? That association made itself irrelevant.
I mean, I suppose that makes sense, I know I listen to a track 1500 times when I buy a new CD.
Alternatively, I suppose given that they play only 20 songs on repeat on the radio, I suppose 1500 plays is a bit of a lowball estimate for the number of times one person might listen to a given track before having "bought" it.
(Or, maybe, they still want to kill streaming dead and push buying music as "the way music is consumed" and by using these rules they're hoping they can get musicians to help them in an effort to win awards.)
Let's find a shitty new song and automate streaming requests for it.
United Slashdotters could push a piece 'o' crap album to multi-platinum in like, what, 5 days?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Thanks RIAA to tell us how much you value streaming and download !
The stock market is rated by the dow.
What the dow means changes over time as the stocks composing it are swapped out.
But a goal is to make the value of the dow seem consistent over these swaps.
The RIAA has another rating system called gold albums.
They are adjusting what it is composed of.
I wonder if this change was calibrated to make a consistent number of gold albums over the switch,
or if they put some marketing spin in to make more or less gold albums due to the switch.
"C'mon guys, we are still relevant! See?"
Proverbs 21:19
If they try to sue you for seeding an album online, their damages should be calculated at [Times Downloaded] / 1500 * manufacturing and licensing cost.
Justin Beiber went multi-platinum. I doubt we can get worse than that.
When the riaa shares the artist's work 1500 times, that's one album sale for the artist.
When you share the artist's work once - even if it was never download - that's a grand jury indictment, $250,000 per copy, plus lawyer fees....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Streaming is worth a tenth of a cent when we're asked to pay royalties, but a million bucks when we're suing you and twisting your ISP's arm.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Poor Jethro Tull and Edge of Sanity!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Who cares what the RIAA says? Just because shit sells doesn't mean it's worth listening to.
It's like those "10 billion hamburgers sold" signs at fast-food restaurants.
This is pretty rich coming from people who count single downloads as multiple lost sales.
Sort of like every time I look at your wife, it means I've banged her six times.
Get stuffed RIAA and your ilk. The only IP right I recognize is the right of citation. Given that assumption, I can only view your organization as a leach on society, using your might to steal our knowledge and culture away from us. Your unjust laws that were foisted upon us are working for now, but your days are numbered. Every day there is one more like me, and one less like you. It won't be long until your laws are ignored entirely. What will you do then? Arrest us all? No, you must adapt into an entity that provides an actual value to society or risk becoming irrelevant, just like the rest of us. I wish you luck in your incredible journey.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
I can't wait for the next time that they try and claim in court that 1 illegal music download is worth hundreds of thousands in damages at the same time that this is true.
This is just an announcement of an update to how they weight their stats, of some interest to those who care about sales figures and the like. Not everything the RIAA does has to be evil or malicious. Sometimes they're just running a record industry association.
They can go shit on a red-hot barbecue grill for all I care.
If this change in math is not accompanied by Spotify and other services paying the artist 1/1500 of a CD cost per streaming play, these numbers mean diddlysquat.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
So no laws were broken. Move Along.
And how much $$$ for the artists?
So every 1500 songs I'm not streaming is a lost sale, then? Then I'm doing the right thing by keeping my Rhapsody playlist small; eventually all the sales I'm stealing should bankrupt them, right?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
That means we now have a number to adjust their piracy claims on.
1500 downloads means a $19.00 fine.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Will they use this standard for fighting piracy? 15,000 streams from a site = one $11.99 album sale lost?
That just seems very very low. People love music, music is bigger than movies. I'm not sure how many people go to watch movies (I cannot find any records), but considering that I have heard that movies cost/make billions of dollars we can make some good estimates.
Lets consider that a block buster film makes 1 billion (many have made more), and what does a ticket cost $15? So a blockbuster movie has an audience of say 70,000,000 at least.
People listen to way more songs than they go to watch movies, why is an album considered double platinum with an audience that would make a movie be considered a complete flop?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It doesn't. You can't easily use this metric alone to estimate piracy effects.
Correct. If someone pirates something without buying it, they may discover it sucks before RIAA has their money in pocket.
The effects are most often felt by people who make music which sucks, and by companies that suck at picking winners, and RIAA, which used to win either way, but now has a lower income from music which sucks being sold.
Think how much the software industry would suffer, were we to effectively eliminate "shrink wrap licenses", the same way piracy eliminates them for music which sucks...
to the MafIAA. I do things the old-fashioned way, I "buy"** CDs or iTunes equivalents.
** "buy" in the vernacular meaning "pay for a personal use license and an electronic copy of the music in some form." nobody owns music except lawyers for music companies.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Tom Green proved that in a heartbeat with "Lonely Swedish" (Bum Bum Song) in spades back in 1999.
In fact, it was so effective that MTV was called out on their TRL (the "L" is for live) show not actually being live.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
That video gave me cancer back in junior high.
I hear there's a second one, but I'm loath to watch it.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
I bought about 400 albums on vinyl, cassette and cds before MP3s existed. I always had something in the car and never listened to the radio. I used a walkman and went to sleep with the stereo playing something.
I don't know that I've listened to any of my albums 1500 times over 20 years. Maybe a few songs, but not whole albums.
When calculating how much was lost when people are torrenting music they would be: one stream one sale.
Continuing on my personal campaign of using capitalism to fight against monopolists and other kinds of anti-capitalists, does anyone know how can we discover for certain whether an artist has an exclusivity contract with a recording company affiliated with the RIAA?
I plan on boycotting these and favor independent artists or those who distribute through recording companies not affiliated with RIAA, MPAA and other obscenities.
Maybe this would be more effective than simply boycotting any kind of distributor.
What's the music industry have to do with sales now anyway, they are too busy suing their customers? IT companies with an updated "technology friendly" business model like Apple, Google, Spotify, etc, are who sells music nowadays. They have taken over the record industries distribution and they should decide how to calculate "record" sales.
Could this have anything to do with the RIAA wishing to 'adjust' how much they pay the artist per stream?
If the RIAA didn't jump the shark around the time of Napster, they have now. Useless buggers.
Steal their album, and then send them a $10 bill in the mail (not a check, because the RIAA probably makes them turn over their bank statements so they can tax the income).
into larger, but less impressive arbitrary numbers.
Country music ?
Taylor Swift ?
Rap ?
And all the rest of the autotuned commercial crap ...
All any of the the above is good for is inducing vomiting.
yeah here is a song to think about RIAA asswipes:
"Uprising"
Paranoia is in bloom,
The PR transmissions will resume
They'll try to push drugs that keep us all dumbed down
And hope that we will never see the truth around
(so come on)
Another promise, another seed
Another packaged lie to keep us trapped in greed
And all the green belts wrapped around our minds
And endless red tape to keep the truth confined
(so come on)
They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
(so come on)
Interchanging mind control
Come, let the revolution take its toll
If you could flick the switch and open your third eye
You'd see that we should never be afraid to die
(so come on)
Rise up and take the power back
It's time the fat cats had a heart attack
You know that their time's coming to an end
We have to unify and watch our flag ascend
(so come on)
They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
(so come on)
Hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey
They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
1500 torrent shares = 1 album sale in their "lost profit" calculations?
How long before it occurs to them that recording a stream is a trivial undertaking?
1 album == approx. $15USD. So, it should only cost $0.01 (one penny) per stream. Works for me! I can afford that! Let's see, at about 3 minutes per play, 100 plays == 300 minutes == 5 hours, So for a full 8 hour day (480 minutes) we are talking about $5. Nah. Still too much! I have purchased 100's of albums over the years, and ripped them to mp3s so I can listen in my car or otherwise - 41+ GB of mp3s (at 192kbps). The 8gb sd card I play in my car can take me across the entire country without repeats!