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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.
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.
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)
"C'mon guys, we are still relevant! See?"
Proverbs 21:19
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
The number had dropped as people started streaming, but streaming also is taking from uncounted radio.
It'll be interesting to see how the numbers compare to 15 years ago, but it will be a dramatic bump from the last couple of years, as paying customers were not getting counted. 1500 streams is probably more listening than a typcical album purchase used to get, but with what are essentially radio listens in the mix too, I suspect a slight increase.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
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.
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...
Reading all of this in the most charitable fashion, I'm inclined to think that the RIAA considers streams to be analogous to a radio broadcast. So, 1500 streams is analogous to one playing of the song on a radio station that has 1500 listeners at that moment.
To put a finer point on it, if P is the number of times a song is played on a station in a month, L is the average number of listeners in that month, and S is the number of sales in the radio station's broadcast region in that month, then I take it the RIAA is saying P * L / S = 1500 on average.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
When calculating how much was lost when people are torrenting music they would be: one stream one sale.
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.
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?