US CD Sales Increase in 2004

Lindsay Lohan writes "BBC is reporting that CD sales rose by 2.3% in the U.S. in the year 2004 despite the growing popularity of legal digital music downloads through services such as iTunes. On the other hand, a BBC report from last July noted that pirated CD sales have hit a record high. Sounds like the RIAA should be going after the real pirates, not little Susie or Grandma."

Re:A thief? Hardly.

[lukewarmfusion]

Did you pay for it? No.
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.

Sounds like a textbook case to me.

You can justify your crime all you want, but it still boils down to your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings. They can only afford to create that product (that you pirated) because of the potential to recover their investment.

It's one thing to not understand this. It's another thing to take issue with the word "theft" simply because you're not physically depriving anyone of anything. It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.

There is not a strong correllation here

[krbvroc1]

I love these articles because they are so misleading. I don't believe there is a strong correllation between sales and piracy. Sales are higher because the economy is doing better. Could they be even higher if there were no pirating? Perhaps, but I would consider it a small subset of people who would have bought something but didn't. Most people downloading stuff would never have bought it in the first place. If the record label lowered their prices that would also increase sales. Thus lower prices == piracy. ;)

The fundamental flaw is that in order to exaggerate their losses they come up with absurd calculations like loss = num_files_shared_last_year * retail_price. That is absurd.

I was watching C-SPAN last night and saw the confirmation hearing of U.S. President Bush's new Commerce Secretary. He was asked by Sen Gordon Smith (R-OR) how he would handle the copyright violations and IP issues that are crippling our innovative entrepreneurial spirit. I believe thre new Commerce Sec nominee has been CEO of Kellogg company. Wasn't that the company who was price-fixing cereal some time ago? Does anyone remember?

No sh*t!

[los furtive]

I just got back from a trip to South-East Asia, and in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos it was rediculous how every single music store sold bootleg CDs. Mostly stuff downloaded from the net (lots of 'best of' with tons of typos), but in high-end/high-quality cases. Especially the stuff I saw in Louang-Prabang (Laos). They were dirt cheap, $2-$5, and I heard they were even cheaper in VietNam, although I didn't make it out there. If you want even more flagrant copyright violations, when I had satelite tv in Cambodia they were playing Swordfish on one of the channels and it was the exact same DivX screener that I'd downloaded when it first came out in theatres...with the same animated logo scrolling across the top right and everything. How crazy is that?

A picture is worth 1000 words....

[telstar]

picture [yahoo.com]

Pretty much all you need to know to understand why CD sales dropped for a few years, then rose again in 2004.

It has nothing to do with piracy

[EmagGeek]

The economy was up in 2004... therefore CD sales were up as a matter of trend. As the economy improves, so does disposable income and sales of just about everything.

Re:Does Not Follow...

[Spad]

Under current law the level of illegality is totally different.

Sharing copyrighted material for free is a civil offence and could land you a fine.

Sharing copyrighted material for profit is a criminal offence and could land you in jail.

Re:indy retailer

[Anonymous Coward]

He said he just down loads stuff like every one else because the RIAA only cares about themselves not the industry (the whole chain, from artists to retailer) as a whole...

This isn't unusual in the industry at all. I have to obscure the timeline a bit to protect the innocent, but approximately ~2 years ago, I was a close friend of a local radio jock in a top 25 market. He handed out CD's like candy. Won't name any bands because again I want to protect the innocent, so I won't even go into the genre. But he was literally giving me 10, 15, 20 CD's a month, they all had the UPC code etched out, that was it, they were otherwise perfect copies of brand new CD's. Month after month.

It all came to him free, via the station, via the record labels who were trying to pimp their latest product. Multiple copies of stuff. He had no use for them so he'd give them out to his friends, thousands of CD's a year. The sad part is, all this shit got charged back to the bands in marketing/promotional fees. The labels could have sent 1 CD to the station but no, they'd send a box full, it was all waste.

Here comes the corroboration to your story.

Half the stuff this guy played during his shows, he downloaded off Gnutella. I watched him do it and occasionally I did the downloading for him. The station didn't have all of the stuff he wanted to play (he had kind of a specialty show), and the labels weren't sending free 10-packs of promo CDs for the stuff he wanted to play. So he downloaded it and played it. And the PD and station manager didn't give a shit, they pretty much encouraged him to do it. And nobody ever got on to the station about it, either.

I wonder how many radio stations out there are pulling their playlist off Kazaa these days because the labels won't send them what they want to play, but instead are sending them boxfuls of CD's that they DON'T want to play or don't know what to do with.

Wait, did I say record labels? I meant independent promoters! Totally different entities, there is no payola anymore! Yeah! That's it...