US CD Sales Increase in 2004 398
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:but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and they can't if they shut down a large scale CD manufacturing plant in SE Asia?
The figures show just how insignificant piracy is (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe the prices have dropped, making the product more desirable to the consumer.
However, they'll just say that it is the result of their "anti online piracy" actions.
Re:but... (Score:3, Insightful)
they talk with one face to the goverment yelling wolf and with the "everything is so GOOOD!" to the investors...
Does Not Follow... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if it is the Pirate CD sales that are the primary motivator behind the 2.4% increase? Come on guys... be consistent. All methods of piracy can have some beneficial network effects on sales. All methods of piracy can ALSO cause lower sales under different circumstances.
It is, in a word, wrong to deify music swapping online, but demonise pirate CD sales. They're both illegal... the only real difference is that one has a profit motive, and the other doesn't. But the actual level of illegality, under current law, is about equal. It's illogical to praise one and not the other, don't succumb to the same stupidity that is rife within the **AA.
Low Hanging Fruit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does Not Follow... (Score:1, Insightful)
I believe file sharing should be 100% legal. I don't believe there is anything morally wrong with taking music and sharing it with people in the forms of 0's and 1's that go over a wire.
On the other hand, selling bootlegs is something I cannot agree with. I do not believe someone should have the right to profit off of my own work just as much as your college propfessor does not believe that you should get a good grade and a degree for plagarizing (someone else's effort).
Can't win... (Score:5, Insightful)
If sales slump, **AA will blame it on piracy, and use it as justification to enact even more legislation to protect their profits.
And if sales rise, they'll use it as justification that their methods are starting to work against piracy, and consequently we need to make them even stronger.
Re:The figures show just how insignificant piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Sales increase, but p2p hurts sales? (Score:5, Insightful)
The report, for the country's National Bureau of Economic Research, studied the habits of 412 students.
Hmmmm.... they studied the habits of students. Aren't students usually short on money but have broadband on campus? This is hardly a realistic "sampling" of the population, so therefore cannot be taken seriously.
So which is it?
Re:Does Not Follow... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why two things being equally illegal makes them morally equivalent.
Re:2 things (Score:4, Insightful)
When I download some songs and say to myself, "Hmm, maybe this artist's entire elbum doesn't suck", then go out and buy the ridiculously overpriced CD, I'm not just being a sucker: I'm being a LAW-ABIDING sucker.
I'll sleep so much better now.
Fuck you and your Devil's advocacy.
When consumer-level (read 'us') audio tape became a reality, the **AA trundled out assholes such as Elton John to weep and wring their hands, and claim they'd go broke. Instead they got even richer.
When consumer-level (read 'us') video tape became a reality, the **AA trundled out more assholes to weep and wring their hands, and claim they'd go broke. Instead they got even richer.
Now that digital music is the current reality, and future, they do the same shit, while still getting richer.
They are a pack of irredeemably parasitic scumbags. They cannot be defended or excused. Their time is over, and the sooner the blood-sucking leech whores just curl-up and fucking die, the better.
As I said earlier, fuck your Devil's advocacy.
Re:but... (Score:4, Insightful)
If Pirated CD sales (from large scale CD factories, not burned copies, if you read the article) are becoming bigger than legal CD sales, maybe P2P isn't quite as big of a problem as 21 large scale factories in Russia and many more in SE Asia supplying the rest of the world...
Re:but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sueing customers and 80 year old Mac owners who can't even install Kazaa, let alone use it to download music looks better than closing a manufacturing plant?
Which record studio hired you??
Re:2 things (Score:3, Insightful)
Most CD stores in China are pirate *only*. In these stores, you can't find a single legal CD. The only stores that sell genuine stuff are the malls, since they need to have a somewhat credible reputation. But even they carry pirated material occasionally.
I don't see how the **AA is going to police this... in the minds of the Chinese, there is no such thing as immaterial rights. Everything that can be copied will be copied and sold for profit.
Now, do we want **AA to do policing at all? Do we want America policing more than it already does? No, we don't...
Re:Of course... (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly, I really believe it has a lot more to do with easy of purchase and single track downloads more than the price.
Albums for $9.99+ isn't exactly inexepensive when there is no tangible media. Most new releases at respectible outlets (not in large shopping malls) are 12.99 or so.
People are still paying an overinflated price for crap that the RIAA puts out. They are just doing it without having to buy a disc full of filler when they only want one song.
Re:That's not good growth compared to economy, DVD (Score:2, Insightful)
however Cd's havent changed format and there's no reason to buy all your old favorites again. Maybe when DVD-A or SACD takes off we'll see a big spike in music sales too.
Just think about the headline for a moment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, oh, I know -- I know! {raised, waving hand}
The reason they aren't going after these "real" pirates is because they are in nations who's legal systems have no incentive to stop the flow of pirated American, European and Japanese media.
It really makes me sad to see this kind of uninformed tripe in a headline. It brings out the general ignorance of the masses in these threads.
Re:but... (Score:2, Insightful)
They will talk about how good the effort is going in stopping P2P.
And most likly ignore the fact that CD sales are tracking the economy fairly well.
Re:I Wonder.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:1, Insightful)
I download music... quite frequently, for a variety of reasons... say I download a madonna song... It's worth the 3 seconds it will take me to click on the link, that I saw browsing for another song, to get it and listen to it once, but its not worth 99 cents on itunes... if I had to pay 99 cents, there is no way I would get it... so I am not a potential sale, because I know there's no way I'd buy that song... on a sidenote, I've spent more on CD's this year, than any year prior, and I made less than the year prior (by a good margin) though, to the RIAA's credit... most of my music is no longer owned by one of their labels... so they are, in effect losing money because I can now find a wider range of things, and have found better stuff that they don't produce...
Re:The figures show just how insignificant piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
> But you can't state that file sharing has not had a negative effect as a result of a positive increas
> in sales.
I'd like to see some evidence of this assertion. I'm very wary of things that seem at face value to be common sense, and I don't see any reason to buy this particular claim. The last album I bought (Brian Wilson's SMiLE) was purchased after I heard a P2P download of Heroes and Villains, and I doubt very much I'm alone.
Record sales have slumped before (there was, as I recall, a big slump in the late 80s and early 90s). It seems that the current slump, which coincides, like the last one, with an economic downturn, has now been oh-so-conveniently attached to P2P piracy.
I'm not saying it isn't possible, but I see no reason to take RIAA's word for it, any more than I would take, say, Kazaa's word for it that piracy hasn't hurt. Both have obvious interests that render them completely unreliable.
So where's the evidence that P2P downloading caused the slump in record sales?
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
So anything you get for free is stealing. I can think of a lot of examples where this is not the case. Say I recorded a show off CBS. I would still answer the same to all three of your questions.
Hate you break you out of your little black and white world there, but when you talk about copyright it is just as infringing to forward an email without permission as it is to download a song, singing "Happy Birthday" in public is legally actionable and girl scouts pay a fee every year to sing campfire songs together. In the real copyright world it is just as infringing for me to make duplicates of my parents wedding pictures or to copy a photo out of my high school year book. In the real copyright world my four year olds scribbles are instantly copyrighted and her preschool teacher better have permission before she duplicates them. I bet you personally have infringed copyright hundreds of times in 2004, but because you disapprove of the way I do it, I'm a theif and a pirate.
Tell you what. If they come up with a copyright system that makes any sense, then I'll respect it.
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they still have it? Yes.
Sorry to "take issue with the word 'theft'", but it is significant, both in a legal and moral sense. Legally, theft is defined as taking something with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of it, therefore downloading music is not theft. It is copyright infringement, which is a very different legal concept.
Whether or not downloading music actually deprives the record companies of potential earnings is also far less clear than they would have us believe. It is only depriving them of earnings if the downloader would otherwise have bought the CD.
From personal experience, I think the vast majority of illegal downloading is in circumstances where the downloader would not have bought the CD anyway, either because they consider it too expensive, or because they were downloading it simply to try it out, on the chance it might be good. In some cases, they like it go on to buy the CD (I have certainly done this several times).
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
Did you see the sign? Yes.
Did you understand the sign? Yes.
Did you drink from the "Whites Only" water fountain? Yes.
It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
Yeah, that's called civil disobedience. Happy Birthday to You [songfacts.com] should be public domain by now. Sharing copyrighted files without making a profit only became illegal seven years ago when the No Electronic Theft Act was signed into law. By comparison, prohibition lasted 14 years.
Don your Elliot Ness attire. Keep busting those average Joes. Personally, I hope your kind stays the course. I hope RIAA legal activity mushrooms. Once you piss off enough regular people, this becomes a campaign issue and the majority is clearly not on your side. Go RIAA GO! :-)
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:2, Insightful)
You would've shown them, right?
Could someone just get honest... (Score:5, Insightful)
The behavior is perfectly consistent with the abuses against all IP being waged by corporate entities and their legal minions, in the pitched battle to own, control, restrict, and monopolize all human knowlege, invention, and the freedom to create. In a world that has substantively shifted to an information economy, the owner and controller of all IP is king.
We're all quick becoming pawns in a war between human freedom and self determination, and corporate design. The science of shaping opinion, controlling the masses, and disinforming entire nations for fun and profit is run riot directly over the ethical and social designs of our forefathers. We are confronted with the conundrum of the successful operation that kills the patient, and in this scenario, you and I are the patient. Either, collectively as a people, we get some backbone, and a whole lot more intelligence, or we can expect to obsolete ourselves in the next several decades.
This is simply one more expression of our own ignorance, the worst of our animal nature, run amock. The beast that blindly grabs for the reins of all human enterprise is without foresight, mind numbingly stupid, infinitely self absorbed, and manned by men with the conscience of politicians. It's up to us (that would be not only the person writing these words, but also the people reading these words), to lay down new laws, build new barriers to barbarism, and set the stage for the next 200 years of human development. The alternative, is a furture shaped a lot like the fossil record for all of us naked apes.
Genda
Re:downloading music is (Score:2, Insightful)
"Oh but Mr. Pirate, you are cheating the poor artists out of their hard earned money. They produced the art you love so you should pay them for it."
Again, please. The artists get a dime per CD...maybe. I'd rather burn the CD and send the artist the dime!
The big corporations (who give money to government to get legislation...yes, it is that easy) are screwing the consumers because they already spent tons of time and money breeding a culture that does nothing but spends. Why? Because they can.
Well, hobbes and locke were wrong. Not everyone HAS to succumb to the same social contract as everyone else to make it all work. I can get by simply by burning my music, screwing the corporate entity and sleep just fine.
There is a sliding scale to right and wrong. There is grey in between the black and white. Stealing billions by pulling a fast one on the public is more black than white, and stealing a CD from those giants is more white than black. They are both grey, both wrong, both right. You can thank capitalism to that, well at least the american version of it.
Make music to be appreciated, appreciate the artists and see them when they come around to play. Thats where they get their money. Revolt against the corporate. Give your business to small labels that don't gouge the public and don't produce crap just to sell it. There are things we can do as a consumer force.
Just a pricing point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirates of the Carribean Soundtrack... $18.
That is why few purchase CDs anymore.
Re:A thief? Hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the law is broken secretly or the lawbreaker attempts to get out of the punishment, the powerful moral logic of civil disobedience breaks down. It becomes easy to accuse the protester of breaking the law just for personal gain rather than for the greater good. If he or she breaks the law openly from the beginning and requests enforcement of the unjust law, he or she is immunized from this line of attack.
If you want to practice civil disobedience against current copyright law, you should copy some tracks (like Happy Birthday) that you believe you have a moral right to own and you should alert the authorities and the media. Force the RIAA and the FBI to arrest you. Accept the ridiculous fines and jail terms that come with the crime, and thereby show everyone the ludicrous and immoral nature of the law.
Don't, however, copy 100GB of songs off of P2P networks secretly and call it civil disobedience. It's not. It's just lawbreaking.
Re:Inundated (Score:1, Insightful)
How do you find this music, though?
If you go to a record store, you can maybe randomly look at things in the (extremely broad) genre you heard of. Each time take it to the counter, ask to listen, wait a minute or so while they find it, load it, listen. This is extremely inefficient, slow, and annoys the staff, and isn't feasible for more than one or two people to do in a store at once.
On the other hand, if you can simply chat or read on the net about bands, then download tracks from there right then and there, you can efficiently decide whether or not they are interesting to you. A good music store can do this too, but such a good music store doesnt exist yet, itunes included. Most of the bands I discovered through P2P are still not in iTunes, let alone other less complete stores.