Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal 331
Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"
95%? (Score:2, Interesting)
amazon number 1 - NiN (Score:5, Interesting)
So this means that the album IS available for free to legally download via torrent AND it was the highest sale on Amazon. Remarkable eh!
Re:I call bullsh*t! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sales are up so who cares (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I wouldn't say that they would never be able to market to some of the subset (ITMS?), namely the casual pirates. I agree, however, there is a core group of people that will never pay for the content and will engage in distribution of copyrighted material. You can woo those who occasionally use Limewire, etc by not treating people like criminals like they have done in the past. A lot of the time (this is true of movies/shows too) it is much easier for someone to fire up some p2p software and download some music, than it is to go and access some DRM laden file of purposely degraded quality. Take TV shows for example, I usually watch a show I've missed online by going to Hulu. I don't mind the ads all that much and I don't really care about owning a TV show which has low replay value. However, a show or other media that isn't easily accessible or purposely made difficult to use because of the industry's fear of the customer, I am going to go to a torrent site and just get the material. I'll tell you though, these dedicated distributors really know how to encode a quality file and I usually find a download is of much higher quality than the crap compressed over my Cable. When the pirates can distribute your media at a higher quality and ease of use, it turns into a sad state of things for the copyright holders.
Re:Inflation... (Score:5, Interesting)
Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.
It may not be inflated. Remember what the music industry considers piracy: Copying your library to an MP3 player, burning a CD for your car, putting your library on a laptop, etc. The industry doesn't like the fair use provisions in copyright law, so they frequently pretend like they don't exist.
It's not like the old days, where you buy an 8-track tape for the car and LP for the house... eventually replacing them with cassette tape and compact disc... sometimes more than once. Who's ever lost or broken an album?
Now that people can make their own copies and backups, there's a lot less opportunity to sell the exact same product repeatedly with ever increasing costs. Digital downloads tend to result in only one sale. You can't "break" an MP3 like a scratched CD. Bummer. Time to bring back Vinyl.
Re:Inflation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do you assume it's inflated? That's one in 20 songs that you download ends up being good enough to pay for. That sounds reasonable. Honestly, I think they're lucky to get 5%. 5% of a mind bogglingly huge number is nothing to sneeze at.
Re:Inflation... (Score:5, Interesting)
How about these maths:
Assume that instead the 40 billion downloads were legal downloads, and not even count the other 5%. Lets also assume that a download is worth 99 cents. Of that, the RI takes a huge chunk, I couldn't find exact numbers but lets say for the sake of argument the RI gets 50 cents (a low estimate in my opinion as the artist gets less than 10 cents in royalties, and apple claims most of the 99 cents goes to the recording industry). So at 50 cents per track this would mean additional revenues for the record industry of 2 TRILLION cents, or about 20 billion dollars. There is no way they were making their current cd sales + legal downloads + extra 20 billion prior to digital downloading.
So what does this tell us? Most downloads are not lost sales. The fact is that people consume many times more music because of music downloads, than if they had to pay.
I'll use myself as an example, prior to MP3's I bought about 12 albums a year or 1 per month. I'd say today I still buy about 12 albums per year, but I also download 3-4 additional albums per month that I never would have bought (i.e. worth a listen or two but not worth my money). Basically I am adding to the download statistics, but the statistics are misleading because the RI has lost no sales in my case. I think the numbers are extremely inflated because of this.
WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? How in the heck could that be? There are costs associated with manufacturing, shipping, distributing and marketing the $12 CD that just aren't there for the $1 downloads. If you're sell a million dollars of $12 CDs vs. the same amount of $1 downloads, how could you possibly make more profit on the CDs?
--MarkusQ
I'm suprised (Score:1, Interesting)
there isn't a Google Records yet. They certainly seem to have the capability to make money from advertising and giving things away for free.
Re:95%? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sales are up so who cares (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually blackened marshmallows are probably better for you than a slow roasted golden brown marshmallow.
The black is carbon left over from the burning of sugar, and pure carbon like this is very good at absorbing toxins. It also will spend less time over the fire and more of its cooking energy comes from the sugars in the marshmallow. So any foreign agents in the fire which may be leaving unhealthy soot deposits on the outside of your marshmallow have less opportunity to build up.
Re:The scale of copyright violations ... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's almost amusing but mostly sad how both you and another guy failed to read the first part of the parent's post, ignoring the information and just try to reply to his other statement without understanding it.
Everything is copyrighted. FOSS software too. Linux is copyrighted, GCC is, this post is copyrighted. That's why, almost by definition, everything linked to from the torrent tracker was copyrighted. (The torrent files are not copyrighted, btw, but that's not relevant to the discussion).
What the RIAA/MPAA are trying to spread is the notion that everything under a copyright is forbidden to make a copy of, which is clearly false, and I think they are afraid that people will eventually realize that there is music out there you don't have to pay for, and there is quality software you don't have to pay for (not even by having to watch/listen to advertisements).
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is correct, they couldn't possibly make as much off the physical CDs. I hate being boring "on purpose" but, manufacturing cost, shipment, advertising, returns policies, middleman (jobber) profit margins and last retail outlet margins cut into the list price something fierce.
Sure they have some economies of scale, but not even remotely enough to negate the cost of incidentals.
One thing though, about CDs, is that they are a lot easier for Artist management to enumerate, for purposes of figuring the artist share. And that "share" is usually subtracted from advances, given at the time of signing "For hire" contracts, and is the artist's only non-touring, non-merchandising income.
Contracts almost always have a per unit rate (minus a percentage for breakage/returns) that is considered the artist share. There are exceptions, of course, and some artists have the wherewithal to initiate touring and merchandising business models that allow them to recoup a lot of the actual cash that was sacrificed when they signed away their publishing rights. But that is rare when we look at the industry and its "workers" as a whole.
Things are stacked against the workers, in many of the same ways that are common all across the board in our work for hire system. But the cool thing is that, although the labels can make more money with less accountability, by using all-digital means of production, that same tech is available to musicians, and, if utilized, will put growing numbers of them in control of the "means of production."
If that scenario were to gain the force of momentum and become the rule, rather than the "exception," we'd have a small revolution on our hands, at least in terms of workers' rights and fairness in that industry.
It would be a rather classic case of a monopoly based on shared objectives, rather than negotiation or collective agreements, etc., with the "workers" on the dealing, rather than the receiving, end of the game.
Re:Inflation... (Score:3, Interesting)
The 8-track is a perfect demonstration of how the Electronics and/or Record industry controls consumer choice. 8-tracks were extremely popular in the 1960s and 70s, while the cassette player barely sold, until suddenly "they" decided more money could be made by forcing consumers to re-purchase everything on cassette.
So the 8-track stopped production, even though it was the most popular format at the time, and people were forced to throw-away their 8-track libraries and buy their favorite album twice (first on 8-track and then again on cassette). It's almost genius the way the record companies figured a way to double-dip.
One final thought -
Before you say, "But 8-tracks sound like crap" they don't sound any worse than the typical 128 kbps MP3 on an Ipod. 8-tracks may not offer random play, but then neither did any other technology in 1980. 8-tracks died, not due to lack of interest, but due to a simple decision to stop making the players.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read up the thread you'd see that:
So the issue is $1 million of downloads vs. $1 million of CD sales. The dollar amounts have stayed the same, but their expenses are lower, and yet they whine that it isn't as profitable.
--MarkusQ