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Music Media

Research: File Traders And Music Purchasing 433

Posted by timothy from the maybe-it-has-to-do-with-wallet-size dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "Like a TV preacher taking excerpts from the Bible to support a contrary thought, the results of research can be similarly interpreted in opposite ways. Edison Research just released a pro-record industry report stating '10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music.' Richard Menta over at MP3 Newswire noted that this also means 90% of file traders are buying music, a positive result that supports the virtues of trading. Menta then goes through the study's findings one-by-one, questioning Edison Research's conclusions. This includes their recommendation to the industry to fight the 'downloading problem.'"
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Research: File Traders And Music Purchasing More

Research: File Traders And Music Purchasing

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  • It's a broken business model (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spongebob ( 227503 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:47PM (#3926969)
    The interesting thing that came up in a conversation the other day was that there is an entire generation of people who are growing up not paying for music.

    I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete .mp3s

    How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free? It's a broken business model for sure and they are really fighting to stay alive in more ways than the average guy realizes.... It will be interesting to see what happens.

    • Let's see an up-to-date business model (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stevens ( 84346 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:58PM (#3927006) Homepage

      Blockquoth the poster:

      How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free?

      I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?

      I'd like to see someone start a label that signs artists, gets music recorded, books tours, and gives away mp3s without worrying who copies what. If there is a business model in there somewhere that takes mp3 copying and makes it remunerative, then the first guy to do it will be well rewarded.

      Plus, it'll end all this bickering as the RIAA members fall over themselves to be the first to copy it.

      • No business model (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mad Quacker ( 3327 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:20PM (#3927062) Homepage
        Perhaps there isn't a business model to be had, that may be a better than any business model. How much money did musicians make before records that you could sell? Not much, but they did anyway, and we have a rich and diverse history of music. After the record industry got started, musicians still made almost nothing, just a few fatcats who had the money to invest anyway. With better contracts and sales of multi-million units, some artists have made a decent amount of money, but this is an infinitesimal number of all musicians. All the while some pseudo-anonymous fatcats with little talent but a large pile of cash, are making their pile larger.

        The time for super-stars and immense amounts of wealth for the few may be at an end, at least for this industry. I welcome it. How many bands that have gotten silly, filthy rich produced a good album afterwards? Exactly.
        • How many bands that have gotten silly, filthy rich produced a good album afterwards?

          red hot chili peppers. californication.

          dave matthews band. broken stuff.

          radiohead. amnesiac.

          okay, that's all i can think of for now. but i'll agree there's not many. but i'll posit a different question: how many bands that have gotten silly, filthy rich produced a good album at all? you might find the same list of bands already mentioned here.

        • Re:No business model (Score:5, Insightful)

          by omnirealm ( 244599 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @08:09PM (#3927772) Homepage

          How many bands that have gotten silly, filthy rich produced a good album afterwards?

          That's the funny thing about our capitalistic system. The possibility of becoming a monopoly is a powerful incentive for innovation and production in the first place. However, once a monopoly actually occurs, then the system begins to fail (specifically, that which follows leaves much to be wanted).

          I submit that the dream of becoming a multi-millionaire superstar (in the area of music), or the dream of producing the de-facto desktop operating system (in the case of Microsoft) gives motivation to struggle in the market and to produce. Take away the mere possibility of ``striking it big,'' and you affect the number of people that are going to try.

      • start a label that signs artists, gets music recorded, books tours, and gives away mp3s without worrying who copies what

        How did the Greatful Dead do it? They made money from concert tickets, t-shirt sales (Hey, that's the sweetest pie! quoth Krusty.) and probably a little from album sales. But they never really cared about concert bootlegs. Don't know how they felt about trading actual albums.

        I'm not a deadhead by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe someone can explain.

        • Re:Let's see an up-to-date business model (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Rasta Prefect ( 250915 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:50PM (#3927154)
          How did the Greatful Dead do it? They made money from concert tickets, t-shirt sales (Hey, that's the sweetest pie! quoth Krusty.) and probably a little from album sales. But they never really cared about concert bootlegs. Don't know how they felt about trading actual albums.

          I'm not a deadhead by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe someone can explain.

          Concerts are where most bands make the vast majority of their money. The only people making real money off CD's are their labels. The only reason bands need the albums at all is to raise awareness for their concerts. So if they can use the Internet to make others aware of their existence, the labels are no longer nessecary. Excellent business model, but theres no place in it for the RIAA, and hence they'll fight it every step of the way.
      • I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?

        A comprehensive, searchable database of freely downloadable mp3s, recorded at multiple bitrates and including all the relevant song information in the file. Price: $29/year.

        It would take one weekend to have a million subscribers.

      • Re:Let's see an up-to-date business model (Score:4, Interesting)

        by alienmole ( 15522 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @05:21PM (#3927249)
        You're asking the wrong question, with faulty assumptions: that the amount of money that can currently be generated from a very successful album is somehow a necessity. It's not. Your question is a little like asking how the buggy whip manufacturers are going to sell as many whips to car owners - not a perfect analogy by any means, but my point is that there's a discontinuous change here, and "business as usual" will have to change as a result.

        One model that can work has already been mentioned by someone else: to focus more on making money from live performances, a la Grateful Dead. Not everyone gets to create something and stamp out millions of copies very cheaply, making huge profit margins on each one. The music industry is actually something of an anomaly in this respect.

        Providing convenient and cheap downloadable music would also help, so that it's easier and preferable to pay a small fee to download a high-quality recording than it is to copy a crappy one. No-one has yet actually done this, the middlemen are all too busy resisting the inevitable reduction in their revenue stream.

        The fact that middlement are being disintermediated doesn't mean that there's no future for the industry as a whole, just that there's no future for certain kinds of middlemen.

        RIAA members won't fall all over themselves to copy whatever successful model arises, because that model will not involve them at the profitability levels they currently enjoy. However, I'd bet that consumers and artists will both find the end result more congenial, on average, with the possible exception of the likes of Maddona, Britney, and the Back Street Boys.

        • No-one has yet actually done this, the middlemen are all too busy resisting the inevitable reduction in their revenue stream.

          Well, I suppose if you've got the power, it makes perfect sense to spend that power on gouging people for the maximum profit you're used to for as long as possible. Why adapt to a new business model before you absolutely have to? To be fair and progressive so that the history books remember your grand foresight? :)

          If Congress (hopefully) denies these dinosaurs their life extension laws, things will get interesting much quicker - and even quicker in the unlikelier case that copyright is reformed (instead of extended again and again and again...).

          --

      • Re:Let's see an up-to-date business model (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DarkZero ( 516460 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @06:05PM (#3927369)
        I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?

        The problem with this question is that no one will ever accept anything as the right answer. The current situation with the RIAA is like a gasoline fuel company trying to keep their profits up when everyone has switched to electric or hydrogen cars. The market is simply gone, and the best that the company can hope to do is sustain itself by changing to a new, smaller business model that serves the few customers that prefer their product. Like or not, it has become a solid fact that people now regularly trade music between each other and burn mix CDs for their friends. From here on, the RIAA can hope to keep themselves from dying by finding a newer, smaller business model, but they cannot get back the annual profits that they once had.

        I'd propose a new business model for them, but I'm one of the people that just thinks that the RIAA is doomed and that the music "industry" is bound to join the art and book "industries" as small but popular businesses that offer a good product at a sane price. I believe that the days of musicians being huge superstars and their companies making billions of dollars are reaching their end, and that that is not as bad a thing as many people think it is.
      • so what's a model that works?

        There are a couple of local artists in Utah that seem to be doin' just fine for themselves. Peter Breinholt [bigparade.com] is the quintessential example.... he played a ton of shows, built up a following, produced his own records (from $3200 to $10,000 for the recordings), and sold them (at $10-$15 a pop). Since he's sold well over 10,000 copies on each of 4 almbums, he's not doing half bad. Certainly better than the musicians discussed by Steve Albini and Courtney Love. This leaves aside the 1,000-2,000+ seat venues that he consistently packs.

        He testified at a field senate hearing [csoft.net] a while back. He was pretty pro-P2P .... because he figures it's a high tech version of the same sort of word-of-mouth which won him local fame.
        "So far," stated Breinholt, "my music has been a cottage industry. I paid for CDs to be made, found people to distribute them, designed covers, booked concert halls, took out ads in the paper... So I've stayed independant. That's not to say I'm anti-label...there's a lot a label could do to make my music available to more people. And if a fair deal came along, I might do it. I've just never seen a deal that would be fair to both parties." He spent some time delving into math of record deals, comparing his self-produced work (which makes $7-9 per CD sold) with that of a friend who went the label route (and makes $1 per CD sold, after all the record label's costs are covered, and doesn't own the rights to the CD anymore).


        "It's a lot of work, but I like doing it. Not only that, but I think I understand my audience, and I get to be protective of them. I like being able to decide ticket prices for shows, who is goign to open for us, what the next CD will sound like, or how aggressively I'm willing to advertise," Breinholt said.
        So there's your business model. Play and write like a maniac, keep the rights to your recordings so that when you sell copies, you actually see a couple of bucks.

        Incidentally, Breinholt is not the only doing this. recently turned down a $250,000 recording contract because the terms sucked, but they seem to do just fine. Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband [shupe.net] have won lots of attention at SXSW, and similarly sell out 1000+ venues on a regular basis, and have a couple of good recordings that people buy (even though they're really a jam band and mostly worth listening to live).

      • You have the usual misunderstanding of the purpose for RIAA labels trying to put MP3 downloading and Internet Radio out of business. Evidence that these act as cheap promotion for albums is abundant. The problem isn't that record labels object to cheap, the problem is that anybody can play, anyone can upload to P2P or submit a record to a Internet Radio station, the payola the RIAA labels provide for a monopoly on FM radio access suddenly becomes a lot less valuable.

        You also don't quite get that sales/revenues are declining for both FM radio and major labels. Is it because of downloading? Let's take the word of the RIAA for a change since they tell us that the 90% of download users buy CDs. This tells us that people are buying, if it's good... and what they are paying for is better than 128K MP3 sound so they can hear something they like better. The MP3s that are played with the listener saying "what total shit" going into the bit-bucket and he's just saved $20. Part of the RIAA model depends on the listerer finding out that an album is crap AFTER paying $20 for it.

        One can blame this the decline of sales on the recession, but I would attribute to the "mass market" fragmenting into niches which are getting small enough to limit the potential market value while simultaneously increasing the expertise required for the labels to know what they are selling, who they are selling to.

        Their attempts to use traditional marketing, focus groups, polling, etc. to find the next million-record seller are an attempt to hit a target that is not only moving, but becoming illusory. Why are people turning off FM radio? Why did you? If it doesn't cater to your tastes, why bother?

        However, this doesn't answer the rest of your question. The answer is drastically cheaper promotion and physical distribution making it possible for a record label to break even / profit on far fewer sales. A record label that intends to be around in 2020 needs to find a business model that doesn't depend on a significant number of their artists going consistently platinum.

        The goal here is to make sure that an artist selling 10K records is a profitable and prosperous one. Since an artist who is selling 10K records a year that she is producing and selling herself is grossing about $100K a year, the question is... how can a record label add value to this product to justify an artist doing business with it?

        The other point is that with the fragmenting of the mass market, a record label that depends on a few record artists going platinum to allow making a profit despite the other artists who "only" sold 5K or 10K or 20K records is going to find increasingly fewer platinum records and ultimately, will find itself in Chapter 11.

        Remember, an artist who sells his own music and finds an audience of a few tens of thousands of people is better off without an RIAA label supporting him. Musicians know that the odds of signing with a label and going consistently platinum are not only comparable to winning the lottery, but if the label gives up on that person or band, that person/band is no longer able to sell his/their own music.

        One piece of the puzzle is missing for a record company to make this new business model possible. The TVD (terabyte removable media in CD/DVD form factor) won't be out until next year. This would make possible a black box driven by a TVD jukebox that would allow CD-on-demand purchases at any record store which has a copy. Automated production equipment for CDs on demand already exists. It would need to be repackaged for non-geeks...

        This allows full quality CDs to be purchased at any record store which has the black box and TVDs from each record label they carry. Each record label could send a TVD out weekly or monthly with every single record on the label, including the back list. Encryption could be used to allow only legitimate stores to use this to make copies. Automated record keeping can be done with the machine to tell the store who to send checks to every week.

        This eliminates physical production and distribution of CDs from the label POV. This also eliminates a great deal of the financial risk with respect to signing a band, as the incremental cost of getting them into stores drops to about zero.

        Promotion? Stop worrying about "anybody can play" and start supporting Internet Radio (unfortunately, outside the US) and MP3 networks. Start buying ads in music print media to tell people where the new "cool places" to find new music is. Make effective use of the Internet. Don't try to be all things to all people, find a niche and try to expand to neighboring niches. Keep overhead low and develop serious expertise in a category to allow effectively helping the artist to promote themselves. The converse of this is that musicians won't be able to

        If a record label develops the expertise to pick artists and give them effective support at a low cost to the label, they don't need to worry about controlling promotional channels.

        Once word gets around to musicians that XXXXXX Records knows how to market, to Internet Radio that they can pick music people actually listen to, and to the industry that they are making real money with a collection of artists who wouldn't even show up on their mid-list and haven't spent a penny on FM payola, a monopoly on FM Radio becomes a whole lot less valuable.

        You wanted a new business model? While I think the technology and environment probably makes other alternative models possible... I've certainly answered your question in detail adequate for a slashdot post, anyone who wants me to work on this further can discuss my hourly consult rate with me.

    • I don't support the RIAA by any means, but I do have problems with this "broken business model" argument.

      Round our way, lots of kids steal cars and go joyriding in them.

      Would you say that the concept of selling cars via a car showroom is now a "broken business model" ? How are car showrooms going to stay in business if kids can just nick cars for free ?
      • These analogies miss an important point, which is that cars cost significant money to manufacture, and when someone "nicks" one, the original owner is now short one car. Neither of these things (the cost, nor the scarcity) is true of digital products. Like it or not, business models do have to take this into account - it's simple reality, not ideology.
        • It sounds to me like it's pure ideology, not a 'reality.' Either we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are wrong, and share away, or we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are fair, and prohibit sharing and punish people who break the rules. Either way it is 'ideology' driving the way things are done.

          The second 'ideology,' incidentally, is the only one by which the GPL is enforcable. If there are no copyright laws, businesses will start distributing software under 'trade secret' restrictions. Things like Linux. Not the Linux of today, but the one that supports the hardware, the office apps, etc. Think of the worst scenario Stallman drags out to describe a closed-source Linux, and you have it.
          • It sounds to me like it's pure ideology, not a 'reality.'

            There are numerous real facts here that are not ideologically based:

            • Stealing a physical product is not comparable to *copying* a digital product. I hardly think I need to belabor this point, but just in case, the point is that copying does not deprive anyone else of the original product.
            • Physical products inevitable have a significantly higher cost of production than the cost of copying a digital product. This is a barrier to copying - not many people violate Ford's intellectual property by making copies of Tauruses.
            • Humans - not just kids - will do things that they can get away with. This is a sociobiological and game theory imperative. Yes, we have evolved social constraints to avoid all sorts of behaviors agreed upon as undesirable, but most of these are in fact quite directly related to improving the survival capability of societies, individuals, and the species. It's questionable whether, in the presence of a cheap digital copying capability, the ability of Lance Bass to earn the money to fly into space by enforcing the non-copyability of his output is actually in society's overall interest.
            If you consider the above three facts in combination, you find that the situation with digital media is factually different from that of physical products. In particular, it seems likely from the above that there will be less social stigma and more acceptance and support for copying of digital media than there will be for stealing of cars. At the very least, it puts price pressure on the products in question.

            Business models do need to take these realities into account, and this is exactly what's leading to the current debate. No-one is debating whether it's OK to steal cars, because of the factual differences that I've outlined. Drawing a parallel between the two, as the post I originally replied to did, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the issues at work, or perhaps simply an attempt to confuse.

            Either we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are wrong, and share away, or we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are fair

            Not at all. You've set up a simplistic binary scenario with respect to intellectual property rights, treating them as equivalent to physical property rights on the one hand, and eliminating them on the other hand. There are an infinite variety of possibilities between those two extremes. You either aren't thinking very deeply about this, or have a vested interest in the current status quo.

      • I suppose this is the point where someone has to explain to you the difference between music and cars.

        Can you buy a new car, bring it home, and then make a copy of it using a cheaply and easily available device where by the overall cost of the reproduction is for all practical purposes zero?

        How about this? Can you setup a method that would allow anyone in the world to get a copy of your car for a near-zero price?

        If you could, don't you think the car companies would take advantage of the very same technology and find a way to make money?

        Do you get it now?

        • "I suppose this is the point where someone has to explain to you the difference between music and cars"

          Ah, maybe this is why I can never get my car stereo to work.......

          OK, point taken. So can I take it you also fully support the wholescale pirating of Microsoft and all other commercial software ? Did the richest man in the world really get that way by following a "broken business model" ?

          [ Yes, I am a strong open-source supporter. And no, I am not my any means a fan of Microsoft. ]
      • Actually...yes. Car showrooms are a horribly inneficient means of distributing cars. It's bad for the car companies, and bad for the consumers. It was a good idea originally because of problems both in tranporting the product to the consumer, as well as in communicating information about the product to the consumer.

        Sound familar? Those same arguments are the ones used by the RIAA to justify their existence. Customers and musicians need the RIAA to make sure they know what CD to buy, and that it's on the shelf at the local store. Or so the RIAA says. :-)

        Joy riding and stealing music have nothing to do with the problems either industry faces. Instead it's simply a matter of producers trying to collapse their distribution chain, both to cut costs and to allow more direct communication with the consumers. Musicians would like to know what their fans want (how many bands have released a great album, drawn the wrong conclusion about why it was popular, then released a crap album?). Car companies want to know what their customers want (nothings worse for profits than a lot full of a model nobody wants anymore). It's not just these two industries either - Dell has actually made a profit from selling desktop PC's from doing exactly the same thing.

        The RIAA is a broken business model (or more accuratly, it looks like it's becoming one). The technology exists to allow them to be bypassed, and an ever increasing section of the population would like to, but the RIAA is fighting back with lobbying, legislation, courtroom battles, etc. Exactly like the car dealerships, incidentally, who have almost uniformly seen off all threats (although some car companies are making small headway in Europe, where dealership networks aren't quite as protected).

    • It never worked in the first place (Score:5, Insightful)

      by theLOUDroom ( 556455 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:33PM (#3927105)
      The music industy's business model never worked is the first place. That is unless you think one of a mere four corporations should make all the money off an album while the artist makes little or nothing.
      They're just pissed because they no longer can control a band's exposure. Before mp3, it was either sign on with us for a shitty contract or you will never get radio play or national exposure. Now I can find bands online.
      If you want to support the actual artist, send them a quarter instead of buying their CD. They'll actually get more money that way.
      I feel as bad about not supporting their ologopoly as I would about not supporting the mafia.
    • I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete .mp3s

      I thought today's [doonesbury.com] (july 21, 2002) doonesbury strip [doonesbury.com] was apropos.

    • Re:It's a broken business model (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @05:07PM (#3927206) Homepage
      Dont you think the amount of "get this free", "free X when you sign up", etc .. the amount of promotions that glamorize getting stuff for free has fucked businesses .. they've basically tried to trick people into thinking, if youre smart (ie, buy-in to this promotion!), you can get lots of stuff for free .. and thus raised a generation of folks that dont have too much guilt about getting stuff for free?
    • How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free?

      Let's face it, it's been possible to make copies for free for decades now. I remember people at university with multiple boxes of illegal tapes they swapped and shared. I'd bet 10% of them never or extremely rarely, bought an album. It's mostly the slightly older ones who can afford to buy anyway.

      It's a broken business model for sure and they are really fighting to stay alive in more ways than the average guy realizes.... It will be interesting to see what happens.

      Garbage. They've been in the same position for 30 years, and they've been bleating about how unfair it all was the whole time; and they've been very, very profitable.

      The worst thing that will ever happen to them is if they actually manage to block downloads. Then they really will lose money. Lots of people will stop listening and stop buying. If 10% are not buying, are the other 90% buying more or less because of being able to listen to music? I'd bet it's more. If they block downloads and the remaining buy just 10% less, they've lost out.

      • Let's face it, it's been possible to make copies for free for decades now. I remember people at university with multiple boxes of illegal tapes they swapped and shared. I'd bet 10% of them never or extremely rarely, bought an album. It's mostly the slightly older ones who can afford to buy anyway.

        Those tapes cost about $1-$2 each, at least. The people that downloaded over one hundred MP3s from me a couple of nights ago did not pay a dime and neither did I. They already have computers for other reasons and they are able to get music for free as a bonus. Also, I doubt that the guys that you knew in college were able to put out the sort of huge amounts of illegally copied music that any given person with a cable connection can in a single night.
    • I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete .mp3s

      Before mp3s did you pay for radio? Or do you always make sure that you carefully listen to commercials or do you change the station during a commercial?

      Did you ever tape songs/albums off the radio? Did you ever tape an album borrowed from a friend?

    • Music and Business (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bouncings ( 55215 )
      The interesting thing that came up in a conversation the other day was that there is an entire generation of people who are growing up not paying for music.
      Maybe, just maybe I'm part of that generation. I have bought some CDs, have mp3's, and go often to live shows, but the statement that having to pay for music is customary seems to be a bit absurd to me.

      I would like to know, in the evolution of humanity, when has music changed from being a community event to something we consume everyday like toilet paper or gasoline? I used to sing with my friends at summer camp as a kid, we used to sing in school, and in my hometown of Boulder, you could hear music everywhere on the city streets. Tipping street musicians was more of a compliment than a obligatory royaltee fee.

      I find that proposition that in a human society, we should all some pay for music like it's an everyday domestic product sick! What kind of a consumer society are we!? Music is supposed be communal, something peoples do together. It's supposed to be art that everyone enjoys. It's not supposed to be a commodity that we buy and sell.

      I'm not against paying hard working musicians. But the availability of "free music" is just like the availability of "free art" or "free speech" -- it's not something that should be put down. Am I stealing from the RIAA if I whistle a song I don't "own"? And do you find the idea of free history or free schools equally repulsive?

  • Dowloading music, not buying it... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by daemones ( 188271 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:51PM (#3926985) Homepage
    So the story goes:
    1. People download music.
    2. These people don't buy music.
    3. The artists that make the downloaded music decide that they can't support their habit on the record sales and do more concerts and other forms of revenue producint activity.
    4. RIAA rots in hell.
    5. Relatively unpoplular musicians make even less money.

    Where is the problem again?

  • This is one of the better bullets... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alouts ( 446764 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:52PM (#3926987)
    *A majority of downloaders have gone on to buy an artist's CD after downloading a track for free from the Internet.

    Of course, it also says that the majority of people have burned a full CD rather than buying one, so to me, this study is kinda of a mish mash.

    Their sample size also seems rather small... only 942 people which supposedly covers all tastes in music, as well as a gamut of ages, incomes, geographies, etc... Maybe it's just my lack of statistics knowledge, but I can't imagine that you can get statistically relevant results outlining behavior across all those different demographics with a sample of only 1000 data points. Any thoughts?

    • Re:This is one of the better bullets... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dthoma ( 593797 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:58PM (#3927007) Journal
      Actually, you're right...get out the old sample size calculator and check. [surveysystem.com]

      With a confidence level of 95%, confidence interval of 1, and a population of 200 million (just a guess, admittedly) we need a sample size of approximately 9,600. So perhaps the survey isn't tremendously accurate.

  • Interesting.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by neksys ( 87486 ) <grphillips AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:57PM (#3927001)
    I don't know about anybody else, but my purchasing habits have changed quite a bit as a result of having the ability to download music. I actually purchase fewer cds than I did before - not because I'm cheap, but because I now have the opportunity to listen to albums before I put my hard earned cash into them. So yes, the record industry gets less of my money from poor purchases - conversely, the bands I truly enjoy and wish to support get more money from me than they would have previously.

    I like to consider my money an investment into a band I support - the more money they have to spend, the more music I get from them in the future. And just like any investment, one must have research tools on hand to ensure that your money is going to get a good return - It just so happens that in my case, its gnutella. Its not piracy - its good business. Surely the RIAA understands that.

    • I'm playing the Devil's advocate here. I don't really think you're a bad person, but just play along...

      I actually purchase fewer cds than I did before - not because I'm cheap, but because I now have the opportunity to listen to albums before I put my hard earned cash into them. So yes, the record industry gets less of my money from poor purchases - conversely, the bands I truly enjoy and wish to support get more money from me than they would have previously.

      Ok, but what gives you the right to do that? You're passing the cost of your information (deciding what music you like) on to the copyright holders by doing something illegal. If you would have bought 20 CDs in a year, but instead only buy 10 because you decided you didn't like the other ones after you illegally downloaded and listened to them, you're costing the copyright holders of those 10 CDs money (remember, we're assuming that you would have bought those 10 CDs).

      In the same sense, if you download the VCD of whatever new movie with the thinking, "I want to see this movie in the theater, but only if it's good," you are depriving the theater owner of money. The cost of you seeing a movie that you thought you would like but didn't is built in to the system. Now, do you still think that your practices are good business for the RIAA?

      • Re:Interesting.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Moofie ( 22272 ) <(lee) (at) (ringofsaturn.com)> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:43PM (#3927138) Homepage
        No, you're not depriving content distributers of the revenue that they are "entitled" to: You are forcing them to provide a quality product, instead of a slickly-marketed one.

        If I buy a stereo, take it home, and it sounds like ass, I can take it back. If I buy a CD, take it home, and find out the only good tracks are the two singles I heard on the radio, I'm screwed. That business model only works if the customers are forced to be ignorant (IE by limiting their exposure to a new band to the two singles that are "free" to listen to).

        I don't care if it's illegal. (I happen to think that it is not) I will not pay $20 for a CD that some marketroid packed with crap because they wanted to save some "good" songs for the next disc. Not going to happen anymore, especially since I've got a superb alternative.

      • What about returned cd's?

        Let's say I hear a song by A on the radio and go to Best Buy and buy the cd. I open it up and it sucks, so I return it for store credit. You can still do that, right? I was able to listen to the album and find out it is crap, then get my money (or the equivalent) back. Did this hurt the musician? It didn't help them, because they didn't get my money, but I certainly don't think that is stealing.

        Or let's say I had a friend and listened to the album at his house. He says, "You got to hear how bad this is." So I do, and agree I wouldn't buy it. That didn't harm the artist.

        How about buying the cd used? How about checking it out from the library? (How many people here knew most libraries have cd's to check out?)

        It is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line?

        I draw it by buying albums that I actually listen to and deleting the crap I download but don't like.

        • At most stores you can only return a CD if it is DEFECTIVE. You can't return it because it sucks. At reputable stores, they will play the CD to check your claim if getting a cash refund, or allow you to exchange the bad one for a good copy of the same CD.
  • The Edison article seems to make it pretty clear right away that the people not part of the "thieving" %10.1 are purchasing music:

    "*A majority of downloaders have gone on to buy an artist's CD after downloading a track for free from the Internet."

    ...but maybe I'm reading it wrong(?)

  • Precision (Score:5, Insightful)

    by plumby ( 179557 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:57PM (#3927005)
    Inappropriate precision really bugs me. The figure "10.1%" suggests that their reseach is accuruate to 0.1%. There is no way that that is true. Why don't they stick with "approximately 10%"? It just suggests to me that people are trusting the conclusions far more than they have a right to given the raw data that they started with.

  • This is fuel for the record industry. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mad Quacker ( 3327 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @03:59PM (#3927009) Homepage
    10% is a _huge_ number to a capitalist corporation. They won't stop short of murder to get this 10% in their pockets.

    This is the game of greed.

  • I stopped buying them (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kizzle ( 555439 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:04PM (#3927019)
    I'm 17 and I don't buy CD's anymore. Instead I download the 2 good songs from the CD. I, like most teenagers work at low paying job so money is tight. I don't want to pay $15 if the artist is only going to see 10 cents of that.

    • Re:I stopped buying them (Score:4, Interesting)

      by neksys ( 87486 ) <grphillips AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:09PM (#3927037)
      Another possible option is to download the songs you want, or a whole cd of you so desire... then find the band's contact address and send them a bit of cash. Perhaps it'd only be symbolic, but I know for a fact that the $2.50 you send them in the mail would be substantially more than what they'd get otherwise - plus, the band might just get that "playing music for the sake of music" feeling again. It's worth a shot *shrug*
      • Dear (insert band here),

        I recently downloaded your new album, "Strange new thing" from the internet. I refuse to give my hard earned money to the RIAA, whom you should be able to get rid of if you so desire. Because of this, and because I feel you should be compensated for your time and talent, I have enclosed a check for $16.99, the cost of your CD at the store. Feel free to do whatever you want with this money, but don't give it to the RIAA.

        Sincerely,
        John Q Public.

        ----------

        What would be really cool is if we all did this instead of buying CDs at the store. Artists would make TONS more money.
      • As a shareware author, I can say, unless there's a brainless way of dropping dollars into someone's pocket, that pretty much almost NOBODY is going to compensate you for your work if you offer it to people for free. It's an ugly truth, but people are used to "free" programs, and they're getting used to "free" music. To take the time to put money in an envelope (or fill out that form for PayPal) for something you've already got, is more effort than most people want to make.

        On one hand, maybe it's not so bad that everyone thinks your stuff is good enough for them to use - at least they're not stealing your work and passing it off as their own...

        You could always pass a law to FORCE the RIAA to put the taxes that they collect on the sale of blank media in the hands of a neutral party, who would parcel out the funds based on "votes" placed by the average user, based on what they were copying. I think people would be much more free with "votes" than they would be with their own hard-earned dollars, just as politicians spend our tax-dollars so freely. As it stands now, it's the RIAA who chooses where the dollars go, from what I understand.

        Of course, there's nothing to stop the band from selling their CD download online for a reasonable amount, say $7.50, with the MP3s encoded at 384 instead of 128, and a "try before you buy" version at 64 for trading online. I think people might want to get the "real goods" from a reliable source for that amount, than relying on incomplete downloads and slow connections via P2P. Benefits to the band? No physical media to ship, no production costs per unit, just the cost of bandwidth and the cost of assembling the original album. Sell the physical CD for $16 (with an upgrade from the MP3 version for $9) for those who want the cover art, booklet, etc.

        Does anyone know the cost of pre-production for a decent album these days? Including recording engineer, studio time, mike rentals, mastering costs, art, etc? Working backwards from that, you could estimate how many download albums you'd have to sell before you could start turning a profit...

      • Bands cannot accept cash for sales (Score:5, Informative)

        by enota ( 592686 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @05:50PM (#3927328)
        As much as I would love to mail some cash to my favorite band, if they are signed with a halfway intelligent label, there will be a clause in the contract forbidding them from being paid for the music they record while under contract unless it comes through the label. They will nullify their contract with the label if they accept it. yeah, it sucks, but on the bright side, you may give them a sign that a record label isn't 100 % neccessary these days. Perhaps all that is needed is a recording studio, a band, and some way for people to hear the music, ie download site, internet radio, etc.

  • Spin (Score:2, Insightful)

    by URoRRuRRR ( 57117 )
    22% of Americans 12-44 years old agree with the statement "You no longer have to buy CDs, as you can download the music for free from the Internet."

    The RIAA will interpret this as 1/5 of the population of America will never buy CDs and they're losing out. HOWEVER, this could simply be the large (and growing) faction of Americans who are discovering independant artists via the net and downloading music free legally. They then support the artist through T-shirts and concerts.

    • Re:Spin (Score:3, Flamebait)

      by foonf ( 447461 )
      The RIAA will interpret this as 1/5 of the population of America will never buy CDs and they're losing out. HOWEVER, this could simply be the large (and growing) faction of Americans who are discovering independant artists via the net and downloading music free legally. They then support the artist through T-shirts and concerts.
      Dear me. You can't actually believe this can you? Have you ever looked at the majority of what is available for download on peer-to-peer systems?

    • Re:Spin (Score:2, Insightful)

      by flonker ( 526111 )

      Good review of the survey, but they seem to have missed a point.

      Some 74% of 12-17-year-olds answered in the negative when asked if "there is anything morally wrong about downloading music for free off the Internet."

      This strikes me as an odd statement. They seem to be assuming that all music downloaded off the Internet is illegal. Not some. Not the vast majority. Not almost all. All. Is there anything morally wrong with downloading a song off the internet that the artist put there? The question was phrased wrong.

      This is further supported by: The majority of music downloaders do have "some reservations" about artists' and labels' not being compensated but download music for free anyway.

  • The Edison study shows that 53% of 12-17 year olds have burned a CD instead of buying it. Unless you disagree with the data (and I mean scientifically, not just "no way, man!"), you can't argue that such activities don't cost the copyright holders money in the form of a lost sale. So the real question is, is that money made up? It's certainly possible that the 53% mentioned previously bought two CDs that they would not have otherwise bought, thanks to MP3s they downloaded for free.

    The study also says that 22% of Americans 12-44 say that you don't have to buy CDs any more, you can just download it for free. Again, unless the data was not correctly put together, that's keeping profits from the copyright holder. So is the other 78% buying enough extra music because of illegal file swapping to make up for the 22% who isn't? I'm sure there are several /. posters who have bought a few extra CDs in the last year because they heard it online for free first, but we all know that the /. demographic != that of America (or the rest of the world, for that matter).
    • The Edison study shows that 53% of 12-17 year olds have burned a CD instead of buying it. Unless you disagree with the data (and I mean scientifically, not just "no way, man!"), you can't argue that such activities don't cost the copyright holders money in the form of a lost sale.

      Uh, yes you can. You can like a band enough to listen to them if it is free, but not enough to shell out $15 for them if you couldn't get it for free. $15 is a lot of money for someone 12-17.
      • Uh, yes you can. You can like a band enough to listen to them if it is free, but not enough to shell out $15 for them if you couldn't get it for free.

        No, the key phrase here is "instead of buying it." When we see headlines like "Software Piracy Costs Microsoft $500 million Each Year", we say, "But not all of those people who pirated it would have bought it." In this case, however, the study is saying "Instead of buying the CD, these people just copied it."
      • $15 is a lot of money for someone 12-17.

        $15 is a drop in the pan considering they are downloading the music on a $1500 computer through a (probably broadband) ISP which has a cost of something like $50 a month. If they are getting free access from college, then it is especially small compared to the cost of education. Last time I checked most CD were purchasable either used ($5-$10) or in on sale ($12), I buy more than 4 discs a week, and I don't remember the last time I paid even $15 for a disc. It's funny that the most affluent of our society bitches the most about the cost of music. If you don't want to pay the piper, then don't listen.

  • What are OUR solutions? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dowobeha ( 581813 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:07PM (#3927030)
    Before /. explodes into a massive frenzy against the recording industry and the senator from Disney, I have a question for the community:

    What is OUR solution to the (perceived) crisis of "piracy" that is today's filesharing world?

    Powerful lobbying interests are hell-bent on coming up with some sort of solution. We've all seen the laws being proposed to combat this and other DRM-related problems.

    File-sharing may have a detrimental effect on sales. Then again, it may be helpful to sales. [baen.com] Either way, most file-sharing is theft - plain and simple.

    I propose that if the online community can not come up with a way to deal with this issue, then the politicians and the lobbies will; and I am pretty sure that whatever they come up with will be a lot less freedom-friendly than what we'd like to see.

    So moaning and complaining aside, what are our options? What can be done that is fair to artists and to consumers?

    (steps off soapbox, slips on soap, lies unconcious for some time...)
    • What is OUR solution to the (perceived) crisis of "piracy" that is today's filesharing world?

      A three-fold strategy:

      1. Cut prices in half...
      2. Provide a value-add beyond just the music. Concept albums and/or albums with extensive artwork, liner notes, etc. are two ideas. Access to exclusive online content (keyed by UPC and revoked if used from more than 3 different geographic regions (just like the porn sites do)) is another.
      3. Provide custom-order CDs with customer-selected tracks for $2 a song or so.
      The bottom line is that you need to give people a reason to buy your content instead of downloading it.

    • File-sharing may have a detrimental effect on sales. Then again, it may be helpful to sales. Either way, most file-sharing is theft - plain and simple.

      I fail to see how it is theft, particularly if it helps sales.

      Here's a solution which will work - a p2p service available for a subscription fee, which allows users to share any music they want. The service will also track what is traded (possibly with some help from users), and pay the artists in proportion to how much their songs are traded. Better still, have the songs available from a central server as high-quality mp3s. The key here is compulsory licencing - that way you don't have to worry about identifying tracks, watermarking and a lot of other bs.

      Many people have proposed something like this, both on Slashdot and elsewhere. However, this solution will never fly with the powers that be because it cut out their source of power. The closest thing to this ATM is emusic, which is still very limited and beholden to ASCAP/BMI/RIAA.

  • Get it right, damnit! (Score:4, Informative)

    by hrm ( 26016 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:10PM (#3927039)
    The statement made in the article isn't what's quoted in the summary,
    "10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music",
    but it's rather
    "10.1% of 12-17-year-olds who actively download music from the Internet did not purchase a single CD or cassette in the last 12 months"

    The real statement allows the conclusion that 90% of downloaders still buy music media. The one in the slashdot summary, as too often is the case, is plain wrong.

    • "10.1% of 12-17-year-olds who actively download music from the Internet did not purchase a single CD or cassette in the last 12 months"

      That's still open to interpretation. Let's assume that 12-17 year olds make up 40% of the music buying public (meaning, people who can afford to buy music and who like to listen to music, not necessarily buying it). Of those, let's say 75% "actively download", whatever that means. Of those, let's assume 50% would've bought a CD or cassette in the past 12 months. And of those, let's assume 80% would not buy non-CD or non-cassette music (MP3 downloads for instance). Because they limited the question to "CD or cassette". So of this group (so far we're down to 12% of the potential music-buying public), only 10.1% (love that decimal point, implying accuracy) are lost sales for the record companies. That's 1% of the potential market for music-buying. Well within the margin of error, perhaps?

      Of course I just made all those other numbers up but that's the problem with these statistical "text bites" thrown out without any rigorous analysis.

      Then again I didn't read any of the articles (shock, surprise). Then again, I bet the RIAA won't either, they'll just use the text bite!

  • I am tired of posts and articles that point out file sharing increses profits. Even if that's true, it's still against what the RIAA wanted when they put it out. When Morpheus switched from the kazaa-like client and switched to an open source client, even though it was great for open source, the first thing people asked was "Does it comply with the GPL?" [slashdot.org]. It didn't matter if it was good for open source, they did it against the rules. With the RIAA, it's their music, let them release it under their rules, and if you have a problem with it, don't use their product.
  • Yeah Right, and the Linux distros are making so much money that they aren't laying off anybody, and no one beleaved the recent rumors that a distro had folded.

  • From the second article:

    But her interpretations of some her own data [sic] struck me as curious, an interpretation that I picked up in the title of the email she sent me "10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music". This implied to me this was a negative stat. Doesn't this also read 90% of teens are both downloading and buying?

    No, that statistic says that there are four groups:

    • Downloading and not buying. 10.1%
    • Downloading and buying. Unknown. (Only 90% if the next two groups are 0%, which I doubt.)
    • Not downloading and not buying. Unknown.
    • Not downloading and buying. Unknown.

    But apparently he misquoted, because the original article actually says:

    10.1% of 12-17-year-olds who actively download music from the Internet did not purchase a single CD or cassette in the last 12 months.

    Which is a completely different statement. And implies that 90% of teens who download music are buying music.

    This doesn't really mean that much by itself. There are at least two contrary arguments you could make with it:

    • 90% of teens who download music buy it, as opposed to 30% of teens who don't. So it increases their likelihood to buy. (I just made up that 30% statistic for this example. No idea what the real number is.) It increases their interest in music and therefore their likelihood of buying music.
    • 90% of teens who download music buy it, as opposed to 98% of teens who listen to music but don't download. So it causes artists/labels to lose business. (This has an opposite cause/effect assumption from the argument above.) (Again, the second statistic is fake for this example.)

    Clearly to get useful information, you need some way to determine which is cause and which is effect. (Probably a little of both.) And in both cases, I made up a second statistic that wasn't supplied by the article. Real numbers might be interesting.

  • Lemme guess... The result is 99% perspiration...
  • I don't fill my hard drive up with that frivolous crap. I consider data like any other peice of data, just another bit to babysit. My hard drive is filled up with some games, tons of applications that I use, and tons of stuff that I work on for other people, backups of their postnuke sites, graphics, renderings from truespace, ect.

    I do have cat5 strung up throughout the block(and my house of course). Click on my user, look back a a few of my posts, sorry i'm a little lazy to do that right now.

    Back to my point, there's a few house frau's that i've taught how to turn their CD collection into mp3's. Over the 4th we pirated the FUCK outta their collection by piping the MP3's through a D/A convertor, then through an amplified coil attatched to some paperish material inside of this big wooden box.

    OkOK I lied, I do have a huge collection of stuff I grabbed when napster was still around. I don't swap songs with people though. My upstream is capped at 128.

    OKOK I lied again, everytime I have a lan party, I add new songs, but they're not on MY hard drive they're on my other FILESERVERS hard drive. I don't wanna put that kind of junk on my 10kRPM Ultra 160 drive! Yeah I'll just shove it on that crap 80 dollar IDE on the fileserver.

    Fuck it, it's too hot and i'm too cranky to write anything usefull. Go ahead and use those mod points to mod me down.

    --toq
  • '10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music.' Richard Menta over at MP3 Newswire noted that this also means 90% of file traders are buying music,

    Ok, someone correct me please, but...

    Based on the two given distinctions, there are four groups of people:

    12-17 year olds downloading and not buying.
    12-17 year olds downloading and buying.
    12-17 year olds not downloading but buying.
    12-17 year olds not downloading and not buying.

    The research shows that the first group is 10.1% of 12-17 year olds. Is Richard Menta saying that that means 89.9% of downloaders buy music? That's what the topic indicates, and there are about ten different really absurd assumptions that would be necessary to make that conclusion. I'm not particularly interested in reading the article, but the way it's presented in the topic is braindead. Hopefully Richard Menta had different reasoning.
    • The article states it very differently, and it makes sense.

      10.1% of all 12-17 year olds who ACTIVELY DOWNLOAD do not buy music.

      So we're only looking at people who download here... the other 89.9% of downloaders do buy music. This is, for the RIAA, a Good Thing(tm). But they don't want to see it that way. They'd rather the downloaders who are not buying be in the catgory of people who don't download anything.

      Shrug.

  • I pirate shamelessly (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Seriously. The only software I buy anymore is Linux distributions, the odd computer game, and a rep theatre movie ticket. Plus, there's no way I'm going to pay for a CD that I can't preview, and without Napster that pretty much means I either steal from my friends or develop a deeper appreciation for the stuff I already have.

    I look at all the media corporations out there and I see rich bastards at the top who are looking to fleece their customers, employers and investors so they can buy that umpteenth car or beach-house. Whenever competition comes up, these corporations try to squelch it. If wage earners base salaries went up in the same ratio as corporate CEO's over the last two decades, we'd all be earning at least 20$ per hour.

    If CD's, software and movies were priced according to the realistic cost of production, maybe I'd be a little more inclined to pay. But, since it's not, and since the sham rich people pretend is capitalism keeps it that way by killing upstarts, I don't have any option other than to pay (thereby enabling the system I want to fight), or pirate.

    So, really, I'm doing it out of a sense of duty. That and the fact there's no way I'm forking over $15 for another mindless Hollywood blockbuster, $25 for another crap-filled album, or whatever inflated monstrosity of a price Microsoft is charging for an OS upgrade. Fuck that.

    Just my two cents.

  • Hmmm. If I was the RIAA I would be looking to see if I could find evidence that the Slahdot offices/employees are actively pirating music. It seems like every other day Slashdot's editors are posting some article which in effect says "Those stinking Nazi RIAA creeps are harrassing us because they are attempting to enforce their legal rights against copyright infringement AND are lobbying Congress to further restrict copying" I mean, could the bias be any more obvious? What is Slashdot hiding?

    Clearly the RIAA is doing what any other industry organization - protecting its members legal position, and lobbying for legislation that would be more favorable to its members. This after all is why these sorts of organizations exist. It's no different from other organizations say, like 'The Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry', etc. except that Slashdot thinks what this organization does gores the precious right to swap files despite the existance of long standing laws that clearly state such activities are illegal.

  • Maybe people just aren't buying music + suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:29PM (#3927093) Journal
    I never bought a single CD before MP3s...I just didn't listen to music. Now, I have some MP3s that I listen to. If those MP3s went away, I'd just go back to not listening to music.

    Because "10.1% of people downloading music are not buying music" does not mean that the music industry is losing sales from all those (though I'm sure it is from some).

    I wonder how feasible it would be for someone like Borders (trying to compete with Amazon as a music retailer) to directly sign for tracks with artists. Then they maintain at each location a fat data pipe (if this isn't economically feasible, it will be -- small credit-check data lines are already in place and data gets cheaper and cheaper, whereas CDs stay the same). Then they have a really fancy burner or press or whatever at the location. They download losslessly compressed tracks from the Borders central server and cache them at local locations (to avoid retransferring popular tracks). Then people can simply say "I want a CD and I want track X, Y, and Z on it". The money goes directly to the artist, aside from Border's profit.

    So lets see why this makes sense:

    * Artist gets money, users have less incentive for piracy.
    * User gets to specify what tracks they want/don't want and get better quality than they would pirating MP3s.
    * The user can buy CDs more cheaply -- by eliminating the middleman, they pay maybe $3 to Borders per CD (you automate the thing, with a little Borders card reader, and there's very little per unit cost) and 10 cents to the artist per track (hell of a lot more than the artists are currently making), and you get a full-quality CD where you're supporting the artist for $5 tops.
    * Users would have a much broader selection, not limited to the few hundred titles that might be in the store.
    * Borders makes money -- I suspect unit costs after amortization would be about 50 cents per CD, so they get a healthy $2.50 in profit per CD, which is probably more than they currently make.
    * Borders risks far less than they currently do -- adding an artist to their central database is cheap cheap cheap. They don't have to risk warehousing and blowing shelf space on CDs that people don't want.
    * New artists can break into the market easily -- they simply register with Borders, send in their music to the main server, and start getting money. They don't have to convince much of anyone of their music quality, since there's no massive production/warehousing costs for all the CDs.

    There are two drawbacks. One, you don't get extras in the CD. You might be able to print out the cover and the CD label, if this "Borders mini-CD maker" machine was fairly capable, but you might not get other stuff jammed in the case. Second, even with a hefty local cache, Borders still has to transfer 300MB per full CD (assuming lossless compression averaging 2:1) for infrequently requested CDs. This may not yet be feasible -- however, data lines keep getting cheaper, and CD prices stay the same.

    Finally, a $100 80GB HD can store about 160 fairly full CDs, and 300 with lossless 2:1 compression. That's a one-time cost -- like incredibly cheaply expandable floor space. At those prices, Borders can afford to have enormous local caches -- one sale of a CD much more than makes back the cost of storing that CD locally.

    • Re:Maybe people just aren't buying music + suggest (Score:4, Insightful)

      by handsomepete ( 561396 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @05:21PM (#3927251) Journal
      Overrated my ass. That's a quality suggestion. I'll bet someone from the RIAA modded it down.

      Anyways, I really like the sound of that. Expanding it beyond the bookstore/coffee shop to radio station ID tags (i.e. listening to the radio if you can remember the time and station you can add it to a collection via the station's website and get radio station burnt CDs for a fee or something) is another possibility (whether it's feasible or not is another story).

      I would say that your drawback regarding the extras of a CD (art, etc.) are actually incentives to purchase the actual product, not disadvantages to burning your own. That would justify a slightly higher price for the complete product. Hopefully by the time something like this could be implemented we'll have something that can alleviate those concerns about bandwidth.

  • Lower the price (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:31PM (#3927099)
    Some young person earning $5 per hour at MickeyDees has to work 5 or 6 hours to earn enough after tax money to pay for a CD. That is absurd. Lower the price. A list price of $9.99 would go a long way to curbing piracy.

    You know damn well that the artists are not getting much money from the sales. It's all gravy for the fat parasite executives.

  • Price (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Thorin_ ( 164014 )
    If cd's were more resonably priced I think more people would buy them. I can go out and get a casset for around $10 where a cd would cost me around $20 usually. Cd's are cheaper and easier to make than cassets and they are no longer new technology. The only reason they are so expensive is because RIAA makes them that way with their oligopoly.

  • Broadband makes a big difference (Score:4, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:38PM (#3927122) Homepage
    Take a look at the graphs from the study. [edisonresearch.com] Only 14% of dial-up model users downloaded 100 or more songs. But 41% of broadband users did. 73% of broadband users are downloading music.

    Next the RIAA will want a tax on broadband connections, I suppose.

  • 10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music.
    Technically, this statement says 10.1% of 12-17-year-olds fall into one of the following two categories:
    1. People who are actively downloading music (this doesn't necessarily mean they're not buying music, downloading music they already "own" or downloading indy music that has been made freely available by the artist)

    2. People who are not purchasing music (like people who don't watch television, there's nothing criminal about not supporting the popular media)
    The "or" operand (/) leaves open the possibility that the entire 10.1% consists of people from either group. However, the statement is designed to be open enough for you to reach your own conclusions based on your personal or corporate-sponsored biases.

    In short, I think it's safe to say that anyone who cites the statement as "evidence" of anything is standing on very shaky ground.

  • "Actively not purchasing music" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GeekDork ( 194851 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:43PM (#3927137)

    Yow! That's active passive resistance. Ghandi would have been so proud.

    But here we go again, the same old crap we have seen with other research and - especially - with benchmarks. Some company, club or whatnot buys a researcher to bend statsitics their way and hopes that no one really notices that they're just reading a modified excerpt from How to lie with Statistics [amazon.com]/Charts [amazon.com]. And most of the time it works, because most of the really important folks (legislators) exceeded their level of competence when they were elected (you know who you are). They get those really biased statistics on glossy paper with lots of really biased charts, have a look at it and say: "Man, those [insert enemy here]s are really bad and should be [put against the wall|fried|gassed|drowned|beat to teath|stoned]." (Personally, I'd prefer the last one afther ther Berkeley definition.)

    Then, it all ends. Why? Because any counterargument comes on standard paper, printed all in black with perhaps one or two graphs meant for people who know what they're looking at, and not for decisionmakers!

    In the end, we can all just sing [userfriendly.org] and hope that the revolution's coming and we get to decide who's to be put against the wall. Or at least who's to rethink their corporate policies to avoit a smack-bottom.

  • "actively not purchasing music" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Awktagon ( 233360 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @04:53PM (#3927167) Homepage

    Ah, such beautiful doublespeak. Would you like to hear the sad tale about the twenty-something who is actively not purchasing a new Lexus? In fact, said twentysomething actively doesn't purchase a new Lexus every single day of the year. Assuming a new Lexus costs $40,000, that adds up to nearly $15million per annum, which is a lot of lost revenue for the high-end car industry.

    When questioned, this twentysmoething admits he feels no moral misgivings about accepting rides to work in his neighbor's Lexus without the company's express permission, and will probably continue to get free Lexus rides without paying in the foreseeable future.

    Something needs to be done about this not-buying Lexus problem!

    • Loaded questions too. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by moncyb ( 456490 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:12PM (#3928141) Journal

      Those questions seemed very loaded. Like the one asking if there is nothing wrong with downloading music for free. What? Why should there be anything wrong with it? Maybe if they had asked whether or not it was wrong to download music without the copyright owner's authorization. It seems the cartel's FUD is working. Half the people said it was wrong just to download music from the internet--as if there is some moral dilemma just using the network reguardless of actually committing any illegal act!

  • I'd buy more but they won't let me... (Score:5, Informative)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @05:03PM (#3927198) Homepage Journal
    I used to buy an average of 2-4 CDs per month. Less than 1/4 was new stuff, mostly I was just fulfilling my dream of owning every song I ever liked. So, I bought a lot of Greatest Hits discs, Best of the 80s, etc. However, even before I started downloading music, I was already beginning to slow down, not because I was anywhere close to achieving my goal, but because there was less and less good stuff to buy. I won't buy a $16 80s compilation just to get 2 good songs any more than I'll buy any *new* CD just to get 2 good songs off of it. Then Napster came along and life was great-- I got a lot of good old stuff that was either difficult, impossible, or economically unfeasable to buy. Given the opportunity, I would have *happily* paid $1 for _every_single_song_, assuming it's a)in a common format (like mp3) so I'm not tied to any one player and b) mine to do with as I wish--burn to CD, keep on a file server so I can get at it from anywhere in my house, etc. I would have _preferred_ that to going the Napster route and winding up with bitrates ranging from 64 to 320, badly encoded songs, songs that have a second or two of the previous or next track on the CD, etc etc etc. If they would make it easy for me to get the music I want in a format I want, they could hook an IV to my wallet and drain money out of me at a steady rate for the rest of my life. As long as they don't, fuck'em, I'll download whatever I want. This isn't a rationalization for what I'm doing. Stealing is wrong and that's exactly what I'm doing. But like I said-- fuck'em.

    BTW, listen.com and rhapsody is pretty good, but not great. AFAICT, they don't have a way to download portable tracks. In the classical area you can download 10 burnable tracks per month, but that's retarded. 1) give them to me in a format that I can use as *I* want--I'm trying to move *away* from CDs, idiots! 2) why limit me to 10/month? Let me download portable files at $1 apiece and I'll spend at *least* $25/month, right now. Probably more like $50 a month to start, then $10-$20 a few months down the road. Hell, if I didn't spend $20 a *day* for the first week or two, I'd be surprised. Remember when Napster was good and you'd get 50-150 songs in a could hours? I'd do it again in a heartbeat, and happily pay as I went along.

    And if they *really* wanted to clean up, they'd ship a copy of "The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits" to every new customer.

  • Beyond western music (Score:2, Insightful)

    by teetam ( 584150 )
    There is an implicit assumption in forums like this and many others that only western music is swapped in P2P networks. That is far from true. Just type the name of any foreign language in your favorite P2P program and see.

    If you are living far away from your country, quite often there is no way to buy the music that you like. Napster and the later P2P networks let people who do not have English as their mother tongue keep in touch with music in their language and songs that are extremely hard to find.

    Is that illegal? Possibly. But one thing is for sure - shutting down these networks will not increase record sales in any way. The alternative is simply to not listen to the music you love.

  • Since the word "purchase" appeared in the story, don't forget to use the important phrases when talking about paying a small amount of money for something:

    1. Plunk down
    2. Cough up
    3. Lay down
    4. Fork over
    5. Shell out

    Then again, also remember to use the term "snap up" (a term normally used when discussing finger sandwiches or donuts) if discussing a nine-figure purchase, like all the we're-so-much-hipper-than-you
    journalists do. For example:

    "After meeting for eight months, the committee decided to make the purchase, snapping up the 1200 acre shopping mall, entertainment center and theme park (which employ some 18,000 people) for an agreed price of $412,349,293.12, payable over 20 years."

  • Isn't 90% *more* than the general population? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eschasi ( 252157 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @05:56PM (#3927345)
    Hmmm...

    What percentage of the general public buys music CDs? I bet it's significantly less than 90%. Combine that with 90% of the downloaders buying CDs, and you can make a case that downloaders are more likely to buy CDs than the general populace.

    Now, admittedly that's a bogus arguement. Almost anyone who is downloading MP3s is doing so because they're a music fan, and therefore is not representative of the US as a whole. But it sure sounded good for a second, didn't it?

    "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Benjamin Disraeli.

    And for instructions on how to do it, see this [amazon.com].
    --
    "97.45% of all statistics are made up." - me

  • 10% of 12-17 y.o. not buying music??? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pjt48108 ( 321212 ) <mr.paul.j.taylorNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @06:01PM (#3927360)
    Heaven and ministers of fate defend us! When did our youth take such a sinister course in life? Where did we fail?

    The record industry is obviously hoping none of us recall how, in the days of cassette tapes, those heady days of the 70s and 80s, MOST 12-17 year olds didn't pay for music. Lord knows I rarely did, if I had a friend with the tape or LP. Better yet, I'd ASK friends to dub tapes, because I lacked either the equipment or the ambition to do it myself.

    Did I buy music, ever? Ohhh yes. But only if I'd had a chance to hear it on it's own merits without feeding the corporate WHORES who claimed to make it possible. That meant hearing music via non-payola avenues. If I liked what I heard, I bought it, and bought other albums by the same artists.

    Unfortunately, it appears to this reporter that corporate execs are as ignorant of all-powerful 'word of mouth' today as they have always been of good talent and new and innovative approaches to music.

    That is, unless it appears it could bring in lots of money for them and to PROMOTE and ADVERTISE that they, geniuses that they are, have reinvented the wheel, once again, and tht to buy anything else is evil and unpatriotic, dammit!

    Grrr.

  • Nobody wants to hear it but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by leabre ( 304234 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @06:38PM (#3927467)
    If the prices of CD's were lower

    If the price of a CD was $11 a CD many people in here probly would still rather download the MP3's instead of go buy it. If the price was $8.99 most people would be more likely to buy the CD but still, would be just as likely to download the song if it was convenient to do so especially if they just happened to notice to lower price CD after they spent $60 on new DVD's or something.

    The arguement "if the prices of CD's were cheaper" really was true, than we'd all be buying the bargain CD's (even of popular tunes) off the shelf, but as it stands, I browse through music stores here and there and notice not too many people lining up to the the latest hit CD for the bargain of $9.99.

    The same excuse is used with software. Reality is, people pirate $5 shareware just as much as they do $500 commercialware. Don't believe me? Do a search on your favorite "security related search site" and every piece of software comes up listed. Some of it is even freeware but requires you send a postcard to get a reg key and people still request serials for the software. If this excuse was really an arguement worth it's weight in gold, then there would be no serial or crack for any software less than $50 listed on any file trading network, serial 9000 archive, ASTALAVISTA, or usenet. But alas, WinZip $29 is listed, to name only one. This excuse is as much crap for music as it is software.

    If the artists were being paid more

    If the artists were to recieve more money and the CD's still cost $16-18 a piece, you'd still not be happy that not 50% or more is going to the artist and you'd still download music because it may still be more convenient, again, if you just spent $60 on new DVD's, $30 for a porn renewal, car payment, rent, whatever, you'd think, "I'll just download the (1) song I want". Yep, and 1 becomes 2, and then 3, and then 3000 songs are in your collection.

    I may not be speaking for everyone, but lets face it, while there are those who would gladly support their favorite indy band or whatever, $16 is still $16. If you're a college student struggling and have a hard time paying $16 a CD now, how are you going to afford it if more percentage went to the artist? When was the last time you donated $x to your favorite band because you felt like they needed more money? Uh huh. That's what I thought.

    I won't buy a CD because there's only 1 or 2 songs I like on the album

    Yeah, and when the newest Britney Spears song appeared on a Single you were the first person to go purchase it instead of download it, right? Or I know for a fact some of you do, and not everyone who uses this excuse does. Why, because when you run a keyword search and the song pops up in the list, it's just too tempting not to download it... after all, that $2.99 for the single can buy a beer, or something, right? Or it all adds up if they happen to have to 30 favorite singles you like for sale, you'll spend $2.99 x 30 for all of them, right?

    If the cost of a song was $1 to download without restrictions

    For many, not all, if you can download an unrestricted song for $1 each, would you really go an download the same 3,000 songs you have in your MP3 catalog currently? Hmm... that's what I thought. If you're friend downloaded some $1 songs and happened to offer you a copy of that "unrestricted" song file, would you happily say "no, I'd rather buy it myself" or would you say "sure, here's the blank CD".

    What if the songs were instead $2.50 per download, unrestricted. Lets say you have 1,500 MP3's in your collection, would you go happily replace them with legit purchased copies at $2.50? What if you have 250 MP3's, would you go spend $625 for 250 unrestricted files at $2.50 each?

    What if the price was $0.25 per song but with some copy restrictions in place (only works on Windows, perhaps all OS's but only Brand X player, limited only to the purchasing PC, etc.)... would you even purchase 10 songs at 1/4 of $1?

    I'm a poor college student, so I have to download them...

    No you don't. If you don't have money the grocery store will not give you free groceries. The car dealer won't give you a free car. Mircosoft won't give you a free Windows. Your insurance company won't give you a free month's premium credit. Your electricity company won't keep your lights on if you don't pay the bill. The gas station won't give you a free tank of gas. So why do you feel like you need to download music (for free) if you won't do it in other aspects of life?

    It's simple. If you can't afford it, wait until you can.

    I will pay to support indy labels

    So you'll pay $16 for your indy labels who you don't even know if they are paying the artists better or worse than the cartels, but still complaining about RIAA $16 CD's because they're
    too expensive and you're a starving college student who only wants to hear that 1 song, even on the indy CD? Yeah... okay...

    While there's a free alternative I'll just use that instead

    I actually agree with you there. You will download it for free, even if there was $1 unrestricted song per download and the cartels or indies paid more to artists. Why? Because everything is just an excuse. Because you won't pay $1 per song for all 3,000 songs in your archive (not in the same year, anyway). Because you're a starving student. Becaues it's too expensive. Because the system sucks. Because you're a deliberate copyright infringer.

    I already own the CD

    Good, then purchase a MP3 converting program (usually $39 or less, after all, if software was cheaper, you'd buy it, right?) then convert your song to MP3 or OGG or whatever, then you won't have to propigate statistics buy downloading them when you
    already own them right?

    You see, when you get right down to the point, it's all just a bunch of excuses. No real substance.

    Thanks, Me

  • Follow the money? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cortriga ( 301336 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @09:42PM (#3928037)
    I suspect the music stealing that's going on is not just a problem of how easy and penalty-free it is, but also a function of people feeling a little vague about where that $15.99 is going in the first place. I, personally, have this picture in my head of a fat-cat record executive standing on his penthouse balcony with a fist full of cash tossing nickles and dimes down to starving musicians clad in filthy rags groveling in the street below.

    But is the distribution simply $15.89 to the exec and $0.10 to the artist? Has anyone done a comprehensive breakdown of where all the money goes? A&R, advertising, promotion, marketing, etc.? A link would be appreciated.

    I'd love to see Ross Perot come on national TV with a pie-chart: "See right here? Two dollars* of every CD goes to the A&R guy. Can I finish?! Two dollars, people! That's over twelve percent!"

    *DISCLAIMER: I have no idea how much money actually goes to the A&R guy.

  • The model (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Restil ( 31903 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:47PM (#3928244) Homepage
    The RIAA represents a business model that might not be necessary anymore. As many have stated many times before, the artists make their money from concerts, merchendise, and other outlets, and not so much from the sale of CDs that you buy in the music stores. Those CDs are almost completely for the expressed purpose of marketing the artist so they can make money elsewhere. CDs are the RIAA's baby.

    Its possible, we simply don't need them anymore. Distribute everything in mp3 and cut out the recording industry completely. It wouldn't hurt the artists any, and it would completely eliminate the whole piracy issue. Of course, there is a chance that the RIAA DOES provide a useful service, but I find it hard to believe that artists won't be able to get coverage if the RIAA isn't around to support them. Radio will still play the good stuff, and they will actually go looking for the good stuff. People will send in good stuff for them to play. It'll happen. It can work, and the RIAA and the companies it represents simply don't need to exist.

    Of course, I'm sure they have a different opinion in the matter, but times change. Industry changes. And they had a good run. But its ending. It might be in their best interests if they realize that now and change to match the way the world is going, or they're going to become the insignificant righteous.

    -Restil

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