Latest Music Piracy Study Overstates Effect of P2P 283
Blackbeard writes "A new study from pro-business think tank Institute for Policy Innovation claims that music piracy accounts for $12.5 billion in lost output to the US economy. That includes 71,060 lost jobs and $422 million in lost tax revenues... if the figures are accurate. Ars Technica's write-up points out a number of flaws in the IPI's reasoning. 'The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads = lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase.' There's more: 'The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good.'"
To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't seem to me they're looking at actual buying potential of the 'offender'... just theoretical maximum revenue lost by the producer.
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I'd like to see the correspondence between downloading and gained sales, and more importantly, gained revenue.
Gained sales of dropping stupid DRM schemes would come through increased word-of-mouth advertising and a much better relationship between movie/music labels and their consumers, as well as a lot more avenues for the media to be used for personal purposes. (E.g. watching a movie on tv, burning a copy to take in the car with you on vacation, etc.)
Here's the kind of thing I'm imagining. Let's say you buy a copy of Shrek 3 on DVD and pay, say $20 for it. $3 could be called the media cost, and $17 could be the licensing cost of having the movie. With the DVD, you get a code you can use to register the fact that you own the rights to watch Shrek 3. Now let's say that you really want a copy of it for your iPod. You get on the web site, pay an incremental $2 fee (you don't need to pay the other $17, you already have!), and you have the movie on your iPod. You want an HD-DVD version? Pay an incremental $5 fee for the media, and there you go. There's a Platinum Extended Edition released a year later? Add another $5 for the content, plus $3 for the new media cost, and you don't have to buy a movie you already own again. Maybe even have a $50 or so "master" version that guarantees you the movie in all formats and with extended material going forward.
Also, there would be a TON of gained revenue from not having to spend any more ridiculous amounts of money on complicated DRM schemes that, in the end, have proven perpetually useless.
Would there still be piracy? You bet, and probably a lot of it. But I look at it this way. The media industries can either lose a billion dollars a year to piracy and make, I dunno $50 billion in revenue, or they can lose five billion dollars a year to piracy and make $100 billion in revenue. So far, they've been pretty stupid in choosing the former. It's just a matter of time (and a matter of the MPAA and RIAA suffering a complete overhaul) before they figure out that the latter is better for us and better for them and that there is a ton of money to be made.
Re: (Score:2)
I seriously doubt it. Most people don't care about DRM, they don't care about the RIAA or labels. What they care about is the music and what is now. So long as the CD "works," meaning it doesn't prevent them from playing the CD or putting it on their iPo
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the DRM was dropped and people found that buying from seller "A" let them use their purchase however they wanted and it "just worked" but purchasing it from seller "B" didn't. Then they would have a very high encentive to buy from seller "A" and the word of mouth between general users would be: "Buy from these guys, it just works!"
That's "So long as the CD "works,"" not "Most people don't care about DRM"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people might not know the terms "RIAA" and "DRM", but you'd better believe they care about it. Ask anyone if they'd like the thought of paying for a movie, CD, or whatever just once and having access to it on any med
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It *does* bring in more money. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe not directly, but definitely indirectly. For example, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan. I started getting into them around 1990, which was the end of an extremely frustrating musical era with all the crap that was churned out in the 1980's. I had gotten so disgusted with music that I honestly never listened to the radio. A buddy of mine had The Wall, though, and I was hooked. He gave me a copy of his tape, and over the years since, I've bought almost every Pink Floyd album there is, except some of the crappy early ones with Syd Barrett. I've also seen them twice in concert.
Another example. When I was in college, like most college students, I was dirt poor. I've always liked Billy Joel, and another buddy of mine invested his disposable income in a CD player (still pretty new at the time) and almost all of Billy Joel's CDs. Of course, I couldn't afford all that, so I bought a bunch of blank cassettes and he made copies for me. Fast forward a few years, and I now am the proud owner of all of Billy Joel's albums, and I've seen him twice in concert, too. (If you're ever lucky enough to get the chance to see either Pink Floyd or Billy Joel in concert, incidentally, go.)
Another example. Just today, a friend of mine was listening to a Lazlo Bane CD I bought. (They're the guys who did the theme to the television show Scrubs, and their stuff is very good.) He had never even heard of the group before. At best, most people I run across are familiar with the theme to Scrubs ("I'm no Superman..."), but they'd never buy a whole Lazlo Bane CD because of that little snippet of song you hear on Thursday nights. I'll be honest, I seriously doubt he's going to rush out and buy a Lazlo Bane CD or go to a concert. But at least now he knows who they are, and if someone mentions Scrubs, he'll probably say something like, "Oh yeah, the theme was done by Lazlo Bane. I've listened to their CD and thought it was pretty good," and thus the "buzz" of the Bane has been bumped up by a bit.
I could keep going, but you get the idea. The collective effect of all of this is that CDs do sell better. Artists and bands do become more famous. Concerts do get attended that otherwise wouldn't have.
Plus, that's also neglecting the money that artists and bands make through increased exposure that have little to do with CD sales and concerts directly, such as through endorsement deals, magazine articles and interviews, non-CD merchandise, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would you buy the album.. if you already have all the songs?
Most of the CDs I buy are of albums I already have as mp3s, largely collected during high school and uni when I didn't have money for frivolous things like that. The majority of the rest of the CDs I buy are from artists I have a few tracks from which I've downloaded (usually long ago, again) and wanted to get the album those songs came from.
Same goes for lots of computer games; I buy the ones I like, but often play ones I don't feel are worth their full list price. I have a copy of Oblivion still shrin
Re: (Score:2)
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:5, Interesting)
i.e. if demand for a full-price version of some music is the same (in their model) as demand for a zero-price version of the music, then they're modelling the demand as being the same no matter what the price.
If that were so (and the wiki pages on economics suggest it's not possible) then it would suggest that you could sell music CDs for $10K each (recognise this theory from anyone's legal filings?
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:5, Interesting)
>>certainly would if they couldn't download it for nothing. Obviously the 1 to 1 correspondence
>>between downloading and lost sales isn't useful, but does anybody know of any reasonable estimates
>>of what the loss actually is? Or even how you'd calculate it?
I'm not sure that is possible. I have purchased hundreds and hundreds of music CD's over the years. I have quit. After hearing what the RIAA was doing, I could no longer support such a company. How can you quantify that affect? I do admit that I've purchased some un-signed (indy?) artists CD's. I have a co-worker that in un-signed and I have his. I have one from a group in NYC and another from a signed but non RIAA member. In the last 3 years..
But I've quit buying music like I previously did. And no, I don't download it from P2P networks either. What I've done is switched to XM Radio. I have two subscriptions. I now understand the RIAA gets a cut of my subscription. I don't like that as I mostly listen to Fox News, XM Comedy, and other stations like that.
I'm with you on that one.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just the DMCA and all the terrible lawyering, lying and lobbying, it's the way they consistently rip off the artists. If the artists are suffering it's because of the record companies and their contracts, not the people who download CDs.
I actually know some real, famous musicians and heard their storr about making one of the top 100 selling albums of all time and not making a penny from it - the record company took it all.
nb. This isn
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Think of it this way: If every consumer product in the world suddenly lowered their cost to $0.00, I don't see people changing their purchasing patterns in any way. That Lamborghini is suddenly free? No thanks, I'll stick with my Toyota. Console games suddenly cost nothing? I'll continue to buy 1 every other month. I don't really have time to play more than that anyways.
So you see, the study's assumptions are 100% accurate.
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong.
Unless the industry can demonstrate that sales/income/market are actually being lost due to p2p. There's no point in trying to calculate the amount of money you're losing due to a particular phenomenon when you don't know that that phenomenon is costing you money in the first place. Indeed, there is some reason to think that those who download music often buy the same music [arstechnica.com].
As far as I've ever been able to tell, the music industry just relies on the fallacy alluded to in the summary to, um, 'calculate' their 'losses'. The claim that every unpaid download represents a financial loss to the music industry equivalent to the retail cost of the downloaded music is so obviously false that I can't believe we're still discussing it...
If the music industry can demonstrate--or already has demonstrated without my having noticed--that p2p downloading definitely costs them sales/income/market, then your proposal is at least better than the method of so-called 'calculation' in TFA...
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If you compare the lost music sale to the increase in the amount people spend on concerts, then factor in how much kids today (probably their most valuable customers) spend on their cellphone, it all adds up nicely, all without having to resort to imaginary lost sales.
Another interesting thing to look at is that music sales is now pretty much back to what it was before the CD boom in the 90ies when people replaced their record collection with CDs. All in all, people spend more *money* on culture today, th
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you compare the lost music sale to the increase in the amount people spend on concerts, then factor in how much kids today (probably their most valuable customers) spend on their cellphone, it all adds up nicely, all without having to resort to imaginary lost sales.
Tickets sales go more directly to the artist. The RIAA doesn't represent the artist as much as the distributer. The RIAA couldn't care less and by extention the labels couldn't care a single wad if the artist never made a dime so long as they
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:4, Insightful)
CDs are (typically) 8-12 songs, and many people would buy all 8-12 just for the 1-3 they liked. (often there was no real alternative: the 'single', or a couple of singles cost as much as the full album!)
With iTunes et-al, many (most?) people are buying only the 1-3 they like.
I'd love to see some kind of break-down for buying patterns on these sites: how many 'album' sales are there relative to 'singles'. And if 'singles' sales were converted to album sales at CD prices, would total sales still be down?
Personally, I doubt it...I suspect sales are actually up once this is factored.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly, it is more likely the "Wal-Mart Effect". That effect tends to not only reduce competition in a geographical ar
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:To put it into 'software piracy' terms... (Score:5, Funny)
Duh, of course not. No one is that stupid.
You obviously didn't read the article. Because the article explicitly quotes: What the IPI is actually saying that high-school kids with a maximum $2K-$3K a year income (which equals a $50 a week allowance) who accumulate 1.5 million dollars worth of music downloads are measured at a rate of 65.7 percent... or more specifically nine hundred and eighty five thousand five hundred dollars of spending each.
Don't go making up silly fictional figures claiming "the IPI consider that 1.5 million dollars worth of lost sales".
Silly rabbit.
-
What about us LEGAL downloaders? (Score:2)
They can keep their opinion to themselves, and they can keep their grubby little fingers off of my network.
(I HAVE noticed that ComCast uploads via FTP of my episodes start at about 194KBps and throttle down to a measly 50KBps by the end of a 25MB file upload. Down is throttled as well but resumes after a couple of minutes. [Fuckers can't even tell the difference be
Re: (Score:2)
The warez junkie consumes bandwidth and storage on a massive scale.
He is not a kid with a laptop and a 120 GB hard drive.
That said, it is very easy to imagine such a kid downloading $250 - $500 worth of music, video, and games - merchandise - that he or his parents would have rented or purchased otherwise.
Try multiplying the real-world example by 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and see what the
Re: (Score:2)
If the IPI is going to make statements like this, they should at least take into account what a firs
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is not the argument, you need to extend it one more step: "Does that mean you would have otherwise purchased that $50K car if you hadn't stolen it?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Can you burn me a copy of that car? (Score:2, Funny)
that does not mean i am on the side of RIAA or something, but thats just the point.
Nothing New... (Score:2)
Summary has it right (Score:3, Funny)
You're damn right. I wouldn't even waste my bandwidth on the vast majority of shit that the record companies are pumping out. But, what am I saying? I'm sure Linday Lohan's next album [stuff.co.nz] would sell millions of copies if it weren't for piracy.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As a musician who purchases quite a few albums each month, I don't agree that music is too expensive, but I do agree that most of what is *marketed* isn't very good. There are many great albums that are *available*, and $12-$18 for a really great album is a fair price, in my opinion. The problem is that record companies are often not willing to develop and market the artists who actually have an
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This brings up an important question though...if they're merely counting number of items downloaded they're not taking into account that someone might be downloading a whole album. Conversely, they're also as
Re: (Score:2)
illicit downloads = lost sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:illicit downloads = lost sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One thing you have to understand here is that the "pens" aren't the same, especially when you consider music culture. Collectors like having physical media with their favorite bands as well as the artwork, fancy looking CD, etc. It would be like the 10 cents pen comming in a nice box with a booklet on it's history, a warranty, a
Re: (Score:2)
Re:illicit downloads = lost sales (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a lot more distorted than that. When Joe Teenager takes the $20 he would have spent on a CD and spends it on ricing out his car, that money is not lost to the economy. People still make sales. It is still taxed. It only shifts to a different sector. The argument that money not spent on my own company is somehow "lost" to the economy is completely absurd.
/p.
Re:illicit downloads = lost sales (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, ricing that car definitely loses that wealth for humanity if not economy.
Re: (Score:2)
You can bring all the evidence you want to the table, but they will conserve their initial position.
Re: (Score:2)
"What kind of idiot still believes illicit downloads = lost sales."
Nobody, but I'm not sure of your point here. Not even the study referenced in the Ars Technica article makes this claim. I'll presume this is just a failure to RTFA (as most people do), rather than a deliberate attempt to set up a straw man.
I'm ashamed... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also ashamed that it has been about 10 years since Napster broke and this is still going on. I feel partly responsible. Time to crank up the anarchy.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, those studies have to be funded by someone and unfortunately, the big record labels have deep pockets to fund those biased, flawed ones like the one in the article while there is no opposite organization with enough money to counterbalance them.
Re:I'm ashamed... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Plenty Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Trained monkeys VS Artists (Score:2)
On the other hand... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, music piracy accounted for $12.5 billion in gained income to the listeners.
Re:On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, the $12.5 billion were instead spent on other things in the economy. Creating work for people like carpenters, contruction workers, resturant workers, etc. Which in turn means no lost taxes at all (in fact, considering the creative accounting of the entertainment business I'd say it's more likely the piracy resulted in $422 million in gained tax).
So the question is, is the economy better off with more coke snorting music execs, RIAA lawyers, fantasy accountants and boyband promoters, or with the others?
I'll bet the 71,060 who are currently employed instead of the RIAA lawyers would say piracy was a good thing for the economy.
Re: (Score:2)
If I, living in the UK, fail to spend £11 on the latest album, not much of that will go into the US economy.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Lost economic productivity is negative. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, it IS also true that piracy causes economic losses for record companies. But, economic losses for record companies are not necessarily bad for the economy, any more than economic losses for carjackers put in prison are bad for the economy.
To use another example, when the US instituted the Do Not Call list, it caused a lot of losses for companies whose business was paying people to call people who didn't want to be called. And it caused a lot of jobs in that industry to be 'lost'. Was this bad for the economy? NO! All the money that used to get spent interrupting people's dinner just got spent on something else, creating more jobs elsewhere.
So when someone pirates a song instead of paying for it, yes, the record company has a loss, but the economy does not - that money instead gets spent on something else, like a trip to the movies. That's an economic GAIN - the consumer gets to listen to music AND they get to go to the movies, whereas before, when they were paying for extremely inefficient record company distribution, they only got to listen to the music.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But the sum of society does benefit. To continue with your car analogy: If everytime someone wanted a car, they created a free copy of someone else's car, then many individual people would be experiencing "economic gain" without an associated economic loss for any other particular person.
Re: (Score:2)
Music and movies
Re: (Score:2)
Money is zero-sum; wealth is not. True, the same amount of money gets spent either way, but total wealth has increased, which means society is now better off than before. For the same cost any given consumer can now have both music and a visit to the theatre, rather than just one or the other.
Copyright is a definite short-term loss to the economy; that much has always been obvious.
Re: (Score:2)
I laughed in his face and told him to get out of my office and get back to work or the losses to the economy were going to go up by a couple hundred grand...
Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
The 12.5 Billion figure stinks with the smell of excrement because of where they pulled it from.
Here's my figures... (Score:3, Informative)
Assume the average buyer like me spends $15.00 per CD avg. After marketing and retail costs, let's say that an average profit to the music company per unit is a max of 40% or about $6.00, divided by 10-15 tracks per CD or 40 to 60 cents each.
Now assume that I bought those same number of tracks from iTunes. Cost for distribution is nearly zero. Cost for marketing: nearly zero -- and many of the songs I am looking for aren't current albums, so the profit margin on these songs is even higher. Net profit between Apple and the music company and the musician? let's say 90%, shall we?
You figure it out. But the politicians probably never will.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They argue:
CD sales are down,
Cassette sales are down,
Album sales are down,
Record stores are hurting
However:
iTunes just sold their 3 billionth track.
wallmart and other stores now sell online
LEGITIMATE online sales are increasing.
I've found graphs online that show the increase then decline of vinyl sales
Unrealized gains are not losses (Score:4, Interesting)
Hint: you have to have something before you can lose it.
The problem with music nowadays.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Legal downloads (Score:3, Insightful)
As a side note, music piracy has caused me to buy far more CD's than I otherwise would have. My first exposure to some of my favorite bands has been through (illicit) downloaded tracks, and I often end up buying their entire discography. I know, I know, fuck the RIAA - regardless of their evilness, it's not going to stop me from wanting to own a physical copy of Marquee Moon by Television (shameless plug for the album at the top of my playlist right now).
Fallacies On Both Sides (Score:5, Insightful)
They assume: Most of what's pirated is clearly of good enough people would buy it anyway quality that it's a direct loss of sale.
The poster assumes: Much of what's pirated is of poor enough quality that no one would buy it but high enough quality that they'd go to the trouble of downloading it.
Both sides have pretty much retreated to their corners and are refusing to meet in a middle. Most likely, the situation is: Piracy, having a lower cost, allows people to consume more than they would otherwise do but that isn't a consumption that would go away if forced to pay the price requested, either. Instead, both retreat to their corners, pointing out how the other one's wrong whilst refusing to look at how their arguments are flawed too. It becomes a somewhat pointless discussion when neither side is capable of considering anything other than their own views.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, the old "compromise in the middle" proposal. Seems fair, but it is so easily gamed.
An example from (where else) automobiles: seat slides. Used to be the seat would not go back any further than a leg's width in front of the back seat. However, govt testing of crash safety with dummies used a simple technique to position the seat: put it in the middle of the slide. So, an easy way for manufacturers to improve car ratings was to extend the slide further back so the front seat could push into the ba
Lost revenue (Score:2, Insightful)
P2P? I guess the dumbasses never heard of usenet! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:P2P? I guess the dumbasses never heard of [del] (Score:3, Funny)
Dang. I must have been asleep. When did we go past version 2?
>some kid in the Midwest who can stand on his head and spit wooden nickels.
Youtube linky please?
Good enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet it's good enough to download, apparently. The "music isn't good enough to justify paying for it" argument vanishes in a cloud of hypocrisy when people download the very music they disparage.
When you're a freeloader, any cost is hard to justify, compared to free (beer).
Re: (Score:2)
There are some cars on the market that I would never buy--they are, in my opinion, overpriced for what you get. However if someone gave one to me, for free, I would use it. In fact I may even go out of my way (take a bus ride across town) to pick it up. It's worth "a bus ride" but not worth "$20,000." Similarly a song may
Re: (Score:2)
And then re-appears in a puff of logic once people understand basic economics.
The demand curve is formed by demand at a particular price point. The fact that I would download a song does not have any bearing on whether or not I would be willing to pay $12 for the CD it is on, or $0.99 for the iTunes track, or even if I would be willing to pay $0.01 for it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are not 'taking' it, you are copying it. If I make a sand castle on a beach and then tell you that you can make your own castle, but you have to pay me a $20 for the right to do that, what will you do?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't want to pay for music, then don't, but at the same time don't trample on an artists right by ignoring
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
music is a very subjective thing, even your favorite band has released some real stinkers, should you buy everything they put out even if you don't like it?
If an album has 10 tracks perhaps 1 or 2 you will hear on the radio, so when you buy an album there is a good chance the first time you hear the other 8 tracks is after you bought it. Not since stairway to heaven has there been a track on an album which was better than the single
The philosphy of Advertising and Radio (Score:2, Interesting)
Whew, good thing I didn't download then (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone ships a hard drive full of music to someone else, would that be a federal crime? What would the value of that music be?
So let's say I borrow someone's external hard drive, and copy all the MP3s on it to my hard drive. In just a matter of hours, have I just cost the RIAA millions of dollars?
To be fair, I do think that illegally downloading music does hurt the music industry. But obviously, there is a market there for downloading or iTunes would have failed by now. When Napster burst onto the scene, the music industry should have seen the untapped GOLD mine that is music downloading. Instead, they fought it. They refused to embrace it. Did they think it would just go away? The ability to download and take music with you everywhere has only strengthened the fact that people WANT to listen to music. They still don't get it.
Years ago, I looked into a concept, and someone had it patented already. But here is what the music industry should do:
1. Digitize their massive stockpile of music.
2. Partner with music stores so they carry that music digitally.
3. Price it right.
It would be easy to come up with a tiered pricing model.
A: anything 2 years old or newer: 0.99 per track, or a flat rate per album ($8?)
B: anything 2 to 10 years old: 0.25 per track, or $3 per album
C: anything older than 10 years: 0.10 per track or $1 per album
Think about this... why would people spend hours downloading questionable quality music when they could go into a store and walk away with a CD, DVD, or portable device FULL of music for a decent price? Then, people are in the store - you can sell them DVDs, Tshirts, CDs, etc. You could have a massive digital catalog to choose from. Keep it in the stores, but maybe make the track lists available online so they could submit an order and go in and pick it up. Charge a nominal burning fee for media. You could have "top 100" lists from all genres, people could upload their playlists for others to purchase..... there are LOTS of possiblities.
Sadly, I am sure this will never see the light of day because it requires the "owners" of the music to open their eyes.
Nearly sound like the broken window fallacy (Score:2)
Naturally this is not the same context, but it could also be used here. EVEN for the few pirate which COULD have paid for their software, they probably invested their money somewhere else (other goods, banks, whatnot). So yes the music industry lost a "new window" sale, but this certainly was Not LOST to the economy. Or do really the smart-head which make this study that the pirate suddenly took the money which it should have cost them to buy the infriged goods, put it in a waterproof box, a
lol lost jobs (Score:3, Funny)
fans DON'T think the music is no good (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary (and the artiicle, for all I know) is not quite right when it says:
He's just fallen foul of Fingals First Law [*] of chart music - the widely observed principle that the charts always turn to complete rubbish within 5 years of quitting full time education. The cool kids will always be listening to something completely different from what we listened to, and we'll just think the new stuff isn't like music used to be, in the good old days. In turn the cool kids will grow up, and find that the music they like has been superseded.
The point is, it's older fans who think that much of what's available now is rubbish. There is a constant supply of new fans ready to be programmed with the new stuff.
Of course, not all of them will buy the new stuff, but that's another issue - and the posters above have covered that pretty well!
[*] I just made that law up right there! Don't expect to find it in the textbooks till next week at least. We're only at Internet 2.0, you know.
Googling around (Score:3, Interesting)
The music industry, as everyone here likes to say, relies on an outdated business model, but one part of their business model that is quite current and up to date is how it seeks protection through government influence. Sometimes Congress likes to hear distorted studies, because it helps them to have excuses. That's the real issue here.
Music industry created false value (Score:2, Informative)
The music that the music industry has pushed upon us is simpler, dumber, and more repetitive than what we would be buying otherwise. Now that people do not have to pay for it, they do not, because they're only going to listen to it for a
Time for some other industries to step in (Score:2)
It's obvious that it is more beneficial to pay money to college lecturers
Problems with Ars Technica's analysis (Score:2)
I take issue with this:
The problem is that these sentiments are constants. Sure, ask any given person in any given year and they'll tell you that they think music is too expensiv
What about the music you can't buy for any price? (Score:3, Informative)
How are concert attendance and revenues doing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Think-tank is pig-latin for... (Score:2, Insightful)
Pfft... Think-tank my crusty ass. The only thing they "think" about is who they can sell out to.
A real think tank would start off a report on this topic with the truth.
"Recording companies that hide behind RIAA are misguided by employing armies of lawyers, instead of one or two good innovative entrepreneurs".
"P2P networks are the definitive distribution model of the digital economy".
"Recording companies that hide behind RIAA either are so out of touch with reality they'd rather
Impossible to accurately measure (Score:2)
The RIAA is wrong to assume that everyone who downloads a song would have otherwise paid for it, and to claim that as a lost sale. They also don't account for people who hear a downloaded track and decide to buy the album (or individual track(s) via iTunes).
Downloaders are wrong to claim moral justification simply because they are unwilling to pay the set price for music. They are also wrong to assume t
Important Distinction (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
So the other 44200 come from what exactly?
Initially they'd be talking about related industries. eg the people who manufacture CDs, advertising copywriters, distribution workers, truck drivers, retail store employees, shopfitters etc.
Then they'd start expanding their theory - if those truck drivers aren't making any money then that means they aren't buying as many burgers on the road, which means the burger joints downsize their checkout staff, so there's a few jobs there. If the advertising execs aren't making as much money, then there will be l
Re: (Score:2)
Nah. They would probably do something stupid like buy food or books.
( Both words with "oo" in the middle. I think that means something ).