BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
Many of my musician friends make considerable income from iTunes.
White House will not support SOPA, PIPA
- Thread starter Ausmerican
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Many of my musician friends make considerable income from iTunes.
Corsair 115
Penultimate Amazing
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Can we put a hard number on how many is "some"? Because that, to me, is the crux of the matter. Also, what is the ratio of those who "will go to some lengths to steal it" compared to those who can't be bothered to go to some lengths?
If it is false to say that every illegal download was by someone who wouldn't have bought the game/music/movie anyway, then it is equally false to say that every illegal download equals a lost sale. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Cleon
King of the Pod People
iTunes and similar services (Amazon etc) make it easier for musicians and artists to make money, and harder for record labels to make money. That's as it should be.
If there are people going great lengths to steal something what makes you think that these people would have bought the product in the first place?
So when you were saying that the attempt to "build a better bittorrent" failed about a decade ago under what metric were you determining success or failure?
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Klimax
NWO Cyborg 5960x (subversion VPUNPCKHQDQ)
Do you really think that? Do you believe that everybody has access to every sigle service for all they musical and movie needs??? False. My country only recently got local variant of iTunes. Many others are still inaccessible here.(Amazon MP3) Local services were bad offers with DRM and still expensive. So we were left with expensive CDs and downloads...
Some links for your reading (Ars Technica reporting on various studies):
Study: P2P users buy more music; apathy, not piracy, the problem (2006)
Study: P2P effect on legal music sales "not statistically distinguishable from zero" (2007)
Dutch government study: net effect of P2P use is positive (2009)
Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all (2009)
US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus (2010)
File-sharers are content industry's "largest customers" (2010)
Just small quick search...
Bandcamp?
bit_pattern
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Precisely, as an Australian, I would love to watch my TV on Hulu. Instead though, thanks to the idiotic copyright laws that split the globe into designated zones (where in places like Australia you can extort consumers and charge them 2 - 3 times more than American consumers, based on antiquated notions of isolation and distance that might have made sense when you were shipping goods into the country) and deny consumers the same products they offer the rest of the world. As it is, i can't. And unless I want to wait 12 -18 months for the Australian TV industry (small, centralised and dependent on reducing content to the lowest common denominator, meaning things like Sopranos or Deadwood for instance will never get a proper run on the networks) then, **** it, I'm going to download it and watch it with the rest of the world.
bit_pattern
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Can you explain why movie and recording profits have continued to spike upwards over the last ten years?
applecorped
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bit_pattern
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BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
Does this include fees paid by services like Pandora and similar? If not, it is failing to capture significant revenue that is not strictly a sale. Also this article speaks of album sales. Well, the album is dead even though they very much wish it weren't. People buy only the songs they really want now, and yes, that means sales do go down, but through a change in business model, not due to piracy.
RandFan
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Also, sales are not profit. The cost to make and store albums reduce profits. Also, bear in mind that not all albums are sold and the cost for those that don't sale reduce profits. The graph is piss poor at telling us anything.
applecorped
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BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
Which does not prove the point intended. All this shows is that revenues are down, not why they are down.
There is a bogus presumption that they will naturally grow forever regardless of the changes in taste or consumer buying habits. When you move from a physical distribution model to a digital distribution model, especially one that eliminates the core concept of the album, you would expect revenues to drop, so you would expect to see this trend even if there were no piracy whatsoever.
Anecdotally, I buy more music and more video now that it is available online that I ever did when I had to hike in to Tower Records to browse the bins.
The recording industry was a bloated monster which did and does abuse artists with shady accounting, and which priced physical recordings far above the actual cost and many times what the artist received. That people are selling their own music online, and even having their own CDs pressed or flash keys made to sell at live venues.
I'd love to see an estimate of the size of that business, artist-direct sales, and I'd love to know it that is represented in this graph.
I doubt its in there, artist-direct sales are zero revenue for the recording
industry, and I'm certain they wish it were gone.
BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
I have heard that one of the ways they screw artists is to print a lot of CDs never intended for sale to carry in a warehouse valued at their wholesale cost rather than cost to produce, and use that to offset anything owed to the artist. Not sure if that is accurate; Musicians are universal in their hatred of the recording industry and may have embellished that somewhat.
applecorped
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That is all I was trying to show. I was responding to someone who claimed revenue has been up over the past 10 years. I don't totally blame piracy for the decrease in sales. I'm sure it contributed to it but other factors apply.
Newtons Bit
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Was the dip after 1979 the result of internet pirates too?
applecorped
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Are you sure you can't answer that question yourself?
BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
Fair enough!
BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
Well it was likely due to a couple factors;
1. The economic downturn
2. The lack of good music at that time (it sucked)
3. Cassettes. People were able to copy things for each other and play them in their Walkman, which was the disruptive technology of its day.
4. Cassettes. These had a lower profit margin than records because records could be pressed and cassettes had to be copied serially. They also had a lower selling price quite often.
17 U.S.C. § 1008 made that actually 100% legal, and it remains so to this day.
Audio Home Recording Act of 1991 mandated that if you bought a consumer audio recorder or consumer audio media, you would automatically pay a fee that goes to the RIAA no matter what your intended use of the devices, and also that consumer recorder should respect a "Do Not Copy" flag in the media and restrict media to be used to that which has had the fee applied to it. This broke down with the advent of consumer computer recorders which got around the prohibition by being data devices.
So, 1979 was a downturn, but legally the reasons were absolutely not piracy. What was happening was that consumers were exercising their rights under the law.
But no matter the reasons, artists get screwed in good times and bad by crooked record labels.
Until that changes, the RIAA isn't getting a lot of sympathy from ME.