Since January, there has already been one album that I have literally only bought because of piracy (I never would have heard of the band were it not for piracy). Last year I bought 2 or 3 albums which I never would have bought were it not for piracy. How many albums do "normal" non-pirating consumer buy a year?
How so? Data point: I don't pirate music, partly because I'm paranoid about getting sued by the RIAA. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
frequently-pirated music makes more money than less-pirated music.
Yes, popular music makes more money than unpopular music. Duh.
pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates
Which, even if true, is not a demonstration of "pirates spend more money on music than they would if they weren't pirates".
I am extremely skeptical of the idea that piracy helps the music industry. It smells strongly of the kind of thing that people believe in order to justify their own actions, rather than the kind of thing that people believe because it's likely to be true.
If you're still pirating music in 2010, and the track you're pirating is available on the Apple Store for 99 cents, then you're just being a cheap bastard.
Where can I get my iTunes for Linux?
This greatly annoys me as there's an album I want that's not on iTunes, but is on Amazon MP3. None of the local music stores stock it. My only choices are to either pirate the album or pay exorbitant fees and wait several weeks to import the disc.
Guess which one's easier.
The response to the itunes lover.... Seriously when we mention pirated music sells more, its because studies show that while pirating is up so are sales. In fact sales are higher now than when pirating was non-existent. There is very little corelation shown that pirating hurts music sales, and vice versa, so both arguments are kind-of equally valid. The music industry just wants every damn penny.
See the post about the Humble Bundle's pirating issue. The entire bundle of games could be purchased at 1 penny, yet people pirated, and often there are good reasons why someone will pirate vs buy.
No need to be paranoid, here. They only go after big distributors, not downloaders (aka leeches).
No, its because you've been brought up with the idea that free music is ubiquitous and encourages more music consumption. You've seen the rise and fall of Napster, Morpheus, Limewire, etc and you justify it to yourself that these sites helped you discover new music more rapidly than having to pay for music. You believe that not spending $100/month on music means you can attend more concerts and buy more merch. Music pirates aren't cheap, they just choose to spend their money elsewhere. Fortunately, the music industry is just beginning to realize where this elsewhere lies. Go to best buy and see the new Dr. Dre Beats headphones that everyone is crazy about. Go to Wal-Mart and see the new Miley Cyrus line of clothes and DVDs. Bands and Brands is the future of music and this is how people choose to pay for music.
All of my internet-savvy friends pirate music, and nearly all of my non-savvy friends pirate music. The only difference is the non-savvy ones may actually get caught.
> ... popular music makes more money than unpopular music. Duh.
It being obvious doesn't make it not true. If the top-selling album in a year gets pirated 10 times as often as purchased, does the RIAA really think they only got one eleventh of the payments they would've gotten were it not for piracy?
> ... is not a demonstration of "pirates spend more money on music than they would if they weren't pirates".
I gave myself as an example to show that piracy can in fact directly lead to sales.
> If you're still pirating music in 2010, and the track you're pirating is available on the Apple Store for 99 cents, then you're just being a cheap bastard.
What if I pirate it, then either don't like it, or buy the physical album? I have never purchased music digitally because the digital versions are easily available for free. That seems like business 101—if your product is easily available for free (whether or not acquiring it is a crime), lower your prices or somehow make your product more appealing than the free version.
What do you do for a living?
I'm a cheap bastard until the band rolls into town the next time and I go because I know who they are and that I like their music. Touring is the new business model--records are live show promotion tools.
Without taking a position on the accuracy of the claim I will say the study that determined that was deeply flawed. Let me quote the first article that comes up on Google...
The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry's largest audience for digital sales.
This is flawed because people who are actively seeking music can reasonably be called "music enthusiasts" who would normally buy more music than their counterparts who don't actively seek out new music. Note the study says the ones who were categorized as "not pirates" didn't even use free sources to listen to new music.
So in order to get an accurate answer as to how piracy impacts sales you'd have to compare enthusiasts who pirate to those who don't.
The right way to run this sort of experiment would be to track how much music someone buys for a while, then give them a mildly inconvenient all-access pass to iTunes or something (a la Rhapsody) and see what changes.
B and C do not follow from A. Even though pirates spend more money than non-pirates, who's to say they wouldn't spend even more if they couldn't pirate. And, frequently pirated music makes money than less-pirated music because music that is popular is more likely to be pirated.
How is it possible that they couldn't pirate? Unless the world governments plan on actually filtering the entire internet clean of piracy, then all they'll be doing is criminalizing piracy, which is already the case most places.
Which can be rephrased far less interestingly as "popular music is frequently purchased as well as frequently pirated".
More to the point, maybe for those 20 free downloads, 5-6 would have actually bought the album but didn't, and 5-6 (possibly overlapping set) will be convinced to see a show or buy a t-shirt, so the actual financial situation for the band isn't so much different as they think it is.
The big recording companies provide a few main services to artists: production, distribution, and promotion. For years they kept CD prices artificially high because there weren't alternatives for most people (for artists to create albums or for consumers to obtain music).
Once everyone could record and burn CDs expensive production studios became much less valuable, and broadband Internet makes distribution nearly free (relatively, at least). Simultaneously, radio has become a much less important means of promotion, so the connections that the recording companies had in that arena become much less valuable.
In other words, the big record companies just don't offer the value they used to - either to artists or to consumers. And once the value your company offers disappears, so should your company (unfortunately this usually happens very slowly, with the company(/ies) trying everything to avoid extinction).
So was it a coincidence that this all happened at around the time that Napster took off? I don't think so, I think there were just common causes that led to both results.
If the major-label hegemony was truly broken, we wouldn't see these mass-market pop stars on major labels get the publicity and record sales (compared to indie artists) that they do, nor would the top touring bands by major revenue continue to be major-label acts. On the contrary, major labels continue to be successful at choosing and promoting which acts achieve popularity and success--they are just less able to share in that success themselves.
If the copyright holders still had the ability to enforce copyright, the fact that internet distribution is cheap wouldn't mean anything, except that they would be able to charge less and still turn a profit. The real problem with the internet for them is that it made piracy on a massive scale easily accessible. You don't have to respect their copyright anymore.
I'm kinda old now and don't follow pop music that closely anymore, but as far as I know the masses still want their top 40 pop music recorded by heavily marketed stars, not some dude on an indie label or no label at all who used his laptop as a recording studio. So the fact that said dude has an easier time now is irrelevant, except to the minority of people who are interested in hearing/recording that kind of thing.
More generally, all businesses rely on legislation to keep their property from being stolen, whether that property is intellectual or physical. If those laws were widely ignored, it would be hard to do any kind of business.
Also, you should really read up on copyright infringement legislation—it's absolutely nothing like theft. It's a completely separate legal notion.
I think a key difference is that each newspaper has something slightly different to offer, the same stories are written different in each. Whereas people are only interested in a song by one artist generally not the same song sung by many different artists. The point being that you would think that music subscription services would be even less successful than written content ones because written content on the same thing can come from many different angles and styles, music doesn't share that trait so it's easy for a pirate bay ect to provide everything a subscription service would.
There's more supply out there. Demand for a specific commodity goes down because if it. It's really basic, and only peripherally related to piracy.
Ask around: I'll bet you find close to 100% of your peers say if their TV watching habits have changed in the past ten years, hours in front of the set have only gone down. Extrapolate.
Without going into too much incriminating detail I just find that really hard to accept.
1. http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/01/dutch-government-stu...
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...
Myself; about 30-40. This is probably a high number; most of my friends will buy anything from 3-5 (in a quick straw poll of about 30 of them).