Aguazul writes with this excerpt from the Guardian:
"The music industry likes to insist that filesharing — aka illegal downloading — is killing the industry; that every one of the millions of music files downloaded each day counts as a 'lost' sale, which if only it could somehow have been prevented would put stunning amounts of money into impoverished artists' hands. ... If you even think about it, it can't be true. People — even downloaders — only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs? I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else. What else, I mused, might they be buying? The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed 'a record year.' In fact ... games spending has risen dramatically — from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008. Meanwhile music spending has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn."
And offers such iron-clad evidence as "If you even think about it, it can't be true," and "I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different."
This isn't correlation or causality. It's simply painfully obvious.
Those in the game industry explicitly acknowledge this and freely admit that they have to compete with not just other forms of paid diversion but of diversions in general. The game developer has to compete with it all, including sex.
The members of the MPAA and RIAA are probably too complacent and too "fat and happy" to realize this.
But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue.
An excellent point about how the music industry is cooking the books. Here's another point they refuse to discuss: You can illegally download games too, and it doesn't seem to be hurting the games industry one single bit.
No, really! You can. And yet the games industry is booming and the music industry is not.
According to the RIAA each song is worth $750, so with 16,987 songs that's $12,740,250 US Dollars that I would have spent if it had not been for thepiratebay.org
The RIAA claims that a university student would have spent more than 12million dollars had it not been for piracy?
I think this proves that the RIAA do not have even the most remote clue as to what they are talking about and we can all safely discard all past, present and future claims without the risk of discarding a single fact.
Blu-Ray == fail. Anybody who buys Blu-Ray media will go the way of the schmucks who blew thousands of dollars on Laserdiscs. Every game I've ever bought has either been on cassette tape, 5.25" or 3.5" floppies, downloaded, CD-ROM, or DVD, and every movie I've ever bought has been on VHS tape or DVD. When Blu-Ray drives cost $19.95, can be made by anybody, and the Blu-Ray disc section is bigger than the DVD section, then let's talk.
Note that those are US-only, not worldwide figures. In the UK, I don't yet know anyone who has a BD player, although I know a lot of people who had adopted DVDs by this point in their lifespan (myself included). The early adopters are moving away from DVDs and towards downloads, and the others are just not moving. In the USA, BD got a boost from the fact NTSC looks awful and digital TV and HD were introduced in the same switch. Over here, SD digital signals were introduced a few years ago and, while a f
You did know that Blue-Ray players can play DVD's as well? Meaning you can buy the player without replacing your DVD's, then acquire Blue-Ray discs as new purchases.
Blue-Ray is also NOT a Sony only format (like UMD is), it's a consortium format, just like DVD and CD-Audio are.
When Blu-Ray drives cost $19.95, can be made by anybody, and the Blu-Ray disc section is bigger than the DVD section, then let's talk.
This is precisely what people said about DVD's about a decade ago, and the fact that you've bought DVD's and DVD-media games proves that it worked itself out in the end, even if only by sheer force of the market, whether or not people actually did want it (and they did). I'm not particularly happy about Blu-Ray winning the format war (I was more a fan of HD-DVD, for basically the sole reason that Sony's had a terrible track record with standardizing media), but at least we have a successor format to do us until we get some good holographic storage going. Given the consumer shelf life of DVD, that should put us in about the right timeframe for it by the time Blu-Ray is long in the tooth. Already there are BD-ROM drives for around $100, and players for about that much. Burners are still expensive, but still continuously dropping in price. Hell, a Liteon 4x BD-R drive is currently running for around $200 CAD on NCIX, and a really nice LG 8x one is only about $60 more. The price is plummeting, and with the PS3 gaining momentum in the gaming market and Blu-Ray being the de-facto standard in high-definition storage media for movies, we'll eventually see Blu-Ray take over and land nicely in the spot DVD landed in some years ago.
This is precisely what people said about DVD's about a decade ago
No it isn't. People looked at DVD and saw:
Smaller form factor.
Better picture.
Better audio.
Longer lasting.
No need to rewind.
The ability to play on computers and portable players.
People look at BD and see longer load times, and a better picture (if you also buy a new TV when you buy your BD player). DVD was better in every way than VHS. BD is not noticeably better on existing equipment. If you bought a DVD player, took it home, plugged it in to your existing setup, and watched a DVD, you immediately got noticeable improvements. BD does not have this advantage unless you already have an HD TV.
The other thing to change is that the durability of DVDs has made rental prices drop and - most importantly - made renting by post easy. These rental services give you access to a massive library of material on DVD. Most of this is not available on BD and even if it were, there is no compelling reason to prefer the BD version; in a lot of cases the source material does not make use of the quality available for DVD.
That's not to say HD video won't catch on. BD has a race to get sufficient market penetration before it's completely obsolete though. I can get a 20Mb/s connection now. My ISP is currently rolling out 50Mb/s, and their competitors are deploying similar speeds. BD has a maximum AV bitrate of 48 Mb/s. The companies that offer DVD rental are now offering Internet streaming as well. Given the choice between a BD player, where I have to get disks posted to me, or a box that plugs into my Internet connection and lets me stream video on demand, I know which I'd prefer. With the introduction of iPlayer, I already watch more via the Internet than by any other medium, including DVDs. I doubt very much that that trend will reverse, certainly not in time to save BD.
Sorry man but the PS3 is not gaining momentum. In fact it is down year over year. Blu-Ray will succeed but just by pure luck. Sony's trojan horse hasn't seen the success the PS2 had bring people into a new format.
Yes, apparently, constant threats of lawsuits might cause people to spend their entertainment money elsewhere. It's kind of like with those Capitol One mailers. On the back of the envelope it says something like "tampering with or changing the contents of this envelope may subject you to legal action." Oh yeah, I am so going to get a credit card from people who start off threatening to sue me (and for what?). Same thing with the RIAA. You sue your customers, we go elsewhere and tell you where you can stick those shiny, plastic discs.
1- consumers buy games/DVDs over the latest music album 2- consumers don't have enough money for music 3- consumers download music
Based on their evidence, though, you could also conclude:
1- consumers download music 2- consumers still have money 3- consumers buy games/DVDs with saved money
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that downloading a song==lost sale, but I don't think the evidence stated necessarily means that people are choosing games/DVDs over music.
One thing that is not really debatable is that the music industry business model is outdated, overgrown with middlemen, and on it's way out. And the end won't come soon enough.
It is a bit of a leap, yeah, but when you think about it, there are a couple of reasons for that:
1) People universally dislike the RIAA. At least around here, people like to spite them as much as possible.
2) It isn't universally illegal to download music over the internet, and still is a legal grey area.
3) The cost of a music CD, given the amount of enjoyment and entertainment (assuming all songs in the album are "good") versus the cost of a DVD/game and the amount of enjoyment and entertainment gained from
I download cracked games and MP3s to check out the content before I part with my hard-to-come-by money. While I no longer spend nearly as much on either as I used to, I am much happier with the items I do purchase.
And no, you can't really get a feal for whether a game is going to be worth playing on your home system from a demo at the store. Aside from that, the only game demos I see running are on consoles, not PCs.
Some music stores let you listen to a select set of albums before you buy them, but u
No, what it proves is that everyone has a discretionary income, and whether they spend it on music or something else, they're still spending it, which is what's important. Not buying music doesn't hurt the economy, not spending the money _AT ALL_ hurts the economy.
people buy games and DVDs these days instead of music because most of the music available now simply sucks
IMO the value of a $50 game is far greater than a value of a $15 60 min. audio CD or a 90 min. movie DVD. Music feels dirt cheap compared to games where every single object in a huge GTA map had been created and placed by hand, and when you can do all kinds of things and expect reasonable game response to them. I feel comfortable with paying for a game because I see what's there on the DVD and I'm am
You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie...
I'm sorry, but that's pretty narrow-minded - if you think music always sounds the same and that therefore you have no reason to listen to it more than once, you either have truly horrific taste in music or you don't pay much attention to it. I've listened to some albums hundreds of times and I keep hearing new things, making new connections, realizing new influences and learning from them. Video games migh
You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie...
I'm sorry, but that's pretty narrow-minded - if you think music always sounds the same and that therefore you have no reason to listen to it more than once, you either have truly horrific taste in music or you don't pay much attention to it. I've listened to some albums hundreds of times and I keep hearing new things, making new connections, realizing new influences and learning from them. Video games might be more expansive, but they are ultimately finite in scope - a good album breathes and grows depending on the other stuff you listen to, on what you bring to the table. Video games are like stale bubblegum from a supermarket vending machine in comparison.
I could take an axe to my game systems tomorrow and not shed a tear, but the thought of living without music scares the piss outta me.
Music ain't that much these days. I realize your perception of it may change over time, but that's as far as it gets. In a videogame like GTA or many others, you can face a very wide spectrum of situations you don't expect, so there's much more stimulation available to you.
The magic of videogames is the freedom they offer. It's the ultimate form of entertainment.
The rise of zero personality manufacturer bands (The Jonas Brothers... like the Monkees but with out the hard cutting edge) and their cult of multiple product selling surely also has to be responsible. Its not just Games and DVDs its the fact that for a given "star" you can get pens, pencils, school bags, DVDs, 3D Movies and all manner of other crap. Their objective almost isn't to sell the music its just to sell the image and then have people buy lots of things with that image.
Dora the Explorer has as much credibility as these bands and is focused on a similar financial plan.
Meanwhile good bands seem to be going into the live tour set up more and more and being less worried about CDs. So what is killing CDs is that at the crap end people are flogging pens and school bags and at the good end its about the live gigs. Meaning that if you want entertainment at home you go for DVDs (because the Cinema is a rip-off) or Games (where you get to do more of what you want).
The music industry has killed the CD by focusing on bag sales and forcing decent artists to focus (thank god) on live gigs.
This is actually really insightful. Here's the UK chart [bbc.co.uk]. Don't recognise anything from it? Here's all the number 1s from the Seventies [theofficialcharts.com]. Ah, music was so much better then, when we had the genius of Pink Floyd and *cough* Showaddywaddy.
What the RIAA members really need to do is make free pirated copies of games and movies more easily available on the web; then people will have more disposable income with which to purchase music!
because you can get the one song you like off of iTunes/amazon/whatever. Why always start from the assumption that it must be illegal activity that is adversely affecting sales.
The legal marketplace has changed to benefit the consumer economically, by not gouging them for $6/15 for a single/album respectively, now they can get what they wanted for around a $1. Some will buy more music but many others will move that savings to other avenues of entertainment.
Where is the InconvenientTruth tag? It's interesting how a fresh perspective on an issue sheds an interesting new light. Of course this is to be expected. The music industry and all of "entertainment" have probably been quite aware of this. But when delivering a plea to legislators and making arguments for why various manufacturers should support a particular measure or restriction, it doesn't help them to tell the complete truth.
It seems so obvious it amazes me how many higher ups in these industries fail to recognize that they're not in the record business, or the video game business, or the film business. They're in the entertainment business. If you're going to make it a pain in the ass to purchase your music or to watch your movie, I'm just as happy to spend my time reading a book, or surfing the Internet, or playing a video game. 99% of the time I'm not even going to bother trying to hunt down a pirated copy, because quite frankly I'd rather just spend that time being entertained by one of the other numerous options I have available to me. You're not competing for my money, you're competing for my time, and you're competing against everything else I can possibly find to fill it with. The sooner these businesses learn this the easier they'll find it to get my money.
The argument that 1 download = 1 lost sale was always pretty silly. Obviously the demand for something that costs $0 is going to be greater than if it costs $20.
Who is the main target audience for popular music (i.e. the staple of the music industry)? Teenagers. Now, teenagers have a bit more pocket money today than they did in the 80s and 90s, inflation sure took care of that, but they also have a lot more to spend it on.
I was a teenager in the 80s and 90s. What was there for us to spend our pocket money on? Music. Fashion. Junk food. Umm... Arcades, maybe. Besides that... umm... I'm open for suggestions, but that's what my friends spent their dough on (for me it was computer games, but that was me...).
Today, you have cell phones (and the various services that come with it, from ringtones to games), you have computer games, MMOs with their recurring subscriptions, Trading Card games, you have all sorts of markets geared either exclusively at teenagers or at least aiming heavily for them.
The music industry simply has to share the market with others.
I have well over 200 CD's that I paid full retail for at legitimate stores. I listen to music all day at work and for many years enjoyed my collection digitized and copied to whatever machine I was working on. That said, I haven't purchased a CD in over 3 years, and I don't download mp3s or touch any torrents of any kind.
I switched to shoutcast streams many years ago, and as of a little over a year ago I started using Pandora.com and haven't looked back.
I buy and play games for my xbox and my PC. I purchase movies (I still haven't paid more than $10 for an HD movie, MPC + HD/BR player FTW).
Anyway, that said - if you were to graph my spending over the last decade 1999-2009 you would see a lot of money going to the music industry (15-25albums/year @$15 each) dwindling down to nothing as of about 2005. Some spending on games (probably 5-8/year @ 50 each) staying pretty consistent with a slight upswing in the last 4 years. Movies, didn't buy all that many VHS, have probably 80 or so DVD's (at probably 10/year) - 20 or so HD/BR movies, all within the last 10 months.
Everyone always brings this up when we talk about the music industry.
Give me a break. If you're listening solely to the radio, yes, you're going to be disappointed (and even disgusted) at what's there. But if you actually spend a bit of time looking, you can find some really great artists. Music is always going to be alive... just because the nostalgia you feel makes you just a teensy bit unopen to newer, different stuff doesn't mean the music is bad.
There are a ton of indie bands who write really good, smart, catchy music. I tend to like things that are a bit more experimental (TV on the Radio, Menomena, Modest Mouse, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), but if that's not your cup of tea you can always try Andrew Bird, MGMT, Cut Copy, anything that Danger Mouse is involved in, The National, Elbow, Fleet Foxes... the list goes on.
Some of the popular music may be crap (though don't make the mistake of allowing that to be your representation of different genres like rap), but if you look even for a bit you can find some good stuff.
Don't kid yourself. Mainstream music did not suddenly become poor when piracy started. Music variety declined well before napster. The difference is, people had no alternatives before piracy. They settled for the bland stuff they heard on the radio. Now, piracy opens ears. People can listen to music that they could never find in record shops, and they are demanding more.
If you can't sell ice to eskimos, maybe you'd better stop selling ice. We all forget that before the phonograph, musicians made a living off live performances. Even current bands with albums make more money with their tours anyway. Isn't it possible to make a living on concerts alone, and give away recorded music to promote your live shows? Today's music scene breeds lazy artists, too passive to playout. Chumps who would rather churn out a few good albums and live off their success until their 90.
The indie scene is doing fine, as am I, but I know several great indie bands that won't or can't take that next step thanks to piracy.
What is the next step? Getting on a major label? Becoming a house hold name? Being a "rock star"? That idea needs to die, and it needs to die quick. As recording becomes less and less profitable, the industry won't be able to support that kind of thing for long. The indie bands you speak of should be happy that they can do what they love and make a decent living, and give up any dreams of becoming rock icons in the age of the famous-to-15-people youtube celebrity.
After taking a step back from everything related to music, radio, magazines, and quality of artists, there isn't one thing that isn't failing, Radio isn't playing anything that isn't on their Clear Channel list and doesn't care to play anything extra. Rolling Stone, which is supposedly is a magazine that celebrates music, is failing miserably in content by falling to much on pop music when really good rock bands are out there, but can't get any airplay because the only thing that sells is pop music. Then
So games and DVD sales are hurting music sales? If you take away the fact that people can pirate music, what happens then? Do people take some of the money they have been putting into games and DVDs and put it back into buying music? They obviously think music is worthwhile, otherwise they wouldn't even be bothering to download it.
You can't just say "well, other things are up, so I think it's those things" without factoring in that music can be had for free easily and that may be a factor in why games an
People only have a finite amount of money. What the music industry has failed to grasp is that it no longer has a near monopoly on entertainment that it shared with the likes of the movie industry for the decades before the internet. It now has to compete with a bigger set of movies than ever before, it has to compete with the games industry and really for teenagers it even has to compete with things like text message costs and so on.
The music industry isn't in competition with piracy, it's in competition with every other form of entertainment expenditure out there. The only way to win that battle is how you would win a single industry battle - provide the most attractive product.
When people can buy their computer games, say, Rock Band, and get their music as part of that, they'll be less inclined to buy the music alone.
The same goes for those developers complaining about people pirating their games but if people can only afford one game, they'll buy the best game, that doesn't stop them wanting to play the other game though, they simply don't have money for both, so they'll buy the better one and pirate the not so good one.
It's simple business competition through and through - again, make a good product and you'll get your fair share of sales from people who think your product is the one worth paying for. Try and sell people crap, or try and sell people the same thing multiple times in multiple formats and don't be suprised when it's not your product they choose to spend their money on.
I'm sure some people will try to argue it's immoral that people do this and that's a fair enough argument, but arguing the morality of it doesn't change the reality of it and anyone with any business sense would realise that and make sure their business factors it in and produces a product good enough to get their share of the finite pool of consumer cash out there.
If I hear some music I like, on the radio, and I then buy the CD, the artist makes some money; if a friend of mine already has the CD and I make a copy, the artist gets stiffed. *I* still get the music, but the people who made it don't get paid.
I totally understand that artists, the **AA, the IP lobby, etc., have a problem with piracy. It may not be "theft" in the same sense as "stealing someone's car", but it is still a breach of the social contract. Artists spend a lot of time and effort creating art (m
Music sales going down because game sales are increasing? Where's the support for that? This has all the appearance of two random facts being pulled out of the air and a causal link assumed for no particular reason.
(Especially given that, in the graph in TFA, game and DVD sales appear to have been increasing over the whole period [1999-2008] and music sales appear to have started significantly declining in 2004 -- they appear to have been pretty close
I wrote a letter to "Wired" stating essentially this... two or three years ago, in response to some article or another discussing music piracy.
When I was a kid (back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, of course), home entertainment media was pretty much your choice of LP, 45-single, cassette, or 8-track. In short, all products of the Recording Industry. Today, you have CDs, LPs (rarely) and downloads from those guys. But that same entertainment dollar is now also split between electronic gadgets, videos (DVD, Blu-Ray, that one guy still buying VHS), and gaming (console, pocket, online).
Then add in the fact that digital downloads re-introduced the single, and the whole industry plan that removed the single back in the 70s in favor of the whole album is gone... only now, they've grown dependent on selling whole albums. Then add in discounts on digital downloads... I've bought direct form the artist, from eMusic.com, and from Amazon.com. I only buy full albums, but if the digital version is near the CD price, I'll just buy the CD. When I can get an album for $2.00-$4.00, I probably buy the download.
And that's perhaps a good thing in the long run for the music industry. They'll have to adjust, and stop paying their relatively worthless executives so much. The new point of stability has a CD selling for under $10, so that it's seen as competitive with DVDs at $15 or video games at $30-$60.
They also need to acknowledge the actual role of record companies in the 21rst century, and price accordingly. There was a time when these guys were responsible for all sorts of artist development... they hired the backing band, they owned the studios, etc. It was very much the same artist management model use in Hollywood of the 40's and 50's. But today, you don't get a recording contract with a major label until you have a fully produced CD to show them... they're not even remotely part of any creative process at that level (they may get involved pushing established artists... after huge cuts to their rosters, due to cost reductions and mergers, they're more dependent than ever on a few big hits every year, despite the fact you can't really depend on that).
So the Big Label really has a purpose only as a publisher and distributer... the same thing book publishers do. Only, when I buy a Stephen King book, I see his copyright on the backside of the title page. When you buy most CDs, you'll see the record company claiming copyright. That's a projection of just how important they think they are, and when that starts to change, you'll know that there's maybe some hope for the industry. The big labels, or their replacements, will catch onto this... the only question is whether or not a record label still makes any sense, or generates any money, by the time they do. It's easy to see folks like Apple, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best-Buy, and Starbucks replacing Sony, Warner Bros, EMI, etc. if things keep on their current path.
Some excerpt (Score:2)
Re:Some excerpt (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Some excerpt (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't correlation or causality. It's simply painfully obvious.
Those in the game industry explicitly acknowledge this and
freely admit that they have to compete with not just other
forms of paid diversion but of diversions in general. The
game developer has to compete with it all, including sex.
The members of the MPAA and RIAA are probably too complacent
and too "fat and happy" to realize this.
Game developers do though.
Parent
Not just that (Score:3, Insightful)
But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue.
An excellent point about how the music industry is cooking the books. Here's another point they refuse to discuss: You can illegally download games too, and it doesn't seem to be hurting the games industry one single bit.
No, really! You can. And yet the games industry is booming and the music industry is not.
I wonder what
Thankyou Guardian (Score:5, Funny)
For defining Opportunity cost, and boring everyone senseless at the same time.
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According to the RIAA each song is worth $750, so with 16,987 songs that's $12,740,250 US Dollars that I would have spent if it had not been for thepiratebay.org
The RIAA claims that a university student would have spent more than 12million dollars had it not been for piracy?
I think this proves that the RIAA do not have even the most remote clue as to what they are talking about and we can all safely discard all past, present and future claims without the risk of discarding a single fact.
Who would win in a fight? (Score:2)
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no one
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ah you're wrong...
One of them would win, some times one, some times the other...
but the loser will always be the consumer.
the interesting part is that in a proper market, the consumer would be the winner when there's increased competition.
The magic of Blu-Ray! (Score:3, Funny)
Let's see.
Games are on Blue-Ray.
Movies are on Blue-Ray.
If only the music industry would put their product on Blue-Ray, it would sell well, too!
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Yay, get your favorite artists entire catalog at 96kHz on a single disk.
Except that's not what they'll do. They'll put the same recordings as on the CD, and then fill the rest of the disk with ads.
Re:The magic of Blu-Ray! (Score:4, Insightful)
Blu-Ray == fail. Anybody who buys Blu-Ray media will go the way of the schmucks who blew thousands of dollars on Laserdiscs. Every game I've ever bought has either been on cassette tape, 5.25" or 3.5" floppies, downloaded, CD-ROM, or DVD, and every movie I've ever bought has been on VHS tape or DVD. When Blu-Ray drives cost $19.95, can be made by anybody, and the Blu-Ray disc section is bigger than the DVD section, then let's talk.
BluRay is penetrating at double the rate DVD did. [highdefdigest.com]
So.... how's that HD-DVD player working out for you?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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You did know that Blue-Ray players can play DVD's as well? Meaning you can buy the player without replacing your DVD's, then acquire Blue-Ray discs as new purchases.
Blue-Ray is also NOT a Sony only format (like UMD is), it's a consortium format, just like DVD and CD-Audio are.
Re:The magic of Blu-Ray! (Score:4, Informative)
This is precisely what people said about DVD's about a decade ago, and the fact that you've bought DVD's and DVD-media games proves that it worked itself out in the end, even if only by sheer force of the market, whether or not people actually did want it (and they did). I'm not particularly happy about Blu-Ray winning the format war (I was more a fan of HD-DVD, for basically the sole reason that Sony's had a terrible track record with standardizing media), but at least we have a successor format to do us until we get some good holographic storage going. Given the consumer shelf life of DVD, that should put us in about the right timeframe for it by the time Blu-Ray is long in the tooth. Already there are BD-ROM drives for around $100, and players for about that much. Burners are still expensive, but still continuously dropping in price. Hell, a Liteon 4x BD-R drive is currently running for around $200 CAD on NCIX, and a really nice LG 8x one is only about $60 more. The price is plummeting, and with the PS3 gaining momentum in the gaming market and Blu-Ray being the de-facto standard in high-definition storage media for movies, we'll eventually see Blu-Ray take over and land nicely in the spot DVD landed in some years ago.
Parent
Re:The magic of Blu-Ray! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is precisely what people said about DVD's about a decade ago
No it isn't. People looked at DVD and saw:
People look at BD and see longer load times, and a better picture (if you also buy a new TV when you buy your BD player). DVD was better in every way than VHS. BD is not noticeably better on existing equipment. If you bought a DVD player, took it home, plugged it in to your existing setup, and watched a DVD, you immediately got noticeable improvements. BD does not have this advantage unless you already have an HD TV.
The other thing to change is that the durability of DVDs has made rental prices drop and - most importantly - made renting by post easy. These rental services give you access to a massive library of material on DVD. Most of this is not available on BD and even if it were, there is no compelling reason to prefer the BD version; in a lot of cases the source material does not make use of the quality available for DVD.
That's not to say HD video won't catch on. BD has a race to get sufficient market penetration before it's completely obsolete though. I can get a 20Mb/s connection now. My ISP is currently rolling out 50Mb/s, and their competitors are deploying similar speeds. BD has a maximum AV bitrate of 48 Mb/s. The companies that offer DVD rental are now offering Internet streaming as well. Given the choice between a BD player, where I have to get disks posted to me, or a box that plugs into my Internet connection and lets me stream video on demand, I know which I'd prefer. With the introduction of iPlayer, I already watch more via the Internet than by any other medium, including DVDs. I doubt very much that that trend will reverse, certainly not in time to save BD.
Parent
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Who would have thought? (Score:5, Insightful)
flawed logic (Score:5, Insightful)
The article claims:
1- consumers buy games/DVDs over the latest music album
2- consumers don't have enough money for music
3- consumers download music
Based on their evidence, though, you could also conclude:
1- consumers download music
2- consumers still have money
3- consumers buy games/DVDs with saved money
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that downloading a song==lost sale, but I don't think the evidence stated necessarily means that people are choosing games/DVDs over music.
One thing that is not really debatable is that the music industry business model is outdated, overgrown with middlemen, and on it's way out. And the end won't come soon enough.
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It is a bit of a leap, yeah, but when you think about it, there are a couple of reasons for that:
1) People universally dislike the RIAA. At least around here, people like to spite them as much as possible.
2) It isn't universally illegal to download music over the internet, and still is a legal grey area.
3) The cost of a music CD, given the amount of enjoyment and entertainment (assuming all songs in the album are "good") versus the cost of a DVD/game and the amount of enjoyment and entertainment gained from
There's another segment, too (Score:3, Informative)
I download cracked games and MP3s to check out the content before I part with my hard-to-come-by money. While I no longer spend nearly as much on either as I used to, I am much happier with the items I do purchase.
And no, you can't really get a feal for whether a game is going to be worth playing on your home system from a demo at the store. Aside from that, the only game demos I see running are on consoles, not PCs.
Some music stores let you listen to a select set of albums before you buy them, but u
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Also is this graph adjusted for inflation?
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people buy games and DVDs these days instead of music because most of the music available now simply sucks
IMO the value of a $50 game is far greater than a value of a $15 60 min. audio CD or a 90 min. movie DVD. Music feels dirt cheap compared to games where every single object in a huge GTA map had been created and placed by hand, and when you can do all kinds of things and expect reasonable game response to them. I feel comfortable with paying for a game because I see what's there on the DVD and I'm am
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You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie...
I'm sorry, but that's pretty narrow-minded - if you think music always sounds the same and that therefore you have no reason to listen to it more than once, you either have truly horrific taste in music or you don't pay much attention to it. I've listened to some albums hundreds of times and I keep hearing new things, making new connections, realizing new influences and learning from them. Video games migh
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You can't play with your music, you can't introduce new elements (or your character) to a movie...
I'm sorry, but that's pretty narrow-minded - if you think music always sounds the same and that therefore you have no reason to listen to it more than once, you either have truly horrific taste in music or you don't pay much attention to it. I've listened to some albums hundreds of times and I keep hearing new things, making new connections, realizing new influences and learning from them. Video games might be more expansive, but they are ultimately finite in scope - a good album breathes and grows depending on the other stuff you listen to, on what you bring to the table. Video games are like stale bubblegum from a supermarket vending machine in comparison.
I could take an axe to my game systems tomorrow and not shed a tear, but the thought of living without music scares the piss outta me.
Music ain't that much these days. I realize your perception of it may change over time, but that's as far as it gets. In a videogame like GTA or many others, you can face a very wide spectrum of situations you don't expect, so there's much more stimulation available to you.
The magic of videogames is the freedom they offer. It's the ultimate form of entertainment.
Don't forget Disney... (Score:4, Insightful)
The rise of zero personality manufacturer bands (The Jonas Brothers... like the Monkees but with out the hard cutting edge) and their cult of multiple product selling surely also has to be responsible. Its not just Games and DVDs its the fact that for a given "star" you can get pens, pencils, school bags, DVDs, 3D Movies and all manner of other crap. Their objective almost isn't to sell the music its just to sell the image and then have people buy lots of things with that image.
Dora the Explorer has as much credibility as these bands and is focused on a similar financial plan.
Meanwhile good bands seem to be going into the live tour set up more and more and being less worried about CDs. So what is killing CDs is that at the crap end people are flogging pens and school bags and at the good end its about the live gigs. Meaning that if you want entertainment at home you go for DVDs (because the Cinema is a rip-off) or Games (where you get to do more of what you want).
The music industry has killed the CD by focusing on bag sales and forcing decent artists to focus (thank god) on live gigs.
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This is actually really insightful. Here's the UK chart [bbc.co.uk]. Don't recognise anything from it? Here's all the number 1s from the Seventies [theofficialcharts.com]. Ah, music was so much better then, when we had the genius of Pink Floyd and *cough* Showaddywaddy.
The RIAA's new strategy (Score:2)
As much as I would like to believe this (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I would like to believe this, the mantra still applies:
correlation != causation. (and I'm not even sure there's enough data to establish for the former)
No more expensive singles or album sales (Score:3, Insightful)
because you can get the one song you like off of iTunes/amazon/whatever. Why always start from the assumption that it must be illegal activity that is adversely affecting sales.
The legal marketplace has changed to benefit the consumer economically, by not gouging them for $6/15 for a single/album respectively, now they can get what they wanted for around a $1. Some will buy more music but many others will move that savings to other avenues of entertainment.
Inconvenient truth? (Score:2)
Where is the InconvenientTruth tag? It's interesting how a fresh perspective on an issue sheds an interesting new light. Of course this is to be expected. The music industry and all of "entertainment" have probably been quite aware of this. But when delivering a plea to legislators and making arguments for why various manufacturers should support a particular measure or restriction, it doesn't help them to tell the complete truth.
People need to recognize what business they're in (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems so obvious it amazes me how many higher ups in these industries fail to recognize that they're not in the record business, or the video game business, or the film business. They're in the entertainment business. If you're going to make it a pain in the ass to purchase your music or to watch your movie, I'm just as happy to spend my time reading a book, or surfing the Internet, or playing a video game. 99% of the time I'm not even going to bother trying to hunt down a pirated copy, because quite frankly I'd rather just spend that time being entertained by one of the other numerous options I have available to me. You're not competing for my money, you're competing for my time, and you're competing against everything else I can possibly find to fill it with. The sooner these businesses learn this the easier they'll find it to get my money.
Supply and Demand (Score:2)
The argument that 1 download = 1 lost sale was always pretty silly. Obviously the demand for something that costs $0 is going to be greater than if it costs $20.
Could we get a "duh" tag? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is the main target audience for popular music (i.e. the staple of the music industry)? Teenagers. Now, teenagers have a bit more pocket money today than they did in the 80s and 90s, inflation sure took care of that, but they also have a lot more to spend it on.
I was a teenager in the 80s and 90s. What was there for us to spend our pocket money on? Music. Fashion. Junk food. Umm... Arcades, maybe. Besides that... umm... I'm open for suggestions, but that's what my friends spent their dough on (for me it was computer games, but that was me...).
Today, you have cell phones (and the various services that come with it, from ringtones to games), you have computer games, MMOs with their recurring subscriptions, Trading Card games, you have all sorts of markets geared either exclusively at teenagers or at least aiming heavily for them.
The music industry simply has to share the market with others.
I would say that fits my personal spending habits (Score:4, Interesting)
I switched to shoutcast streams many years ago, and as of a little over a year ago I started using Pandora.com and haven't looked back.
I buy and play games for my xbox and my PC. I purchase movies (I still haven't paid more than $10 for an HD movie, MPC + HD/BR player FTW).
Anyway, that said - if you were to graph my spending over the last decade 1999-2009 you would see a lot of money going to the music industry (15-25albums
News Flash: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hear hear.
After 20+ years of Rap & Hip Hop who else is ready for something with a bit of tune to it?
Yeah, I said it.
Re:News Flash: (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me a break. If you're listening solely to the radio, yes, you're going to be disappointed (and even disgusted) at what's there. But if you actually spend a bit of time looking, you can find some really great artists. Music is always going to be alive... just because the nostalgia you feel makes you just a teensy bit unopen to newer, different stuff doesn't mean the music is bad.
There are a ton of indie bands who write really good, smart, catchy music. I tend to like things that are a bit more experimental (TV on the Radio, Menomena, Modest Mouse, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), but if that's not your cup of tea you can always try Andrew Bird, MGMT, Cut Copy, anything that Danger Mouse is involved in, The National, Elbow, Fleet Foxes... the list goes on.
Some of the popular music may be crap (though don't make the mistake of allowing that to be your representation of different genres like rap), but if you look even for a bit you can find some good stuff.
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Re:News Flash: (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself. Mainstream music did not suddenly become poor when piracy started. Music variety declined well before napster. The difference is, people had no alternatives before piracy. They settled for the bland stuff they heard on the radio. Now, piracy opens ears. People can listen to music that they could never find in record shops, and they are demanding more.
If you can't sell ice to eskimos, maybe you'd better stop selling ice. We all forget that before the phonograph, musicians made a living off live performances. Even current bands with albums make more money with their tours anyway. Isn't it possible to make a living on concerts alone, and give away recorded music to promote your live shows? Today's music scene breeds lazy artists, too passive to playout. Chumps who would rather churn out a few good albums and live off their success until their 90.
The indie scene is doing fine, as am I, but I know several great indie bands that won't or can't take that next step thanks to piracy.
What is the next step? Getting on a major label? Becoming a house hold name? Being a "rock star"? That idea needs to die, and it needs to die quick. As recording becomes less and less profitable, the industry won't be able to support that kind of thing for long. The indie bands you speak of should be happy that they can do what they love and make a decent living, and give up any dreams of becoming rock icons in the age of the famous-to-15-people youtube celebrity.
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Business model: FAIL (Score:2, Insightful)
Now for the opposite argument (Score:2)
So games and DVD sales are hurting music sales? If you take away the fact that people can pirate music, what happens then? Do people take some of the money they have been putting into games and DVDs and put it back into buying music? They obviously think music is worthwhile, otherwise they wouldn't even be bothering to download it.
You can't just say "well, other things are up, so I think it's those things" without factoring in that music can be had for free easily and that may be a factor in why games an
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This may come as a shock, but movies and games can also be pirated.
I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
It's poor product that is hurting sales. Put the blame where it belongs, with the RIAA cartel itself.
No, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've said this for a while.
People only have a finite amount of money. What the music industry has failed to grasp is that it no longer has a near monopoly on entertainment that it shared with the likes of the movie industry for the decades before the internet. It now has to compete with a bigger set of movies than ever before, it has to compete with the games industry and really for teenagers it even has to compete with things like text message costs and so on.
The music industry isn't in competition with piracy, it's in competition with every other form of entertainment expenditure out there. The only way to win that battle is how you would win a single industry battle - provide the most attractive product.
When people can buy their computer games, say, Rock Band, and get their music as part of that, they'll be less inclined to buy the music alone.
The same goes for those developers complaining about people pirating their games but if people can only afford one game, they'll buy the best game, that doesn't stop them wanting to play the other game though, they simply don't have money for both, so they'll buy the better one and pirate the not so good one.
It's simple business competition through and through - again, make a good product and you'll get your fair share of sales from people who think your product is the one worth paying for. Try and sell people crap, or try and sell people the same thing multiple times in multiple formats and don't be suprised when it's not your product they choose to spend their money on.
I'm sure some people will try to argue it's immoral that people do this and that's a fair enough argument, but arguing the morality of it doesn't change the reality of it and anyone with any business sense would realise that and make sure their business factors it in and produces a product good enough to get their share of the finite pool of consumer cash out there.
Screwing the artists? (Score:2)
I totally understand that artists, the **AA, the IP lobby, etc., have a problem with piracy. It may not be "theft" in the same sense as "stealing someone's car", but it is still a breach of the social contract. Artists spend a lot of time and effort creating art (m
Correlation/causation, post hoc ergo propter-what? (Score:2)
Game sales going up...okay.
Music sales going down...okay.
Music sales going down because game sales are increasing? Where's the support for that? This has all the appearance of two random facts being pulled out of the air and a causal link assumed for no particular reason.
(Especially given that, in the graph in TFA, game and DVD sales appear to have been increasing over the whole period [1999-2008] and music sales appear to have started significantly declining in 2004 -- they appear to have been pretty close
Not even accurate. (Score:2)
This is kind of a no-brainer (Score:4, Insightful)
I wrote a letter to "Wired" stating essentially this... two or three years ago, in response to some article or another discussing music piracy.
When I was a kid (back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, of course), home entertainment media was pretty much your choice of LP, 45-single, cassette, or 8-track. In short, all products of the Recording Industry. Today, you have CDs, LPs (rarely) and downloads from those guys. But that same entertainment dollar is now also split between electronic gadgets, videos (DVD, Blu-Ray, that one guy still buying VHS), and gaming (console, pocket, online).
Then add in the fact that digital downloads re-introduced the single, and the whole industry plan that removed the single back in the 70s in favor of the whole album is gone... only now, they've grown dependent on selling whole albums. Then add in discounts on digital downloads... I've bought direct form the artist, from eMusic.com, and from Amazon.com. I only buy full albums, but if the digital version is near the CD price, I'll just buy the CD. When I can get an album for $2.00-$4.00, I probably buy the download.
And that's perhaps a good thing in the long run for the music industry. They'll have to adjust, and stop paying their relatively worthless executives so much. The new point of stability has a CD selling for under $10, so that it's seen as competitive with DVDs at $15 or video games at $30-$60.
They also need to acknowledge the actual role of record companies in the 21rst century, and price accordingly. There was a time when these guys were responsible for all sorts of artist development... they hired the backing band, they owned the studios, etc. It was very much the same artist management model use in Hollywood of the 40's and 50's. But today, you don't get a recording contract with a major label until you have a fully produced CD to show them... they're not even remotely part of any creative process at that level (they may get involved pushing established artists... after huge cuts to their rosters, due to cost reductions and mergers, they're more dependent than ever on a few big hits every year, despite the fact you can't really depend on that).
So the Big Label really has a purpose only as a publisher and distributer... the same thing book publishers do. Only, when I buy a Stephen King book, I see his copyright on the backside of the title page. When you buy most CDs, you'll see the record company claiming copyright. That's a projection of just how important they think they are, and when that starts to change, you'll know that there's maybe some hope for the industry. The big labels, or their replacements, will catch onto this... the only question is whether or not a record label still makes any sense, or generates any money, by the time they do. It's easy to see folks like Apple, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best-Buy, and Starbucks replacing Sony, Warner Bros, EMI, etc. if things keep on their current path.
Re:What's needed (Score:4, Insightful)
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