Game, DVD Sales Hurting Music Industry More Than Downloads 223
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."
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.
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 usually it's limited to the current top 10 or 20 CDs, which are rarely what I'm interested in. For that matter, I find I just gave up on shopping at the local CD store and go straight to the internet to order new CDs -- the stuff I want is rarely stocked by the local stores. (Ask them about Blind Pig Records and you just get a blank stare.)
Re:The magic of Blu-Ray! (Score:3, Informative)
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.