That one paragraph was meant tongue in cheek... but you're right, people smarter than me have discussed this.
Wired 14.09: No Suit Required The music industry is suffering. The major record labels – which rely on CDs for most of their revenue – are in decline. CD sales in the US have dropped more than 20 percent from a peak of $13.4 billion in 2000. But don't be fooled: The market for music is thriving. With the rise of peer-to-peer networks, the iPod, and other digital technologies – plus a 100 percent jump in concert ticket sales since 1999 – the world is awash in music. The industry now has more sources of revenue – ringtones, concert tickets, license agreements with TV shows and videogames – than ever before.
Less popular artists profit from filesharing | TorrentFreak
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script>The rich get poorer and the poor get richer. That’s what filesharing does for the music industry. No wonder the RIAA is desperately trying to shutdown all filesharing activities.
A recent overview of the current literature on the effect of filesharing on record sales shows that the most popular artist (top 25%) sell less records. However, […]
The rich get poorer and the poor get richer. That’s what filesharing does for the music industry. No wonder the RIAA is desperately trying to shutdown all filesharing activities.
A
recent overview of the current literature on the effect of filesharing on record sales shows that the most popular artist (top 25%) sell less records. However, the remaining 75% of all artists actually profits from filesharing. How this is possible?
Easy, sharing increases the amount of artists you get familiar with. Especially BitTorrent sites are an excellent platform for promoting new, or less popular artists.
First of all, on BitTorrent sites the users decide what’s popular, not the radiostations, record labels and pluggers. Besides this, it’s far more easy to first download an album, listen to it, and then decide if you want to buy it or not. Sure, most of the people will not buy the album, but since you will probably tell tell your friends about this “great new album”, popularity will grow, and eventually the artist will profit from it.
An excellent example is the band
Harvey Danger who offers the opportunity to download their album on their website. As soon as they decided to do this, their popularity grew. By offering their album as a download, they gained a lot of fans, collected donations, and probably sold more albums.
Something to think about…
A critique of some of the studies:
P2P, Online File-Sharing, and the Music Industry
And an interesting interview about new strategies:
OpenBusiness » Blog Archive » Interview with Beatpick - FairPlay Music Label
Movies have the same problem.... er...
LawGeek: File-Sharing Has No Effect on Record Xmas Movie Profits File-Sharing Has No Effect on Record Xmas Movie Profits
Jack Valenti and the MPAA love to scream about how file-sharing and other forms of priracy are decimating the movie industry. In fact, they now show
sympathetic trailers before almost every movie pleading their case against downloading because "Movies.. They're worth it."
Well, it appears that they
are worth it, at least in terms of $$$ at the box office. Reuters
reports that
Return of the King is approaching close to $500 million in box office revenues after only two weeks in the theaters worldwide and that it could reach $1 billion soon. And this is
before any kind of DVD sales or rentals (not to mention TV presentations or marketing tie-ins), which have also
broken numerous revenue records for Hollywood and the MPAA.
In fact, according to the Reuters article, this has been
THE ... BEST ... XMAS ... EVER ... for the movie industry:
So while I respect your right to disagree, I do want you to know that I have actually researched my opinion.