Are there any reliable studies showing whether artists are doing better, worse or the same now that a good chunk of music sales has cut out the packaging aspect? I know that many folks still don’t have broadband at home but a decent fraction of the population does, and that should be cutting into the jewel case and shrink wrap industry, resulting in increased profit for the artists. I think we know that it’s more affordable for the consumer now, at 99¢ per song.
I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual CD in a brick & mortar store. It has been at least 6 or 8 years since I was at Tower Records shelling out $16.99 for new releases.
Billboard has been tracking music sales practically forever, so there’s no need for an in-depth. Just compare the biggest selling albums from the 90s with the biggest selling albums from the 2000s:
There can be many reasons why sales are slumping. What if the biggest selling album this year just wasn’t as good as the biggest selling album from 1995? There might be other factors involved that have nothing to do with the production cost of music sales. Maybe the Baby Boomers are getting older and not buying as much music? I know that’s true of me.
The main reason sales have contracted is because people can easily get the music they want for free in a way that they couldn’t during most of the 1990s.
I’m not sure how you know that, but in any case one pirated piece of music does not equate to one lost sale. In fact people who download free songs overwhelmingly end up buying more music (I did read this recently but somehow cannot locate the reference any more). Other data:
“The weight of current evidence strongly supports a view that file-sharing diminishes the revenues of the recording industry. There are two forms of evidence.” - To read further on the topic go to MP3, Copyright, Piracy, Intellectual Property Issues where Stan Liebowitz gives a good run through of research into audio filesharing (ie illegal downloading). Your “In fact people who download free songs overwhelmingly end up buying more music” sounds like nonsense to me. Record sales are down because people don’t pay for the music they listen to as often as they used to.
CD sales are clearly down (and the quality of the records/CDs is irrelevant – people always bought records others considered low quality – it’s the total sales drop that’s disturbing). Sales of legal downloads is making up for a portion of the drop, but not enough to reach pre-file-sharing levels.
As for the “pirated piece of music equating with one lost sale” argument, it’s attacking a straw man. No one has claimed a one-to-one correspondence. But what is happening is that people are download music without paying. It doesn’t matter if they would have bought all that music or only a fraction of it – it’s lost revenues.
As as for the claim that people who download free songs overwhelmingly buy more music, do an experiment. Count the number of songs you’ve downloaded without paying the artist. Then count the number you’ve downloaded and paid for. Which number is bigger?
I’ve read numerous times that artists rarely make money from album sales. They get an advance which is used to make the record, and the music company gets the profit on the first million or two sold. In past decades even top selling bands often made no money from their first several albums.
Musicians make big money on concert tours. Songwriters get royalties when their songs are aired a lot or covered by other artists. Artists get money when their songs appear in movies, TV commercials, etc. They often get a good cut of the profits on merchandise sales. Except for a slice of the royalties, none of this income is affected by file-sharing. In fact, file-sharing exposes new bands to a wider audience that may then go to shows or buy merchandise.
It’s music companies that are really damaged by file-sharing. They are also arguably affected by the fact that people can cherry-pick songs they like instead of buying the whole album or just the single. But any statistics that show a drop in album sales should also take into account ringtones, which are very profitable for music companies (and perhaps artists) and reportedly are big business.
Well here’s proof that the plural of anecdote !=data. I have never in my life downloaded a single free song, movie, TV show or anything else. I have paid for more than 0 songs off iTunes (I’d say about 6). So my answer to your last question is: the latter. But as I’m one single sample, your question and my answer to it are entirely irrelevant to the larger question.
Can you support this assertion? The music industry, specifically the RIAA, routinely say “piracy cost the music industry $xxx Billion last year”, and that’s exactly how they calculate it - estimated free downloaded tracks times the average cost per track were it to be bought. They make no allowance whatsoever for the obvious fact that the alternative to many, if not most, pirated downloads is nothing at all, not a sale.
The advent of viable download models, such as iTunes, Walmart, and so on shows that there are business models that work and people will pay for. How else do you explain these successes, when there are free, almost risk-free, alternatives available?
Actually that’s precisely what matters. If someone pirates a song, but would not have bought it if it were not “free”, then that’s NOT a lost sale. It’s a failure to make an extra sale, which is a different thing entirely. Piracy matters a lot when it prevents sales that would otherwise have been made, but not much when it does not. The argument is about how much of each of those occurs.
Besides the piracy argument, a possible factor could also be that any one person’s entertainment budget is not infinitely expansible. Back in the 70s, 80s, even the early 90s, people bought music, books and went to the cinema. That’s about it.
But these days, it’s not uncommon to have one or more gaming system, plus games and accessories for it, plus movie and TV series DVDs, one or more cell phones, mp3 player, TiVo, home computer, etc… on top of the music, books and cinema staples.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’d rather buy a new game than a new CD any day of the week.