Yes folks while you all argue over the ethics of paying for a 99cent download spare a thought for the poor saps who buy a 10 second clip for top dollar.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8635/Why+doesn%27t+the+RIAA+talk+about+the+%249+billion+USD+in+ringtone+sales%3FA detail that seems hidden in all the fuss over declining music sales by the RIAA and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), is the fact that people bought over $9 billion USD worth of ringtones worldwide last year. That's right, $9 billion USD! This is about a 41% increase over last year and is expected to hit about $32 billion USD by the year 2010.
What makes this so odd is that on average we're talking about people shelling out $2 bucks for a 10 second clip of what they could normally purchase in it's entirety for half the price. That's 3% of the real product at 200% the price. What's even more ironic is that $6 billion USD of the total ringtone sales were spent on those crappy mono and polyphonic style ringtones that make even karaoke machines cringe.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that worldwide music industry sales were about $20 billion in 2006, down from $21 billion in 2005. Their RIAA counterpart blamed uncooperative governments, unethical college students, 10-year old kids, a paralyzed man, and in the case of all cases, even the deceased. They pretty much blamed everyone and everything twice over for a failed strategy that's been maddeningly obvious to everyone else but them for years now.
Does anyone really think that the media industry are really losing out, they like to demonstrate only skewd and out of context statistics but seem rather shy of letting anyone know that given the uptake of digital sales and ringtones, overall the picture is remarkably different, profits are up yet again and all the hullabaloo of chasing files sharers is just to save face, they seem too proud to admit they got it wrong and nearly missed the online sales boat, something they should thank napster and its decendants for.
