Yes folks its that time of the year we see the excuses and "blame filesharers" mantra being wheeled out to explain why the cocaine allowance for recording industry executives has been slashed in this years budget
http://torrentfreak.com/misleading-statistics-from-the-record-industry-080126/The IFPI recently published their latest digital music report. Amongst their claims “illegal downloading” outperforms legal downloading by a ratio of 20:1, and that because of this, the recording industry has lost US$3.7 billion.
The press releases put out by the recording industry focus solely on piracy for declining sales, while in reality there are so many reasons.
A decline in CD sales is an indication of saturation in a market where innovation is lacking. There’s also only so many “best of’s”, “greatest hits” and other compilation albums consumers are going to buy before thinking “I already own three copies of most of these songs, why would I buy another one?”
Now it seems consumers don’t think they should have pay to move their collection of music to their computers and media players, and especially not pay to receive an inferior quality copy of something they already own.
There is no doubt that piracy is on the rise. This in in part due to the aforementioned, overpriced, inferior or non-existing alternatives. This aside, it is absolutely ridiculous to compare downloads with actual sales.
Ahh the smell of sweet success folks its now coming to the attention of the greedy Cartel that folks are no longer happy to be defrauded, mislead or double dipped regarding their rights and payments for over priced products filled with DRM, the afore-mentioned likely also to cost you hundreds of dollars in PC repair bills is you bought sony products.
Many folks are still voting with their feet in an embargo against the use of lawyer led economic terrorism directed at file sharers, lets keep up the good work folks and only buy second hand CD,s etc if you have to really have a copy of something, lets not help them pay to sue any more folks.
It does seem strange though folks that out of the total amount threatened with suit they have taken less than 1% to court, and most of those have been heavily contested and cost them more to employ top lawyers than any gain from penalties imposed, the truth of the matter is we are winning with our refusal to purchase over priced products, who here can seriously say they get value for money from legal digital downloads ?
If you add up the cost of purchasing the tracks individually it comes to about the price of the shop CD, the problem with that is that you dont have anything tangible, no case or cover lables no disk to store away safely, in fact itunes and the rest can change their terms in the future and deny you the right to even play what you have purchased, and what about the savings on distribution, surely it costs more to make ship and package a CD than it does to download the album from theses download services ?
Of course it does and yet this saving will never be passed on to you the consumer, so what do you do when they got you over the monopoly barrel ?
Enjoy the local radio station buy second hand CD,s and look seriously at some of the newer non RIAA labelled groups who dont want $10 million before they get up to play a gig, lets reward them for their talent and honesty, independent musicians who market directly via the web to cut out the middle men are the future, lets shine some light their way next time we open our wallets.
