Recording Industry in Australia works to conceal record-breaking sales

Vampyromaniac · Mar 30, 2004, 07:19 AM

From the commentary by Ken Fisher on ArsTechnica:
"The Recording Industry has spent a prodigious amount of effort on manipulating statistics in order to shroud the industry in the shadow of doom and gloom. In recent years, the push has been to villainize P2P users, often to such an extent that the serious career criminals are ignored when the discussion of piracy is brought up. To make matters worse, the industry has been caught playing fast and loose with consumption data, all the while ignoring the opportunity that's been in front of their face. Sadly, the trend continues. The Australian market has had its best year ever, but they're trying to cover it up to rhetorical ends."

Read the original article at: SMH.com.au
Read Fisher's full comments at: ArsTechnica.com

**dj_stick** · Mar 30, 2004, 07:25 AM

yeh, album sales down here have been up whereas single sales have gone down.
singles are supposed to be released to promote albums sales and it sounds like P2P is replacing this promotion at no cost to the record labels

WaltC · Mar 30, 2004, 05:08 PM

Looking at other forms of media--say newspapers, books--it's obvious that what concerns newspapers and book publishers is how many newspapers and books they sell.

Have you ever heard a newspaper complain that a small business will buy one copy of the newspaper and share it, daily, with office employees of any given number? I never have. Even with home subscriptions, more than one person will routinely read the daily paper. So it's clear that "newspaper sharing" has never bothered the newspapers--in fact, the practice is not only expected, it's traditional.

Books are the same way. Publishers are always concerned with how many individual copies of a given book are sold while being completely unconcerned with how many friends and relatives of the people who buy the books read them. Book sharing is utterly traditional, and we have an entire Public Library system devoted to the ends of doing nothing but sharing books. Once the library buys the book the publisher gets no more royalties on that copy regardless of how many times the library shares it.

Basically, book and newspaper sharing have never bothered these media companies because they've known for a long time that these practices actually serve to stimulate additional sales of books and newspapers, rather than curtailing them--just like the RIAA has always known that song-sharing via the radio has always been a great sales stimulus.

More specifically in relation to the RIAA and its current tactics, if radio stations even pay royalties to the music companies (often they do not), they pay far less than $1 per song per play, and what royalties they do pay are not predicated whatever on the number of people who hear that song on the radio each time it is played (which is not knowable, anyway, as public broadcasts are "shared" by nature and intent.) Most of the time the "royalties" that radio stations pay per song are paid when they purchase their CDs for use on the air, just as book publishers receive their royalties from libraries when the libraries buy their books. The RIAA's official position on radio is that it is "wonderful," as it serves as a very cheap advertising outlet for their retail music products. So, clearly, when it comes to radio, the RIAA thinks that song sharing is the best thing since sliced bread, even though recording songs for replay directly from the air has been a snap for 40 years or more.

So....why, suddenly, this strange and zealous opposition to digital file sharing from outfits like the RIAA? Two reasons lie at the heart of the RIAA's crusade, in my opinion:

*My own long-held opinion is that there are a bunch of highly paid recording company executives who have been doing a poor job in recent years of recruiting talent and producing music that people think is worth buying. In this regard, the whole "file-sharing" campaign is a CYA operation that these executives engage in simply in attempt to avoid blame in terms of their personal poor management. The "file-sharing" scapegoat allows them to escape responsibility for those decisions. It's a very convenient tactic for sweeping things like "losses" under the rug.

*The traditional music companies are also scared to death that the day is coming in which they won't be needed any longer. They can see a day looming when musicians and other artists will bypass their distribution and seek to distribute themselves digitally, via the Internet and P2P, and the traditional labels see themselves getting cut out of the loop and becoming irrelevant, eventually. So, their attacks on the Internet and on P2P, as well as their reluctance to engage in digital distribution at all, stem from these fears.

It will not be possible for any amount of Congressional lobbying or RIAA terrorist tactics against the public to "unring" the technology bell, so if the RIAA member companies want to survive into the next decade they will need to restructure and refocus their energies on how best to use the emerging technologies instead of trying to force the public away from them. "Short-sightedness" and "lack of imagination" do not begin to describe their current tactics and, indeed, will do little more than hasten a public retreat from the traditional recording company labels which make up the member companies which front the money to the RIAA necessary for its existence and activities. Customers of products in the generally "free" marketplace traditionally take a dim view when companies try and involuntarily force them to buy what is more convenient to those companies than to themselves. The thrust of the RIAA in actuality is not abouyt file-sharing, it is about control of the distribution channels--in this case the Internet and P2P. Of course, it is predestined--the RIAA will fail to eliminate the Internet as a channel for digital media distribution--and the sooner its member companies realize that and "go with the flow" of technology themselves, the better off they will be.

Xiphias · Mar 30, 2004, 05:40 PM

The book analogy is flawed. It's one thing to lend a book to a single friend and quick another to copy a song to a thousand computers in a short time and still keep it yourself.

There are already services like iTunes up and yet we're having 'record-breaking sales' rather than people rushing to buy songs online.

studbagel9 · Mar 30, 2004, 08:43 PM

typo on that post xiphias, should be "...and quite another..."

Vampyromaniac · Mar 30, 2004, 09:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by WaltC
*The traditional music companies are also scared to death that the day is coming in which they won't be needed any longer. They can see a day looming when musicians and other artists will bypass their distribution and seek to distribute themselves digitally, via the Internet and P2P, and the traditional labels see themselves getting cut out of the loop and becoming irrelevant, eventually. So, their attacks on the Internet and on P2P, as well as their reluctance to engage in digital distribution at all, stem from these fears.

Judging by the current state of connectivity, I doubt that online-only distribution would really take off, because switching to it would cut out a large chunk of your audience from accessing your music. Think in the US alone, how many homes still have no Internet access. And of those that do, how many are only on dial-up, making online distribution difficult or bothersome at the least. Then think of the rest of the people across the world who fit in those two categories, and it adds up to quite a number of people who cannot or will not access your music. Poor quality encoding, glitches, errors, and mis-labeling further hurt the hopes of online distribution. Of course if the files are encoded at the source, and distrubuted with a hash-checking or other error-correcting network, those problems could be eliminated. And who knows what the world's online-connectivity statistics will be like 10 years from now. Online-only distribution doesn't seem a very good idea to me right now, but the future could bring anything.

Also, I must agree that the book/newspaper sharing doesn't quite compare to P2P, since in one case you're talking about sharing, but in another you're actually talking about copying. It would make more sense if people would be able to clone books, or if people were only actually lending friends the original CD's (and no copies were being made.)

Mar 30, 2004, 07:19 AM	#1
Vampyromaniac confutatis maledictis Join Date: May 2002 Location: somewhere dark Posts: 5,974 Rep Power: 77 System Specs	Recording Industry in Australia works to conceal record-breaking sales From the commentary by Ken Fisher on ArsTechnica: "The Recording Industry has spent a prodigious amount of effort on manipulating statistics in order to shroud the industry in the shadow of doom and gloom. In recent years, the push has been to villainize P2P users, often to such an extent that the serious career criminals are ignored when the discussion of piracy is brought up. To make matters worse, the industry has been caught playing fast and loose with consumption data, all the while ignoring the opportunity that's been in front of their face. Sadly, the trend continues. The Australian market has had its best year ever, but they're trying to cover it up to rhetorical ends." Read the original article at: SMH.com.au Read Fisher's full comments at: ArsTechnica.com

Mar 30, 2004, 08:43 PM	#5
studbagel9 Rolling the Hard Six Join Date: May 2003 Location: Lock Haven, PA Posts: 767 Rep Power: 0 System Specs	typo on that post xiphias, should be "...and quite another..." __________________

Mar 30, 2004, 05:08 PM	#3
WaltC DriverHeaven Addict Join Date: May 2003 Location: Deep in Martian soil where it's warm and the air is good Posts: 245 Rep Power: 0	Looking at other forms of media--say newspapers, books--it's obvious that what concerns newspapers and book publishers is how many newspapers and books they sell. Have you ever heard a newspaper complain that a small business will buy one copy of the newspaper and share it, daily, with office employees of any given number? I never have. Even with home subscriptions, more than one person will routinely read the daily paper. So it's clear that "newspaper sharing" has never bothered the newspapers--in fact, the practice is not only expected, it's traditional. Books are the same way. Publishers are always concerned with how many individual copies of a given book are sold while being completely unconcerned with how many friends and relatives of the people who buy the books read them. Book sharing is utterly traditional, and we have an entire Public Library system devoted to the ends of doing nothing but sharing books. Once the library buys the book the publisher gets no more royalties on that copy regardless of how many times the library shares it. Basically, book and newspaper sharing have never bothered these media companies because they've known for a long time that these practices actually serve to stimulate additional sales of books and newspapers, rather than curtailing them--just like the RIAA has always known that song-sharing via the radio has always been a great sales stimulus. More specifically in relation to the RIAA and its current tactics, if radio stations even pay royalties to the music companies (often they do not), they pay far less than $1 per song per play, and what royalties they do pay are not predicated whatever on the number of people who hear that song on the radio each time it is played (which is not knowable, anyway, as public broadcasts are "shared" by nature and intent.) Most of the time the "royalties" that radio stations pay per song are paid when they purchase their CDs for use on the air, just as book publishers receive their royalties from libraries when the libraries buy their books. The RIAA's official position on radio is that it is "wonderful," as it serves as a very cheap advertising outlet for their retail music products. So, clearly, when it comes to radio, the RIAA thinks that song sharing is the best thing since sliced bread, even though recording songs for replay directly from the air has been a snap for 40 years or more. So....why, suddenly, this strange and zealous opposition to digital file sharing from outfits like the RIAA? Two reasons lie at the heart of the RIAA's crusade, in my opinion: My own long-held opinion is that there are a bunch of highly paid recording company executives who have been doing a poor job in recent years of recruiting talent and producing music that people think is worth buying. In this regard, the whole "file-sharing" campaign is a CYA operation that these executives engage in simply in attempt to avoid blame in terms of their personal poor management. The "file-sharing" scapegoat allows them to escape responsibility for those decisions. It's a very convenient tactic for sweeping things like "losses" under the rug. The traditional music companies are also scared to death that the day is coming in which they won't be needed any longer. They can see a day looming when musicians and other artists will bypass their distribution and seek to distribute themselves digitally, via the Internet and P2P, and the traditional labels see themselves getting cut out of the loop and becoming irrelevant, eventually. So, their attacks on the Internet and on P2P, as well as their reluctance to engage in digital distribution at all, stem from these fears. It will not be possible for any amount of Congressional lobbying or RIAA terrorist tactics against the public to "unring" the technology bell, so if the RIAA member companies want to survive into the next decade they will need to restructure and refocus their energies on how best to use the emerging technologies instead of trying to force the public away from them. "Short-sightedness" and "lack of imagination" do not begin to describe their current tactics and, indeed, will do little more than hasten a public retreat from the traditional recording company labels which make up the member companies which front the money to the RIAA necessary for its existence and activities. Customers of products in the generally "free" marketplace traditionally take a dim view when companies try and involuntarily force them to buy what is more convenient to those companies than to themselves. The thrust of the RIAA in actuality is not abouyt file-sharing, it is about control of the distribution channels--in this case the Internet and P2P. Of course, it is predestined--the RIAA will fail to eliminate the Internet as a channel for digital media distribution--and the sooner its member companies realize that and "go with the flow" of technology themselves, the better off they will be.

Mar 30, 2004, 05:40 PM	#4
Xiphias DriverHeaven Junior Member Join Date: Nov 2003 Posts: 27 Rep Power: 0	The book analogy is flawed. It's one thing to lend a book to a single friend and quick another to copy a song to a thousand computers in a short time and still keep it yourself. There are already services like iTunes up and yet we're having 'record-breaking sales' rather than people rushing to buy songs online.