Gregg Carter

No, not according to some music labels, that's actually breaching copyright if you listen to them.

Scatter

No, not according to some music labels, that's actually breaching copyright if you listen to them. </BLOCKQUOTE>
music labels can gtf - it depends on the law in the country you live.

a recently passed amendment to australian law corrected the archaic rule in regards to copying to personal mobile devices (which was until that point illegal) for example.

Fred_the_Red

Cananda is such a nice country in regards to downloads.

JK Galgreefe

a lot of people i know who download music illegally are students or have crap jobs and no money. if they didn't download the music for free, they say, they wouldn't be buying it anyway since they don't have the cash. so the music industry isn't losing a thing.

the artists themselves are more likely to gain though, since they all now have huge music collections and go to gigs about three times a week instead of just going the pub or sitting in their houses moaning.

TheCranker

i-tunes sales increased around 25% last year. cd sales have fallen about 10% in that time iirc.

dunno what that means in real financial terms (as 25% of one isn't necessarily greater than 10% the other), but the point is, the competition is not just with piracy - the music industry is competing with itself in a way through the scatter gun approach to new media technology.

also interesting to note this reaction in the article:
"It's not rocket science to work out that if you get your music for free, why would you go out and buy it," Ms Heindl said... She pointed to a telephone survey of 1000 Australians aged 14 to 74, conducted by Quantum Market Research last year, which found 57 per cent of those who downloaded via P2P file sharing programs rarely or never went on to purchase the music legitimately.
which is pretty much ARIA themselves admitting that sales aren't as affected as they'd like us to believe by music piracy. a line of thought shared by several studies into software piracy as well. </BLOCKQUOTE>

The article I read was pointing out that total sales was down. It wasn't just CD sales but the total revenue received by the music industry.

rosslarkin

As piracy increases, sales will drop, it's natural progression regardless of all these so called study's.

The music industry will keep trying to combat this, but piracy will always be one step ahead. They closed down Napster, then re-opened with subscription.

People refuse to pay, Torrents are introduced. I'm not advocating it in any shape or form but like everything in life, some people go for the cheapest option, more often than not in multimedia terms this being 'free'.

If the music industry is going to succeed against piracy, there needs to be a compromise. 50,000 cd sales at say, £5 is better than 10,000 at £10 and 40,000 illegal downloads....

People don't show restraint, they use 'it'll never happen to me' philosophy, so no amount of laws or restrictions will work.

Boskovic

piracy will continue always because as long as something costs money people would rather not pay. i refuse to believe that people who claim they only download illegal music etc because it costs to much would actually go out and buy it instead if the price dropped to less than £5 for an album.

Arjen Robben

Good stuff :thup:

Pretty much my take on the whole thing too, just without the insider knowledge

super_imps

Yeah, some good points. Particularly regarding the shutdown of oink. The press was talking about it like it was some sinister child porn ring or something, it was ludicrously over the top.

rosslarkin

Excellent article, got a bit bullshitty towards the end, but on the right path