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You’re most likely familiar with the background: RIAA claims that the decline in CD sales since mid-2000 (and before) is solely because of P2P file sharing. The economy has nothing to do with it, nor do the high prices, price-fixing etc. RIAA has for the past couple of months been openly at war with file sharing, and it seems, with it’s own customer base. According to an article at the San Fransisco Chronicle, recorded music sales for the first 6 months of 2003 are down 15.8% over the same period last year. That makes music sales down 31% since mid 2000.
What RIAA doesn’t seem to be looking at is that P2P file sharing dropped 25% since they began their crackdown. Now admittedly much of that drop in p2p sharing is the Summer vacation of college student, but that has traditionally been only a 15% drop in activity. So who/what are they going to blame now? They are suing college students left and right, claiming that their activities are destroying the Empire, yet when the sharing drops 25%, RIAA associates sales continue to drop another 15%. Wait I thought they said if the pirates were gone they would be back to the good old days? What happened?
Of course at the end of the day RIAA head Cary Sherman says:
“(The) issue is not the decline in CDs; it’s the decline in people paying for the music that they acquire. We need to get people back into the habit of paying for music, whether it’s from record stores or a legal online service.”
Until recently RIAA was dead set against any on line music services. What they still don’t understand is that most of the digital consumers want to reward the artist by paying for the music. What we also want however, is to be able to transfer that music to any of our playback devices. Listen to them through the entertainment center, on my desktop, on the road with my laptop, in the car CD/MP3 player and on an MP3 Walkman. With the DRM and licensing schemes that are being used and proposed I would not be able to do that with any music I buy from an RIAA approved service. So I won’t buy.
My personal CD purchasing has declined by about 90% since mid 2000. The few CD’s I do buy are generally either for my toddler, or from an Indie artist. So RIAA now you know where some of your sales are disappearing to. Very few of us can afford to buy 2–3(or more) CD’s a week like some of my friends did some years ago. We now have to budget for every one of those $14–17 dollar CD’s far more carefully, which also means we are far less likely to impulse buy, and far more likely to buy the CD only if we are able to hear more than one track and we know that the majority of those tracks will be enjoyable. ROI you know. How many CD’s do you have that only have 1 or 2 decent or good tracks on them.
When Napster was big, I was buying more CD’s than ever and was reallyt into music, because I could find other people with the same tastes, I would find obscure bands Like Eloy, Marillion, UK, PFM Buddhashake, Cold Sweat Star Castle and other Progressive bands that I had never heard of before and downloaded some of the songs knowing that I would probably like them since the person had many songs on his hard drive that corrosponded to my tastes. I would end up going out and ordering these bands CD’s if I couldn’t find them in the record store…Just to check out what these bands looked like and to have a good CD copy for my collection. I bought more CD in the few months I had napster than all of my life. When They killed Napster, it was like “The day the Music Died”. People are sick of being force fed the same old crap over and over on the radio and MTV, and now it’s the same thing with ITUNES, These bands are non-existant on there. It’s not about making money, proving once again that the RIAA is really a legal Mafia for the Currupt music industry to control what we listen to so they can force feed us crappy music from one hit wonder bands they put no money into or over produced bubblegum crap with no real talent or soul.
I’m done buying CD’s forever, I don’t even like listening to music anymore, they just ruined the experience of discovering new stuff and my 17 year old son would also agree.
Get rid of the Mafia like RIAA that has created a monopoly on music and has prevented talented bands from persuing music careers and the music world will be a happier more profitable place for both record stores and muscians. RIAA is an illegal monopoly that controls a large section of the media and has to be stopped.
i agree with you 100% i HATE the RIAA and will never buy any music from their corporation as long as i live. keep it indie, where the REAL music is.