
Music Sales Continue to Plummet for Albums and Digital Downloads - prostoalex
http://variety.com/2014/music/news/music-sales-fall-albums-digital-downloads-losses-1201257795/
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Zigurd
A market for recorded performances is about 100 years old. It is a novelty in
human culture as well as commerce. Cartels controlling this market are an even
more recent and dubious "innovation."

Expecting them to have lifespan and protection of the property under one's
house, or to even be analogous to that property, is delusional.

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dharma1
how is it different from say, a book?

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Zigurd
That's the question, isn't it: Copyright became mainstream in the era of
books, printed sheet music, and other publishable symbolic encoding of
information. Performances were not protectable.

Why do you think a recorded performance of a work should be protectable under
copyright? It's NOT an original work of the intellect. It's a performance of
what is often someone else's work. Just because it is recorded, should it be
protected? Does the technological innovation of recording make it protect-
able? And, if so, shouldn't the technological innovation of infinite copies at
zero marginal cost make performances un-protectable?

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dharma1
There is plenty of music which is only recorded in an audio form and cannot be
encoded as sheet music, and is original work of the intellect.

I don't see any difference in a book and an original music recording in terms
of why one should be subject to copyright and one not.

Whether recordings or books are protectable in practice is another matter, as
it is very easy to make digital copies of both.

But if one takes the stand that an author of a book (be it an e-book or a
printed one) has the right to set a price for a copy for her work, and benefit
from protection by copyright if she so chooses to, I don't see how a recording
of an original piece of music is any different.

~~~
Zigurd
I would be happy to limit copyright protection to recordings of "music which
is only recorded in an audio form and cannot be encoded as sheet music."
Despite the fact that I've been published by several major book publishers and
I'm a "real" author with representation and the whole nine yards, I have not
defended the continuing copyright protection of the written word, either. One
of my publishers uses no copy protection (except for Kindle where they have no
choice), and they distribute a large part of their backlist for free. The
whole notion of copyright and publishing needs a rethink. Some publishers are
farther along this path than others.

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davidgerard
There is too much art, because former amateurs now have the tools to make
something that's _good enough_ to pass within their chosen splinter of
culture. And give it away free. [http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-
not-about-aesthe...](http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-
aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/) Artists are now directly
competing with their fans.

Or, more directly: I have a disk with literally terabytes of media on it. It
is _still_ more convenient for me to find stuff on YouTube and play it from
there.

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narrator
Have you seen [http://www.ektoplazm.com/](http://www.ektoplazm.com/) ? It's a
free music label. There's no obvious monetization strategy and it's hundreds
of albums worth of independently produced electronic music, some of it quite
good, all available for download at full quality. Perhaps it's just so so
cheap to produce music that people give it away for free? Maybe they just do
it to get a higher profile, so they can get DJ gigs, or they just love the
music?

~~~
davidgerard
Or indeed Jamendo or Bandcamp, where you can basically _put your stuff up_ and
get _paid_ instead of hammered by bandwidth charges should you accidentally
gain popularity.

People like _making stuff_ and _putting it up_. Witness DeviantArt, which is
>90% unspeakable shit the perpetrators of which should have their hands cut
off to stop them abusing pencils ever again, with a small percentage of
actually goddamn brilliant artists whose presence justifies the whole
enterprise.

(COI: I'm shacked up with one of said decent artists.)

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hassy
Personal anecdote - <2% of visitors that play a preview ever click on a buy
link on [http://wonderwheel.fm](http://wonderwheel.fm)

It's something I built for myself and I didn't expect to make anything, but
it's still been entertaining to have the expectation confirmed.

The site has seen some okay traffic but hasn't made enough to buy me a half of
Tennent's.

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yabatopia
I don't think that the transition from physical to digital/streaming music is
the only explanation. There's also plain simple demand and supply. There's
never been so much music available as now. It's never been easier to create,
publish and distribute music. The digital supply is just immense. The demand
just can't follow.

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pinaceae
especially through youtube and the gratis availability of so much existing
music you never heard of. just listening through the stuff created between
2000-2010 will take years. and then youtube carries all the older stuff.

add pandora, spotify, etc. and you don't need to purchase music, at all,
anymore.

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Zenst
YEs the whole media market appears to be transitioning from outright purchase
towards a leasing model with the likes of Netflix and Spotify and others doing
streaming of films and media.

This is not entirely unexpected given how cable operators operate TV packages,
but it does open up for more competition and it is that competition that makes
the private sector model work for the consumer.

This all said, I can often get a CD cheaper than the online equivalent, more
so if a bit older and you shop about. Aspect of old stock taking up space does
play more for the physical store offerings, unlike digital versions.

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daveid
I hope it never actually transitions. I'm one of those people who still buy
CDs; I want to own what I buy, not have it leased to me for a limited time. I
love music and having my own library is cheaper in the long term than paying
some monthly amount. Imo that only makes sense for people who jump from artist
to artist on a daily basis.

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endgame
Same here. I want to be able to rip it to FLAC, archive the rips, convert it
to Ogg Vorbis for my portable device and never have anyone take my music away
from me because they revoked license keys, or the service died, or because I
happen to be in Australia...

~~~
Zenst
That does raise a whole very valid point.

The issue of portability globally with subscription streaming services. The
World is getting smaller and more people travel further than before and with
that.

Are streaming services all equal, do they lock you down to certain countries
and with that do any offer true comparable global reach that a physical object
affords you.

I see this as something that will become more of an issue as time goes on and
also somewhat worrying. Bad enough planning a local SIM card for a phone as
cheaper than roaming. Will streaming services start to add roaming charges too
later on? I do wonder and suspect they may very well end up doing that.

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imchillyb
People don't really want to own music. People want to listen to what they
want, when they want.

If a company can provide that service, for a fee, that company will succeed.

The older and slower to move companies, will not understand. Those old and
slow to act companies will fail.

People don't want to own music. People want to listen to music.

~~~
coldtea
> _People don 't really want to own music. People want to listen to what they
> want, when they want._

Actually music fans used to want to own their music -- and took pride in their
collections.

The current decline is a combination of two things:

1) for the younger generations music (pop/rock/whatever) is not as important
as it was up until the eighties and slightly into the nineties.

Pop/Rock music thrived in an era when it was a major escape into a fantasy
world. Nowadays there are 100 other diversions, from video games, to YouTube,
to 9gag, to anime, 200 tv series, etc etc.

2) the remaining (but not that culturally important anymore) music fans, can
listen to anything they want in several different ways, none of which involves
paying for the music ("radio" streaming, youtube, torrents, etc).

(Btw, "concerts" and "merchandise" is not the answer for musicians. Band
merchanidise is a non-musical gimmick for teenagers and immature
20-somethings, and concerts were traditionally a loss-leader for album sales,
except for bigger bands. Plus concert attendance is even on the decline on the
younger demographics).

> _If a company can provide that service, for a fee, that company will
> succeed._

Bah,, it will just be a company with razor-thin margins in a declining market.
They might make some profit, but they wont "succeed" the way music industry of
the past had, especially when it starts charging a fee. With ads they might do
better, but still not that great.

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dragonwriter
> > People don't really want to own music. People want to listen to what they
> want, when they want.

> Actually music fans used to want to own their music -- and took pride in
> their collections.

It used to be that owning your own music was the only way to listen to what
you want, when you want, since if you didn't own it, you couldn't play it on
demand.

Now, those two things are separate, and the demand for ownership has dropped.
That may be a change in desire for ownership or other priority changes of the
type you suggest, but the simpler explanation is that the ownership wasn't
desired as an _end in itself_ , it was desired _as a means_ to the end of
listening to what you want, when you want, and when the available means to
acheive that changed, the desire for ownership of music was reduced because
there were now alternative means to the ends.

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gcv
It probably doesn't matter to the artists, but I wonder how much of that
business went to streaming services, and how much to BitTorrent?

~~~
coldtea
There's this bizarro idea you get from a lot of people that torrents are not
any threat to artists, because those people dowloading from torrents wouldn't
have bought the record anyway. Not to mention it brings them "new fans" who
discovered the record on the torrent.

In real life, of my 30+ friends, few and very rarely bother to buy anything
from the artists the like anymore, they just torrent it. And they almost never
see them in concert either -- since most rarely visit my country.

So a band that used to sell 100.000 and 300.000 records here (say U2), now
sells around 10.000-20.000 or so (on a lucky day).

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taeric
While I think some of the evidence in support of torrenting is more than a
little suspicious, I do question whether or not heavily fighting it can
provide value.

That is, I don't know how many folks that torrent stuff do buy stuff.
Anecdotally, I actually just don't know that many folks that torrent. Of the
few I suspect do torrent, they wouldn't be buying anything anyway. At worst,
they would have been fine with crappy taped copies from the radio. Or music
videos on VHS. (Heck, as a kid I probably watched more VHS stuff than anything
else, and we bought videos.)

So, my hypothesis is that the amount of money and effort that is extracted
from and goes into fighting music torrenting eclipses any supposed money that
was lost in the crime.

I'm definitely game for any links. Or ideas on how to explore this hypothesis.

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pyre
> So, my hypothesis is that the amount of money and effort that is extracted
> from and goes into fighting music torrenting eclipses any supposed money
> that was lost in the crime.

I think that part if it is to create a legal environment that is hostile to
making torrenting more mainstream than it currently is.

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taeric
Apologies, but I'm not sure I follow your sentence. :(

~~~
pyre
Suing torrenters / torrent sites makes the legal environment around torrents
hostile. It increases the risk that you are taking in trying to 'mainstream'
torrents in a way that _everyone_ would fire up a torrent client to download
pirated music / movies / etc.

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bhewes
I don't see how market movements of -13%(digital) and -15%(albums) equal a
plummet.

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dang
Url changed from [http://pando.com/2014/07/03/digital-music-sales-are-in-a-
fre...](http://pando.com/2014/07/03/digital-music-sales-are-in-a-free-fall-as-
spotify-does-to-itunes-what-itunes-did-to-cds/), which points to this. HN
prefers original sources.

~~~
prostoalex
Thanks, I was wondering.

