Downloading saves money.
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willy
- Posts: 17
- Joined: Sun Jul 23, 2006 1:47 am
Downloading saves money.
i disagree with people who claim that downloading is bad for the music indusrty,in fact its agood thing as it has saved me a lot of money and hustle,coz sometimes you might just want one tune but you are forced to buy a whole album at an unbelievable price.but downloading is free.what do you think people? bless
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anbessa
- Posts: 206
- Joined: Thu Dec 14, 2006 3:38 pm
Re: Downloading saves money.
Downloading might be free, but producing music is not...
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Lion
- Posts: 1160
- Joined: Thu Oct 12, 2006 11:06 am
Re: Downloading saves money.
why not support the music without support no music.
Do also steeling your food in supermarket.
Lion
Do also steeling your food in supermarket.
Lion
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ton1
- Posts: 447
- Joined: Thu Jun 14, 2007 5:07 pm
Re: Downloading saves money.
Mr "Music Industry" has found Roots-Archives and is speaking to uswilly wrote:i disagree with people who claim that downloading is bad for the music indusrty,in fact its agood thing as it has saved me a lot of money and hustle
.Sorry to be a bit rude but did you think just one second before writing this ?
Antonin
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seb
- Site Admin
- Posts: 305
- Joined: Sat Nov 20, 2004 8:56 am
Re: Downloading saves money.
A $13 billion fantasy: latest music piracy study overstates effect of P2P
A new study from the Institute for Policy Innovation takes a different approach to quantifying the cost of music piracy. Instead of just focusing on what the lost sales cost the record labels, the new study measures the impact of piracy on the US economy. The total price tag? A cool $12.5 billion in lost output, if you trust the study's numbers.
Along with the multibillion-dollar loss, piracy also is hindering job growth, according to the IPI. The US economy will lose 71,060 jobs due to piracy, with almost 38 percent of those (26,860) in the recording industry. That amounts to $2.7 billion in lost earnings. Piracy also hits Uncle Sam—as well as state and local governments—right in the pocketbook, with at least $422 million in lost tax revenues.
Problematic assumptions
The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads == lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase. "Unfortunately, there is no precise measure of the degree to which consumers of pirated CDs would continue to purchase those CDs at legitimate prices," according to the study. "While the degree to which these legitimate purchases would occur differs by market, it appears nevertheless that such purchases would comprise a very significant fraction of the total number of pirated CDs now purchased... In this study, the weighted average substitution rate used for the physical piracy of recorded music is 65.7 percent. It is then assumed that only 20% (1 in 5) of these downloaded songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist."
That's a bit better than the one-to-one argument, but not by much. It essentially assumes that one of every five downloaded songs would have been purchased, were it not for file-sharing. Although a 20 percent figure may not look like much, it is still a percentage not justified by our own knowledge of file-sharing trends. The study needs to make a firm argument for why this percentage is so high. It's a flaw similar to that in a 2006 study commissioned by the MPAA.
Note that the assumption cuts both ways. Not only does it assume many would-be sales, but it also ignores sales that do stem from file-sharing. P2P users buy a lot of music, after all. Three out of four P2P users said that they bought music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of the respondents to the survey commissioned by the Canadian Record Industry Association saying that they have bought previously downloaded music on more than 10 occasions. So here again, we have data which would necessarily lower the study's estimates not being taken into account.
Another study even goes so far as to argue that the effect of file-sharing on legal music sales is "not statistically distinguishable from zero." Published this past February in the Journal of Political Economy, the study tracked the effects of 1.75 million song downloads on 680 albums. The researchers concluded that the availability—and even increased downloads—of music on P2P networks did not correlate to a negative effect on music sales. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file-sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero," the study's authors reported.
If there was no such thing as piracy...
The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive and that much of what is available isn't very good. 58 percent of those responding to a study commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine and the Associated Press said that music is declining in quality. And although the DRM situation is looking up these days, it can still be a confusing morass with unanticipated side effects for consumers, as the recently announced closure of the Google Video Store demonstrates.
Consumer apathy aside, there are other factors at work in the music industry. One of the biggest is the transition from sales of physical media to digital media. CD sales have dropped sharply since the beginning of the decade, and projections indicate that there's no end in sight to the decline. Sure, downloads have picked up since 2004, but not at a rate that will come close to overcoming the slide in CD sales. The individual song download angle is largely ignored by the IPI's study as well, which is fixated on sales of physical media.
The IPI has a history of pushing what it calls a pro-market agenda with its research, including one study asking if open source has reached its limits and another similar to that under discussion here that attempts to quantify the economic impact of movie piracy. Given its track record (which includes this gem from the aforementioned open-source study: "Open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K") and ideological bent, the results of this study are rather unsurprising.
When the discussion over dollar figures and economic impact comes to an end, most people will agree that file-sharing is a real issue for the recording industry and that there is a financial cost that goes along with it. It's also true that piracy has something of a ripple effect, reaching beyond the artists and record labels. But studies that overstate the economic effect of piracy do little to further the discussion over issues of copyright, file-sharing, and DRM, and they obscure the fact that the music industry still has some serious work to do on its business model.
By Eric Bangeman | Published: August 22, 2007 - 11:17PM CT
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... f-p2p.html
A new study from the Institute for Policy Innovation takes a different approach to quantifying the cost of music piracy. Instead of just focusing on what the lost sales cost the record labels, the new study measures the impact of piracy on the US economy. The total price tag? A cool $12.5 billion in lost output, if you trust the study's numbers.
Along with the multibillion-dollar loss, piracy also is hindering job growth, according to the IPI. The US economy will lose 71,060 jobs due to piracy, with almost 38 percent of those (26,860) in the recording industry. That amounts to $2.7 billion in lost earnings. Piracy also hits Uncle Sam—as well as state and local governments—right in the pocketbook, with at least $422 million in lost tax revenues.
Problematic assumptions
The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads == lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase. "Unfortunately, there is no precise measure of the degree to which consumers of pirated CDs would continue to purchase those CDs at legitimate prices," according to the study. "While the degree to which these legitimate purchases would occur differs by market, it appears nevertheless that such purchases would comprise a very significant fraction of the total number of pirated CDs now purchased... In this study, the weighted average substitution rate used for the physical piracy of recorded music is 65.7 percent. It is then assumed that only 20% (1 in 5) of these downloaded songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist."
That's a bit better than the one-to-one argument, but not by much. It essentially assumes that one of every five downloaded songs would have been purchased, were it not for file-sharing. Although a 20 percent figure may not look like much, it is still a percentage not justified by our own knowledge of file-sharing trends. The study needs to make a firm argument for why this percentage is so high. It's a flaw similar to that in a 2006 study commissioned by the MPAA.
Note that the assumption cuts both ways. Not only does it assume many would-be sales, but it also ignores sales that do stem from file-sharing. P2P users buy a lot of music, after all. Three out of four P2P users said that they bought music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of the respondents to the survey commissioned by the Canadian Record Industry Association saying that they have bought previously downloaded music on more than 10 occasions. So here again, we have data which would necessarily lower the study's estimates not being taken into account.
Another study even goes so far as to argue that the effect of file-sharing on legal music sales is "not statistically distinguishable from zero." Published this past February in the Journal of Political Economy, the study tracked the effects of 1.75 million song downloads on 680 albums. The researchers concluded that the availability—and even increased downloads—of music on P2P networks did not correlate to a negative effect on music sales. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file-sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero," the study's authors reported.
If there was no such thing as piracy...
The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive and that much of what is available isn't very good. 58 percent of those responding to a study commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine and the Associated Press said that music is declining in quality. And although the DRM situation is looking up these days, it can still be a confusing morass with unanticipated side effects for consumers, as the recently announced closure of the Google Video Store demonstrates.
Consumer apathy aside, there are other factors at work in the music industry. One of the biggest is the transition from sales of physical media to digital media. CD sales have dropped sharply since the beginning of the decade, and projections indicate that there's no end in sight to the decline. Sure, downloads have picked up since 2004, but not at a rate that will come close to overcoming the slide in CD sales. The individual song download angle is largely ignored by the IPI's study as well, which is fixated on sales of physical media.
The IPI has a history of pushing what it calls a pro-market agenda with its research, including one study asking if open source has reached its limits and another similar to that under discussion here that attempts to quantify the economic impact of movie piracy. Given its track record (which includes this gem from the aforementioned open-source study: "Open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K") and ideological bent, the results of this study are rather unsurprising.
When the discussion over dollar figures and economic impact comes to an end, most people will agree that file-sharing is a real issue for the recording industry and that there is a financial cost that goes along with it. It's also true that piracy has something of a ripple effect, reaching beyond the artists and record labels. But studies that overstate the economic effect of piracy do little to further the discussion over issues of copyright, file-sharing, and DRM, and they obscure the fact that the music industry still has some serious work to do on its business model.
By Eric Bangeman | Published: August 22, 2007 - 11:17PM CT
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... f-p2p.html
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leggo rocker
- Posts: 4071
- Joined: Fri Sep 09, 2005 4:40 pm
Re: Downloading saves money.
People who exclusively download (freeload) are like the 'friends' I once had who were always pleased to come and tape my vinyl but NEVER bought a single record or pre-recorded tape with their own money. Later, they discovered CDs, or at least how to burn copies of their friends CDs. Then they moved onto P2P filesharing.
They are the type who NEVER buy records and thus their stealing of music has little or no effect, economically, on the industry.
The record industry tends to overstate the damage in an effort to get political muscle behind their argument.
However, I still don't like it. I'd prefer people to BUY music again. But it would be even better if the record industry really supported the artists on a wider scale, instead of just throwing a large bundle of cash at a few unsuitable teenagers.
It would also be good if, instead of crying 'thief' all the time about piracy, they put their own house in order and made sure they actually PAID the artists money owed to them!
They are the type who NEVER buy records and thus their stealing of music has little or no effect, economically, on the industry.
The record industry tends to overstate the damage in an effort to get political muscle behind their argument.
However, I still don't like it. I'd prefer people to BUY music again. But it would be even better if the record industry really supported the artists on a wider scale, instead of just throwing a large bundle of cash at a few unsuitable teenagers.
It would also be good if, instead of crying 'thief' all the time about piracy, they put their own house in order and made sure they actually PAID the artists money owed to them!
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Nugstriker
Re: Downloading saves money.
I live in NYC, although there are a few good reggae record shops I don't live in jamaica and most of the music I download I have no way of purchasing. In the past 2 years I've probably spent $2000 at Jammyland(NYC reggae record shop) but downloaded thousands of records I cant find there. Downloading is legit, I am envious of those who put music out there, if you can afford it and find it, buy it, if not do what you can to listen to great chunes all day long.
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picaraza
- Posts: 141
- Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2007 8:14 pm
Re: Downloading saves money.
One factor that the recording industry never seems to factor into their estimations of lost revenue is the growth of used-record (CD) sales. Neither the industry or the artist receive a penny from the sale of previously-owned music.
For most of my music buying life (25 years or so), I've been buying both new and used records. The number of used record shops and the quantity of discs available went through the roof-- at approximately the same time as mp3s arrived. Not only do you have people downloading mp3s for free, you've also have people buying, ripping, and selling CDs.
Here in the Bay Area (CA), Ameoba and Rasputin are about as big as you can get--they both care a lot of quality music new and used. Tower Records, on the other hand, went the way of the dinosaur. They didn't cater to quite the same niche market-- people interested in rarities, imports, odd genres, and couldn't make a living hawking latest release from Britney or the latest boy-band-record- industry-boondoogle.
I agree with Leggo that a lot of the people downloading music, didn't buy much music to begin with. But then I look at myself. Last week I bought a used CD of Earthquake Dub in Berkeley-- I might as well have downloaded it for all the good I did the record company that re-released it. Never mind the artists. Who knows if they ever will see (or have seen) compensation for their efforts.
For most of my music buying life (25 years or so), I've been buying both new and used records. The number of used record shops and the quantity of discs available went through the roof-- at approximately the same time as mp3s arrived. Not only do you have people downloading mp3s for free, you've also have people buying, ripping, and selling CDs.
Here in the Bay Area (CA), Ameoba and Rasputin are about as big as you can get--they both care a lot of quality music new and used. Tower Records, on the other hand, went the way of the dinosaur. They didn't cater to quite the same niche market-- people interested in rarities, imports, odd genres, and couldn't make a living hawking latest release from Britney or the latest boy-band-record- industry-boondoogle.
I agree with Leggo that a lot of the people downloading music, didn't buy much music to begin with. But then I look at myself. Last week I bought a used CD of Earthquake Dub in Berkeley-- I might as well have downloaded it for all the good I did the record company that re-released it. Never mind the artists. Who knows if they ever will see (or have seen) compensation for their efforts.
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matty
- Posts: 314
- Joined: Wed Jun 21, 2006 7:50 am
Re: Downloading saves money.
I personally rather own the CD or Vinyl, rather then have a bunch of Cd-R's lying around, I like to read the credits, who played what instrument, who produced it and so forth, I like to visualize the band playing while listening to their creation. So I say boo to dowloading over all, but could admitt that I do have some hard to find material in Mp3 format, Still I would much rather pay the money for the original.
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Nefta
- Posts: 375
- Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:44 pm
Re: Downloading saves money.
Downloading save money for who? for you...perhaps for the companies that produce it.
Look i beleive that a musican make a record to sell and eat.Also believe that without music sharing there would be artist that you never ever discover.The money and the buying is the base of the capital system (babylon).I know of musicans that love to sell but prefer to be recognize and respect for their works better that for their sells.A good artist also do tours and sing live.Thats were the artist get money.Record companies also sell mp3 and behind al their crying of the download the to put up with it.There are records that money could buy.For everythin else use DOWNLOAD...
Fya
Look i beleive that a musican make a record to sell and eat.Also believe that without music sharing there would be artist that you never ever discover.The money and the buying is the base of the capital system (babylon).I know of musicans that love to sell but prefer to be recognize and respect for their works better that for their sells.A good artist also do tours and sing live.Thats were the artist get money.Record companies also sell mp3 and behind al their crying of the download the to put up with it.There are records that money could buy.For everythin else use DOWNLOAD...
Fya