EU Commission - Piracy doesn't affect music sales

[Deleted]

Just as long as piracy remains discouraged and considered immoral, the customers that can actually afford it will buy it.

Now if piracy was widespread, accepted, and no one did anything about it, that would hurt music sales.

Yeah there needs to be incentive to not pirate so people buy music. A lot of people refrain from pirating because 1 they can afford to buy and 2 theres a risk involved.

[Deleted]

This thread made me think of this
*snip*

I actually have that in my bookmarks and I did think of it while I created the thread. The "negative employment" bit always makes me smile.

[Redblade]

Nothing new really, they had people testifying to this in the Pirate Bay trial as well, doesn't mean the dinosaur that is the record companies and their lobby organizations will start to use normal logic...

[Deleted]

I thought it was common knowledge that the music business is simply outdated. When people want music, they want to download it right now. They don't want to go to a store and waste time. That's why streaming services have actually proven succesful.

What's hurting the music business the most is themselves clinging to outdated sales concepts. They need to accept that this is a new generation and things need to be done differently. For the most part, they should blame themselves for letting this happen.

[Teabaker]

I don't trust this. I never buy music I just download it from youtube.

.. Does this fall under piracy? I have no idea.

[jbombard]

It is all about value and cost. People pirate because it is free, and the only cost is the time it takes to find something and download it. Much like with software like adobe photoshop and microsoft office, for people who are just interested in touching up some photos or reading a file someone sent them, it is hard for them to justify the cost for the amount of value provided. And because of that value proposition they wouldn't have been customers in the first place. The same thing goes for music, people don't want to have to buy to try. But if the cost was low and their was some additional value to buying more people would buy. Knocking down doors and taking people's computers isn't going to solve the problem, the only thing that is going to make people buy what you are selling is to provide them with enough value to warrant the cost.

[breadisfunny]

I don't trust this. I never buy music I just download it from youtube.

.. Does this fall under piracy? I have no idea.

technically yes. why do you think companies keep sueing youtube?

[Deleted]

This sounds far fetched. Music sales have been in decline for a decade now

This couldn't possibly have anything to do with the music industry pushing a lot of music that was low quality, while good creators were disentagling themselves from the business, sticking to concerts, and now migrating to the online sales?

[oblivionx]

This ought read: EU commission - we've pirated so much American music that we've decided to claim piracy doesn't affect music sales.

[SirPiken]

I don't buy music, Pandora is free. Audio books > music anyway.

[Wilian]

This ought read: EU commission - we've pirated so much American music

With majority of good music worth actually shelling coin for coming from EU, this probably is true. Then again 90% of music from US is not even worth pirating worth so I doubt it would be so wide-spread either.

As for the whole study. Ton of studies made on piracy has pointed this out before year after year and this is just one more on the long list of them. It is quite obvious that there is more incentive to buy stuff when you can be 100% certain you do enjoy the product and the artist.

On the other way if you went to buy "blind", which music industry seems to prefer probably due to obvious quality issues, you could get a sea of shit into your hands and that would promote not buying.

Also with great service products like Spotify, the typical "buying of music" is started to become obsolote way of consuming the product which obviously hurts in actual sales, specifically so when talking of these big production house that take 80% of the income away from the artist in any case. While with services like Spotify the bands can directly deal with "customers" in easy manner and the cut taken from them on the way is much smaller, down to 5-15% depending on the case.

[Deleted]

It really dosent and if it did the artist would still find a way to get money and waste on dumb stuff

cough cough Nikki manaj and her shitty music

How I see it, they need to shift more from the selling albums to concerts and other stuff, like merchandise, cater to it's fan base. Also keep in mind that the vast majority of trash music, you know the "hit" now are played like 24/7 on the radio also. But they still make a lot of money. While the good artists that are not very known you buy their album mostly because you don't hear their music everywhere and/or it's not on a file-sharing website yet or it' low quality there.

And the known bands/singers also offer sweet albums sometime, like with extra features and content, things that make the album worth buying. If not it's just 12 songs that you hear on the radio anyhow, recorded on a CD.

Same goes for Movies/TV Shows if you make it a nice deal, package with extra content, people will buy it. But that doesn't mean they won't pirate it, since in some countries the physical version ends up being sold months after the digital is released. And even if does, there is still the question if you own that movie/tv show as you have bought, you might end up downloading it sometime from file-sharing website because maybe you are not at home, you don't have the disc and so on. Just an example where piracy does not affect the industry since you won't buy the same movie each time you want to watch it...

[Kulanae]

I think it is a rather simplistic viewpoint. The reason it can even be considered is because there are ramifications for being caught with stolen copyrighted material. If there were no consequences, then piracy would be rampant and the creators of said content would be out of a job. Piracy has pretty much killed the comic book industry, along with many other artists who try to make a living by selling their art, only to see it in torrent form overnight. Imagine if there were no consequences to owning a $10 copy of Windows. Can anyone here honestly say they would pony up what Microsoft wants?

---------- Post added 2013-03-21 at 12:57 AM ----------

I don't buy music, Pandora is free. Audio books > music anyway.

Pandora isn't free. They pay royalties to copyright holders and you either subscribe to their service or watch their ads on occasion.

[Deleted]

I used to pirate.

There was no way of getting certain movies or albums (or really OLD games) back in the day.

Specially when we talk about, now booming, asian music.
Wanted to listen that Japanese artist prior to youtube or music streams? Either buy it from amazon(no credit card) or order it from japan...or download 'em.
Heck, even slightly smaller US/UK artists had the same. All you could really do is pirate the music.
NOT to mention when in 2000-2003 they insisted on putting DRM on music albums so that you had to use their own player..also making it unplayable on certain devices because certain devices used PC-like software to play music (like car stereo) = cant play on car. Wtf?

Movie that was more than 2 months old? Already removed from shelves. Also I didnt have DvD player for while :P

Good luck getting that games' OST too - not to mention if the game is year old. It doesnt stay on shelves.

Now I got netflix and spotify unlimited and I buy music online (or order it from good music stores that have only now started to have more selection of music)

And HD remakes, steam, PSN really help out getting old games.

So yes, piracy is mostly (and certainly was in this case) service problem.

[mysticx]

Hence the entire point of DRM.

The point of DRM is hassling legitimate consumers, pirates just crack the DRM and get a free (As well as hassle-free) product for it :P

My problem with the music industry is that i don't want to pay 15-20 euros for a CD that has maybe three songs on it i really want, now i use my iPod (Apple hate incoming in three... two...) to buy and download the songs i want for 1-1.5 euros each and i haven't pirated music that's feasibly available for two years, well ok, maybe i downloaded some anime soundtracks, since they're kind of nigh-impossible to get here in Holland...

[Wildtree]

This is what a REAL expert to the subject has to say about it.....
Someone in the music business longer than most others, someone who is undisputed one of the biggest stars and icons of the music field, ever....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8681410.stm


As for myself, I am siding with what some said... I've listened to album mp3's and decided to buy them, or not.
What changed? I didn't have to walk to the record store and listen to it there.
Before the internet, one recorded songs off the radio. It wasn't that much different. If anything at all, then the digital quality of music and video is nowadays perfect enough for criminal counterfeit sales. But staying with music.... The internet will never be able to harm sales to true music lovers. It is impossible.
Nothing beats analog sound, and never will. Because digital tech is just that, digital, and there will always be fractions missing.

[Djuntas]

Think they should shut down youtube Saw they reached 1 billion views/month now...wicked.

I only listen to music via youtube now days (As inn I only listen to music by the PC). Made myself a good playlist off the music I like, and every now and then I haft to update it cause of 1-2 songs removed. I don't pirate movies etc trough - That comes both from my own POV that its stealing, and I don't want to fill my PC with spyware, virus and shit...I don't trust the internet. I would love a service that has good content off movies trough...Sure woulden't mind seing The Avengers once, or Skyfall or Dark knight rises again - But no way I'm paying for the dvd's...so costly.

[Deleted]

I would love a service that has good content off movies trough...Sure woulden't mind seing The Avengers once, or Skyfall or Dark knight rises again - But no way I'm paying for the dvd's...so costly.

Isn't netflix like that?

In China you have Baidu video, which is free XD

... I guess the long arm of the RIAA doesn't reach here.

[Deleted]

Just as long as piracy remains discouraged and considered immoral, the customers that can actually afford it will buy it.

Now if piracy was widespread, accepted, and no one did anything about it, that would hurt music sales.

Where I live pirating is not only widespread and accepted, but more then a few times when I bought legal software/music/movies I was met by incredulous stares and remarks like "Why didn't you just download it for free?".
I remember when 10+ years ago, when internet connections were still too slow to download games, there were tons of public ads selling pirated CDs with any kind of digital content for 3-5$ a piece and pretty much everyone (me included) was buying software in that way. Good old times when you had your trusted software "dealers" instead of anonymous torrents.

[Deleted]

I am a music producer and so have a vested interest in all this. This research is misleading and can be disregarded. The study focuses only on music downloads and doesn't take into account the effect of piracy on CD sales. CDs still make up the majority of global music sales. The researchers even admit that digital piracy negatively impacts the CD market. Piracy does affect music sales. Studies show that the majority of people who engage in music piracy rarely or never purchase legit copies of the music they download.