New research says file sharing no threat to music sales

[elroy]

A new study performed by researchers at University or North Carolina and Harvard bussiness school suggests file sharing has no bad effect on music sales and in certain cases even boosts sales.
Also:

Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, an Atlanta company that tracks file-sharing activity, said the findings match what his company has observed about the effect of file sharing on music sales.

In your face, RIAA!
Yahoo news

[Bigity]

You expect them to listen to the facts?

[Egon]

Ahhh! You heard 'em, boys! Let's go download that music so we can help the starving record companies and artists!!!

[Deacon]

Heh, starving record companies. I like it

[ReggarBlane]

The article admits there was a drop in sales during the same time that file-sharing really took off. The article claims that file-sharing couldn't have attributed to any more than 2% loss last year.

The obvious question: If file-sharing didn't cause the drop in sales, then what did?

Personally, I think sales fell because artists began to (seemingly) "pad" their albums with crap en masse. One good song and a bunch of poorly recorded/edited/performed/written/redone junk on the rest of the album.

File-sharing, cd-burning and even market flooding may have had a small hand in it, but the lack of the desire to buy due to content is likely the biggest culprit here. If anything, file-sharing made it easier for people to discover the ruse of "padding" a CD album. Shame on the recording industry.

[StruckingFuggle]

Well it's no thread to sales, but is it a threat?

[Deacon]

Read it as if elroy has a code and canb talk troo his node

[misterskullhead]

I believe file-sharing my contribute slightly to the drop in CD sales, but there are many other factors that are more important:

1. The opportunity to hear new music in a public forum has been steadily decreasing. Clearchannel radio stations play about 50 songs in various degrees of mediocrity. The record labels effectively killed independent internet radio. VH1 and MTV rarely play music and when they do it's the same songs heard on the radio. If we don't know what bands are out there, we won't buy.

2. Quality of albums has been decreasing steadily, as another poster pointed out. Most new albums have a couple of decent singles and a lot of fluff. Many clock in at 45 minutes or less - that's $18 for less than an hour of music. Why should I spend more than an hour's wages on less than an hour of music?

3. Price point - we're getting gouged for CD prices and we know it. There's no reason why CDs should cost $18.

4. An emphasis on mega-selling singles and ultra-mainstream successes. If the record labels would promote 100 good bands to gold albums instead of 1 ultra-bland triple-platinum, they'd do much better.

5. The music that these kids today listen to ain't even music, it's just noise. Dang kids, with their roller skates and their comic books...

[elroy]

There's no reason why a CD should cost 21 or 22 euros either. (26-27 US dollars) (not exagerating.)

[confusedcious]

Ahhh....
economics

they and CD players are complements with a relatively inelastic demand curve

put simply, they can charge outrageous prices, and get away with it too

[two_tone]

Well only sort of. It can't last forever, and file sharing is showing that people want music but are pissed off about paying thorugh the ass for it. Compare to indie label fans who download but still buy the cd later. As oppsed to the BritChrisPop crap that everyone just wants two songs off of and never really pick up further interest. These are the people i-tunes was invented for. Unfortunetly it's still about 15 dollars a cd.

[elroy]

Nope. 99 cents per song, or 10 dollar for a complete CD. As far as I know anyway.

[peter-griffin]

I prefer my music to be free and my artists poor, frankly. Keeps them working harder

[jesse, stay asleep in bed]

Damn skippy.

As much as I'd like to justify my 6.18 gigs of mp3s, I think the correlation between free music, and a decline in buying of un-free music is quite clear. I don't think the impact will "cripple" the industry, but it will definitely give it a much needed downsizing.

Mainstream media needs to be cheaper anyways. 18 is quite ridiculous for a single album.

Either way, I don't mind, I always buy CD's to bands I really like, and as it works out, most of the bands I really like aren't mainstream, and the CD's are much more reasonably priced at 10-12 each.

[Quelkron]

The obvious question: If file-sharing didn't cause the drop in sales, then what did?

The most obvious reason is actually music piracy. You know, those people who sell copies of CDs for $5 a disc. I saw an actuall study on the effect of this vs P2P piracy and the difference was staggering. CD copiers have been damaging the industry for years. I guess they just figured that it was better business to alienate their entire customer base rather than go after actual pirates (who by the way do not seem to put forth much, if any, effort to hide what they do).

Another reason that their record sales have been dropping is that the transistion period is over. People who were converting their vinyl and tape collections to CD have finished and are not buying as much music anymore.

These are the same people who could not believe that internet radio could do anything but harm them, and then there was a boost in profits until they shut down internet radio. They did the same thing with public radio when they started playing popular music. It is an industry that can never see a beneficial technology until it is forced down their throats several times. So I guess that they will figure it out some day that they can profit from this P2P thing in ways other than suing their cutomer base, and if they never do, then let them die. Those who cannot addapt die out.