Hey, wha'dya know. I'm not alone in my beliefs.
http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_...s/dmr2009.html
Bullet point #2: 95% of all downloads are infringing/unauthorized (as of January 2009).
Many people will be highly skeptical of the IFPI, and even I won't give them an extended defense. But the chances that they are off by an order of magnitude is rather slim.
Meanwhile, CD sales are still dropping (though they still make up 50% or so of the market), and artists -- especially less well known bands -- routinely assert that unlike 10+ years ago, they can no longer earn a living from recording sales.
So, a likely scenario is that the legit services are cannibalizing CD sales, while piracy is replacing at least some portion of download sales.
Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Strnad
As noted in the other thread, the Radiohead pay-what-you-want-even-if-it's-nothing deal required buyers to register their name, email address and mailing address. I wouldn't buy from an unknown website like that if I had to register that information.
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mmmmm
• People
routinely give up their info at the drop of a hat. You and I may not do so, but many people have few qualms about such things. *cough* FACEBOOK *cough*
• Infringing file sharing isn't exactly a security-enhanced environment.
• I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that Radiohead's fans are technically savvy enough to at least know who was running the site. Or do you think I'm giving those folks too much credit?
(By the way, you might want to re-read the last paragraph of the article....)
Quote:
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Originally Posted by J. Strnad
Radiohead moved more that twice as many copies through their own website, at whatever price, than were downloaded for free from pirate sites.
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Actually, the article points out that after a few weeks, infringing downloads were likely to outnumber initial sales, since so much were presales. (Go ahead, re-read the article, I'll wait.
)
The point is that even when you give it away for free and/or let people pay what they want, at a high quality, without DRM, without concerns about viruses and malware, and cut the publisher out of the deal altogether -- in other words,
even when you resolve all the issues critics point out about the current system, people will still pirate your stuff. In huge numbers.
I'd say you can
cautiously draw some inferences from that fact.