Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I think you are right. That's why recorded music has experienced a big revenue decline in the last twenty years. Some people here say they can fight back with lower prices and ease of purchasing. They have... How some people here can't see a piracy problem is beyond me.
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To be clear, you are mixing two things here.
1: The recording industry is in decline because times and the market have changed. People don't buy full albums like they used to.
I remember during the boom period of CDs that there were complaints that CDs were just too expensive. A new release at that point averaged around +/-$16.00. The fact that nearly twenty years later a new digital album runs between $10-12 dollars tells me that CDs likely
were overpriced. When digital music was first catching on, you had to buy the entire album, the cost was the same as CDs and the process was cumbersome.
Napster revolutionized that and people realized that they didn't always want a full album. They just wanted a few choice songs. Illegally downloading music was huge. Aside from the fact it was free, it was also easy. Everyone did it. It was all over the news. Piracy became a big issue.
2: Eventually, Apple developed iTunes and sold individual songs at $0.99 a piece. Amazon joined in and the files were (eventually) sold without DRM and legal MP3s took off. There's still piracy, to be sure. It just isn't what it was. It's hard to argue with a buck a song and in general, it's probably easier to find a legal version of a song on iTunes or Amazon than to look for the file elsewhere.
Eliminating all music piracy won't make people go back to forking over $17 for an album when they only want two or three songs. That ship has sailed.
That's my memory of what happened to the music industry in the last twenty years. Fair warning: I wrote this in my tablet and it's fairly late. Research and spell checking were minimal.