Is Piracy Killing The Music Industry?

"A lot of people in the industry want to blame downloading for the state of the business. But I think if most music wasn't (expletive) to begin with people wouldn't be downloading it for free,." "Seriously – who wants to risk hard-earned money on music that's maybe 98 percent crap? I'm not going to. I still buy new albums, but people ask what my favorite new album is and nine times out of ten I don't have one. Music is garbage. - Slipknot's Corey Taylor

Piracy is killing music, and the music industry will never make as much money as it did back when everyone was replacing their tapes and records with compact discs, according to the latest reports. Sound cliche? Let's take a look.

I’d hate to break the news to all the suits in the music business but the CD is dying, and the album is dying with it. Sure, the true music enthusiast will appreciate the art that a well orchestrated album is, but the masses are increasingly spending their money on singles. The album has lost much of it’s appeal and function to the iPod generation.

In 2010 the UK music industry sold 161.8 million singles (digital and physical) compared to 66.9 million in 2006.

the BPI points out that album sales overall were down by 7%. Although digital album sales were up 30.6%, physical CDs were down by 12.4%.

Everyone tends to want to blame the artist, but even an indie artist gets hurt by piracy, they still at at the mercy of digital pirates on file sharing services, because they don’t have the legal backing or financial resources that a major does to go after every single violation.

Sorry but ITunes, Amazon, CD Baby, etc. still charge the artists just like a label does, yes the artists get a larger share of sales, but the total cost of promotions, marketing, manufacturing, merchandising falls on the lap of the artist, and whether or not the artist sells one cd or not, these sites still get an upload fee to their sites, and they make money off artists that have not even sold one single song or very little. So who is getting raped here?

Of course the majors are directly responsible for the digital revolution in a negative way because of their MAPS agreement in the 90′s, and instead of capitalizing off of the digital revolution, they railed against it. They are now attempting to play catch up by shutting down all the competition whether legal or illegal, so I get that one. But this argument over numbers that seem to be inflated only because most of these tech zines and sites complaining about the RIAA and piracy in itself, tend to negate the years between the numbers they usually post in these articles, does not make a legitimate argument.

In each of the past two years, the rate of increase in digital revenue has approximately halved,” reads a Times’ article. “If that trend continues, digital sales could top out at less than $5 billion this year, about a third of the overall music market but many billions of dollars short of the amount needed to replace long-gone sales of compact discs.

There are a few problems with assertions that the sky is falling where music is concerned. For starters, revenue (including services like Pandora, Spotify, YouTube) is not the same thing as sales (CDs, iTunes, Amazon), so when the Times talks about “digital music sales,” it’s leaving many of the most popular music services out of the discussion. - From Wired.com

So is that to say the numbers are being padded for digital and cd sales because music subscription services are being left out of the equation? Digital downloads in my opinion do count as a "sale", so these numbers should always be included, even if a consumer signs up for one of these music subscription sites and has free reign to download whatever they like.

Contrary to "popular belief" or whatever any industry professional or insider may be telling you, the US music industry has seen numbers fall over the past several years (http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/amplifier/70991/2010-album-sales-way-worse-than-2009-album-sales/) as compared to other countries. File sharing and piracy are not responsible for that? Ok, then who or what is, ghosts?

In a previous post I wrote about a new music service that will be offered by the major record companies in the U.S., seems they now want to jump on the digital bandwagon instead of sitting on the sidelines. Music Unlimited, which has more than 6 million songs, lets Sony Music Entertainment and partners Universal Music Group, EMI Music and Warner Music Group effectively cut out middle men and gives them more control over revenue. Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity, which Sony unveiled in September, started in the U.K. and Ireland in December and in France, Germany, Italy and Spain this weekend.

Will this curtail piracy or help the industry salvage falling numbers? Only time will tell.

On another note, consumers(who tend to pirate on these file sharing sites) need to pipe down! You can’t get a free car, free gas, free bottled water, a free radio component system, a free stove, a free meal at your favorite 5 star restaurant, so why should you not want to pay for music that is “property” as the aforementioned items?? Bottom line, this music belongs to the artists and to the distributors that put them in the marketplace unless the artists are completely independent and not even using a digital distribution service.

Artists need to learn the business, and then they won’t be signing one sided contracts. It is quite alarming to say the least when one artist in particular, Michael Jackson owns %50 of the publishing (an artists largest source of income), of some of the world’s major artists through several of his acquisitions of music publishing catalogs. That includes The Beatles, Justine Bieber, Lady Gaga, The Black Eyed Peas, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Eminem, Rick Ross, etc., etc… In 1984 he acquired ATV’s 4000 song publishing catalog and then merged it with SONY’s music publishing wing in 1995, which has generated over a billion dollars since his untimely desmise.

LOOK AT THIS LATEST REPORT FROM THE BBC ON THE GLOBAL PUSH TO END PIRACY