p2pnet - rss feed: P2p file sharing is here to stay
p2pnet.net News:- Finally, a mainstream media outlet has managed to put two and two together and come up with 3.75, as close to 4 as it’s likely to get.
There’s a huge disparity between what’s happening in the real world of online music and the wholly fictitious corporate world as reported by the world press, relying on data self-generated by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel.
To all intents and purposes, there’s only one corporate player. Apple. And stacked against what happens every minute of every day of every month on the p2p networks and independent download sites, Apple’s claimed sales, unsubstantiated and unaudited as they are, don’t amount to a hill of beans.
p2pnet has been pointing this out for literally years, often using statistics from premier p2p research company BigChampagne to drive the message home.
According to Fox News, “Despite success in suing people who download music illegally and in reaching deals with personal networking sites like YouTube, the music industry is still bleeding millions of dollars in sales to online piracy”.
It would be more accurate to say it’s hemorrhaging money because of bad management, bad business decisions and bad product as it tries to sue its own customers into toeing the corporate-drawn bottom line.
“It is a major issue for an industry that is desperately trying to boost revenue from legal downloads to make up for falling sales of compact discs, which declined 23 percent globally between 2000 to 2006,” says Fox, going on:
“To get an idea of the size of the problem, Eric Garland of Web consultants Big Champagne estimates that more than 1 billion digital tracks are illegally traded for free each month.
“By comparison, Apple Inc.’s iTunes Music Store, which has more than 70 percent of legal digital music sales in the United States, has sold only a bit more than 2 billion songs since its launch in 2003.”
P2P, “remains an unacceptable problem,” the story has RIAA (Recording Industry Association of Americ) boss Mitch Bainwol, saying.
And in direct contradiction to a statement he made last year, when he claimed file sharing had been “contained” and “file-trading is flat,” according to Fox, he now says “folks” engaged in file sharing, “are doing more of it”.
Meanwhile, “the industry’s strategy is to slow down P2P sharing and hope that legal digital music sales will eventually make up the shortfall,” says the story, which has Larry Kenswil, Universal Music’s “top digital executive” admitting something the p2p community has known since Day One, namely, “P2P is not going to go away”.
However, he also says, “the relative problem will drop for us.”
It will, eventually. But not until the Big 4 stop trying to sue their customers into buying low quality, grossly over-priced ‘product’ and admit that business models from the 1970s don’t, and won’t, work in the digital 21st century.
Also See:
Fox News - Record Industry Denies It’ll Lose File-Sharing Battle, February 7, 2007
direct contradiction - P2p file sharing contained: RIAA, June 13, 2006
Want to subscribe to p2pnet by email with Feedburner? Just click here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use our own p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
February 8th, 2007 at 4:26 am
Whether the industry is bleeding or hemorrhaging money it is still inaccurate to relate the amount of money lost with the amount of files that are traded online (or offline for that matter).
So when Eric Garland from Big Champagne uses an estimate (with no references as to where this number comes from) of illegally traded tracks to ‘get an idea of the size of the problem’, it just helps to propagate the distorted concept that illegally acquired music equates to lost sales.
While sharing music is easy and free, people will naturally tend to be opportunistic.
If someone stops you in the street and asks you of you would like to buy a CD of an unknown artist you would likely say “No Thanks.” If they then said, “Well would you like to take it for free?”, you would probably take it.
That doesn’t mean the music retailer down the road lost a sale and likewise does not indicate the size of any problem with declining profits.
February 8th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Says a story here:
http://www.lauweb.com/index.php?Secc=3&nid=12233
“Several legislators were cought red-handed: the press discovered the exchange of pornographic material and pirated copies of videos right in parliament.
Is it not Mexico (and it’s parliament) one of the many places where the cartel lobbyists are trying to criminilize kids that download songs?
Maybe Universal heard about the story and is distancing itself to avoid the embarrasment.