Friday, February 27, 2009

I know I'll make you yell, scream and holler for more / Yes, Yes, y'all

The Torrent Bay trial is fascinating and has provided the recording industry with an fairly high profile outlet for some of it's more outrageous claims, most of which either don't stand up to heavy scrutiny or analysis. There has been much written about the decline of the dollar value (although not the unit numbers, which are on the rise, giving substance to part of the below story) of the recording industry's business since 2000 but the things the labels don't want to talk about are fairly well summed up in the piece linked to below (and no, 'music is shite now' is not one them, thankfully).

Recently I noted a meeting I was at, close to a decade back, when the ogre of the day was blank CDs. An industry spokesman in NZ loudly and publicly touted a figure of lost sales based on CD burns using 50% of the blank discs sold in NZ as a base. Somebody quietly pointed out the figure being touted was greater than the sum of all NZ CD sales in the previous year.

Just as a note, this is taken from Torrent Freak which clearly has a side in this but writer Jens Roland is a guest of some substance.

According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past 8 years can be fully attributed to (read: blamed on) illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past 8 years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability — much more so than any amount of piracy.

Let us refresh our memories and take a look at what actually happened during and just before the past 8 years:

[From How To Kill The Music Industry | TorrentFreak]

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