File Sharers Spend More On Music, Also Responsible For Decline In Sales
Wait…what?
There was a great post by Andrew Dubber over at Music Think Tank addressing this apparent contradiction in the media of late. Here’s what he had to say…
———-
I’ve read two very interesting related articles this week.
The first suggested that people who download music via peer-to-peer services spend more money on music than their non-filesharing peers.
The second insisted that the net drop in CD and download sales overall has increased concurrent with, and as a result of filesharing.
It’s difficult to argue with either, since they’re both backed by respectable-seeming research and surveys – and yet they can’t possibly both be true.
Until you realise the fundamental logical flaws in both positions: the presupposition that unauthorised downloading of music has a causal effect – indeed, is the only causal factor – on the fortunes of the music business.
Clearly, as soon as you take a step back and think about it logically, so-called ‘piracy’ cannot possibly be anything more than one of a whole range of factors affecting the music industry as a whole, simply because the world is a complicated place and people are complex and interesting.
There are political, economic, social, cultural and technological factors all influencing the industry’s affairs – and it stands to reason that different influencing factors are pulling in all sorts of different directions.
To blame piracy for the decline of music revenues – or to single out pirates as the main source of income – overlooks that complexity, and merely provides a PR sideshow to the main story (that almost never gets covered in the mainstream press), which is that the entire ecosystem of music business is changing.
Click here to read the rest of this article
[wpp keyword="recording studio" limit_page="2"]Related posts:
- RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales
- Music Tech Guru Says Web Is Not The Enemy
- How Can You Possibly Make Any Money Giving Away Your Music For Free?
- Is The Future Of Music Really This Bleak?
- Google Launches Music Search With Lala, Pandora, Rhapsody, imeem & MySpace
