How to save the Music Industry

[tunetown]

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainm ... and-piracy

by U2 manager Paul McGuinness.

It's an interesting read.

[jkhuri44]

would be great if music was cheaper.

i know i'd buy 3 times more music if a cd cost 15 bux. not 30.

[jkhuri44]

make older music freely available in highest possible quality. that way you can pay artists creating music now.
stupid idea maybe...but im pretty stupid.

i think part of the music piracy problem is the amount of information and music/media in existance is at an all time high. Naturally, people are more curious about more types of music from different periods than ever before.

30 years ago, people had 30-40 years of recorded music history to catch up on...

today, we have around 70 years of it...our desire to hear more has never been so high.

I buy about 400 dollars worth of records a month...is this enough to satisfy my curiousity, musically speaking, not really, not by a long shot. This 400 dollars is confined 1 style so far....that's all i can really afford. If i had the money, i'd buy limitless amounts of music on vinyl, but i dont. And so the cycle continues.

[jkhuri44]

taking that further, some DJ's that play music for a living dont even buy it...so saying 90 percent of people that listen for fun download that much, is pretty spot on unfortunately.

[gorepants]

95% of music downloads are piracy / illegal - WOW

Not to be skeptical, but I'm always dubious about figures that come from within the industry. Why? It's covered well
here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -downloads
and here http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog ... ads-piracy

Putting on my statistical scientist hat, the a good part of what's wrong with the industry stance is that they oversimplify the problem space and mistak co-occurrence for causation. For example industry types tend to say, $X worth of downloads equals $X lost sales, which is patently not true (made startlingly obvious by some figures reaching up into the tens of percents of GDP!), and forget things like the changes in patterns discretionary spending, correspondence between illegal downloads and later purchase, etc, etc.

That's not saying piracy is OK, that it is not a causal factor (and Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, who originally found that file sharers were more likely to buy music, have more recently found that up to 20% of the drop in music sales is due to file sharing), but that with accurate and meaningful information rational choices that provide long term benefit to both consumers and producers are hard to make.

And in direct response to the article, while I think subscription is a good way of tackling declining sales, if it too plateaus like iTunes sales appear to be doing, will piracy be blamed again? If piracy is the major problem in declining music profits then attacking that will solve it, but only if you know what the underlying problem is. If piracy is not the major problem the attacking it will not do much to arrest declining profits. Worse still, resources used to fight piracy are effectively being wasted if there are other problems that could be solved to bring a greater payoff.

Subscriptions are good start, since they tackle piracy by making it easier to obtain music, and lowered discretionary spending by hiding the cost to the consumer, but I still say more informed data!