Does Music Piracy Hurt Record Sales?

[Bch]

^^^

everyones going to be so used to "SAVING" money... look at it like this ... people spend alot of time cutting out coupons from sundays news paper that save them about 75 cents on items.. what makes u think society wouldnt want to continue to save money buy getting there shit for free...


torrent?? blogs, mirc, internet rap forums boxden , lime wire = alot of shelved albums and starving artists

[Suffice]

No way, artists on majors don't get paid shit anyway for CD sales, i support the artist by going to their concerts. Plus, it takes effort to go to the record store, find what you're looking for, wonder if you're gonna like it or not, and then buy it and find out it was a waste of money. It's faster to DL. I'm gonna buy Lupe Fiasco's record and Radiohead's one though i've already been listening to the downloaded ones for a minute. so yeah, an artist doesn't make classic music, if there's only 2-3 good tracks on a record, why the fuck should i spend 12-18 dollars (that i could find 100 other uses for) on that record? esp. if i'm gonna listen to those 2-3 tracks only

[JAZ]

i download first, i like it? i buy it. if its bad, or so-so i keep it digital.

[Shallow]

^^^

everyones going to be so used to "SAVING" money... look at it like this ... people spend alot of time cutting out coupons from sundays news paper that save them about 75 cents on items.. what makes u think society wouldnt want to continue to save money buy getting there shit for free...


torrent?? blogs, mirc, internet rap forums boxden , lime wire = alot of shelved albums and starving artists

Starving? No way. The more people that have the album, the more people that like the artist, the more people that go to a concert. That's where the artists get there money; live shows.

Save? Why didn't they do that in the 80s? People don't save, and a dubbed cassette on a crappy walkman isn't much worse than a real cassette on a crappy walkman or 80s car stereo.

Show me a great album from an artist than didn't sell. Show me where that artist would have sold. Illmatic wasa classic, barely went platnum. No internet to hurt those sales. N'sync came out at the heart of the internet craze, so did Eminem. Everyone downladed Encore, why'd it still end up at 5 platinum?

[Philip1123]

I still buy albums all the time. The only time I download is if it's random song by artists whose albums I don't intend to buy - meaning not my favorite artists.

But when it comes to the artists I am a fan of (and there are tons of them) I'll buy the album for sure.

[Bch]

it never used to be that way the ONLY SOURCE of MAJOR INCOME for an artist is in TOURING....there used to be several artist deals and perks/bonuses if an artist sold xxxxx amount of copies in record contracts... plus not only that you were able to negotiate a contract were you would earn more money back on every single record sold ...


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truth be told all bull shit aside ^^^^^^ 
watch and pay attention

[Efrain]

Only if you're a rapper, and your target audience is the 16-25 year olds.

If you're in any other musical genre the impact of the internet, mp3's et al. is minimal. 5-10% maybe. If you're in the hip-hop/r&b/rap genre you're talking about 25-30% which changes the way record companies look at prospective acts/artists and arguably influences the majority of what we hear hip-hop today. The profit margins are smaller so the available funds to develop new artists are limited, and thus the spectrum of creative diversity is smaller. Record exec's rely on older, established artists/acts to keep bringing in money while new artists are pressured to come with a sound that's popular/proven to generate income or turned away completely.

So yeah, downloading and piracy pretty much = the black plague for hip-hop IMO. 

[Shallow]

it never used to be that way the ONLY SOURCE of MAJOR INCOME for an artist is in TOURING....there used to be several artist deals and perks/bonuses if an artist sold xxxxx amount of copies in record contracts... plus not only that you were able to negotiate a contract were you would earn more money back on every single record sold ...


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truth be told all bull shit aside ^^^^^^ 
watch and pay attention

I'd say record labels not throwing money away on shitty Busta albums is a good thing. 4 million dollars to make a Busta album? Fuck that. Why would I support bad artists getting overpaid for doing less. You get on the road, put on a home run show night after night, build your fan base. Dave Matthews Band barely aproacges 1 million sales when they realease a record but every time they go on tour they come home with 50 million dollars.

Look through the history of music revenue for artists. The records started breaking year after year with each tour. Grateful Dead in the 70s and 80s and Phish in the 90s made more money than the top hip hop stars and both bands barely sold a record,  and barely saw radio, or video play. The money was always in the live show.

The late 80s and 90s was filled with shitty music and stupd business decisions by management. That's what lead to Busta geting 4 mil. It was the time of propping up artists and making them look special. High budget videos, expensive guest spots. People still pay clowns like Tinbo, Dre and Kanye way too much for a beat just to say those guys did the beat. They can just take the same samples Kanye uses and get the same song. You can hire Elizondo for less than Dre and get the same musical notes because Elizondo wrtes, unless they are covered from an old song.

[Turf Hitta]

bootlegging + POOR records are working hand in hand in my opinion

Exactly. The piracy is obviously not going to make it easier to sell records unless the music is actually quality music worth buying. If an album is garbage, the easier access to the album is going to make it much easier for it to be known that its a garbage ass record. It works the opposite way for quality music. The more people who hear a quality record, then more people are going to buy it.

[R1ZE]

I wouldn't buy alot of the stuff I download anyway, and if I really like the artist, I still buy - but I know other people who don't. Of course it affects the sales, but the artists really don't connect with the audience like they need to, either.

[~Lucien~]

yes.. and also my harddrive

[HD]

no. just a little tiny  bit http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

[Elevz]

no. just a little tiny  bit http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

Props!

[LyRiCaL_G]

there is absolutely no doubt that downloading has played a role in the continued downward trend of record sales...not so much for big acts because people usually buy the records of their favourite artists anyways....even the biggest cats have seen sales decline drastically BUT its more of a problem for the regular cat, the average singer who would have sold 50-500k or even reach platinum will probably sell about 50-100k max now....why? because before downloading people would often buy records they were not soo sure about...like u would walk into a record store and cop an album u may have heard about but was not sure about.....now instead of that, people just download the album or download the one or two dope tracks from the album and fuck the rest of the album whereas before poeple would cop the album...

i know there has been stuff i would have copped in the past i have not now because of the internet....and lets face it, the internet seems to expand ont he daily and ipods and mp3 players and word of mouth of downloading tracks back from napster to torrens is huge...

ofcourse music piracy has had a negative affect on record sales, not just of hiphop, most genres BUT at the same time, it also gives promotion and has in many ways made people blow up who couldnt exposure in other ways due to lack of funds or whatever...

but obviously like anything else its not all clear and a one sided debate...but there is no doubt the internet has had an effect on sales of music records...but seriously who gives a fuck, i download and i aint ashamed....i buy albums still too...but its just shit i would have had to cop before to check shit i don't need to anymore....

i mean if eminem used to sell 10 million records now but is now sellin 3-4 million...i couldnt give a fuck because whiteboy is still gon be makin crazy paper

pz

[HD]

no. just a little tiny  bit http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

Props!

yeah i did a presentation about this a few months ago so i still had that link
for the people that dont want to read 52 pages... here's some of the important parts: http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/032904_file_sharing.html

File Sharing Cannot Explain the Decline in Sales of Music during This Period

Even in the professors most pessimistic statistical model, it takes 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by a single copy. If this worst-case scenario were true, file sharing would have reduced CD sales by 2 million copies in 2002. To provide a point of reference, CD sales actually declined by 139 million copies from 2000 to 2002.

More Popular CDs Benefit from File Sharing

The effect of file sharing on sales depends on the popularity of a release, according to the researchers. For the least popular albums (with sales of less than 36,000 copies) the authors found a small negative effect. In contrast, for the top 25 percent of albums (with sales of more than 600,000 copies) they found a positive effect: 150 downloads increase sales by one copy. This effect is particularly important because the profitability of the music industry depends almost entirely on the success of the most popular albums.