James Delahunty
3 Jan 2006 11:54
Now that 2005 has come to an end, major music labels can assess their sales over the past 12 months. To the annoyance of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), music CD sales in the U.S. dropped by about 3.5% according to Nielsen Soundscan. CD sales had risen by 2.3% in 2004 and the music companies were quick to applaud their anti-piracy efforts and gave those efforts full credibility for the rise in CD sales. However, now faced with a 3.5% drop, the same companies are blaming piracy all over again.
However, looking back over the past year, the collective anti-piracy efforts of both the music and movie industries on the Internet reached a whole new level of toughness. Specifically, the entertainment industry has the U.S. Supreme Court Grokster ruling under it's belt, which then led to many P2P services disappearing or changing completely. Now add on the 7,000+ lawsuits from the RIAA against P2P users and the Australian Kazaa case; it was a good year for anti-piracy efforts (from the music industry's usual point of view).
So that brings us to a question; if the music industry cited the 2004 anti-piracy efforts for the rise of music sales, then why were their anti-piracy efforts ineffective in 2005? Perhaps the answer is simply that the RIAA was wrong in 2004? One thing that is easily forgotten by music companies is that economical changes affect sales all around the world - sometimes people have less or more money to spend on music. Then you must remember that technology advances lead to new "must have" products every year that consumers buy up, leaving them with less money to spend on music. Then, there is also another factor; maybe less people were really interested in the music selection major labels provided in 2004.
It seems the the major music labels of the world believe that all their customers have the same amount of money each year and spend it on the same things. New gadgets like Sony's PlayStation Portable and new iPods (and other MP3 players) in 2005 were purchased with many consumers' spare cash, leaving them less money to spend on music. Also, take into account some of the recent natural disasters in the world, such as the December 2004 Asian tsunami disaster which saw many people donating large amounts of money in early 2005 to help out. There are countless things that are not music-related that could have contributed to the drop in CD sales.
Legal music downloads have also grown in popularity. Many consumers now have turned from buying CDs and instead just pay for single downloads instead of full albums on CD. Does piracy affect music sales? Of course it does but can it be solely blamed for CD sales drops in 2005? That's very doubtful. It is probably just easier for the music companies to blame piracy (particularly file sharing piracy) for drops in CD sales than to accept that some consumers were less interested in music in 2005 for example.
Source:
The Register