Piracy outweighs online music sales

Piracy will never go away and it's time that the entertainment industry realises this. The software industry figured it out long ago. The best they can do is to stem the tide and these online services will certainly help.. Unless they all suck as bad as BuyMusic does.

Well, what can I say? Of course piracy will never go away, IF there is a way to pirate stuff, which there always is.... ;)

I wonder what sort of a figures you'd end up with if you added up all the album (CD and LP) and video (VHS and DVD) sales from both 1995 and 2000. I'm pretty sure the total sales were quite a bit larger in 2000. Atleast I put CDs and DVDs in the same category -- if I buy CDS, I'm not going to buy DVDs for a while, and vice versa.

Okay, I may be dating myself here. I used to put a lot of other people's albums (vinyl) onto cassette tape. A lot. I may have purchased a few of those records if not for the tapes, but only a few. These "losses" of CD sales seem to be based on estimates of the TOTAL number of files being shared. There's no way people would have purchased all that music even if P2P did not exist at all. Combine that with game sales (through the roof), increased CD prices in a bad economy, & crappy offerings from the major labels and I feel like P2P's impact on music sales is being extremely exaggerated.

I agree with Gray Area, people pirate much more than they would ever buy. Heck people pirate more than the would ever use. Check out the people with 500 CDS of MP3's. Thats a heck of a lot of music. And I doubt they listen to half of it. Much less they would have bought 10% of it if they were forced to.

i think Grey Area and rpeckhoff got it exactly right. i have so much stuff that i would never buy if i couldn't have gotten it free from one source or another.

Grea area is perfectly rightm well see what happens to the Riaa in the future

Why are we kidding ourselves? Music SHOULD be free. And we all know why. If everybody had unlimited access to music the world would be a happier place for everyone. Funny thing is, it's not that hard to do and only extremely rich people would be losing money.

y'all are full of sh*t. any one who takes free music is robbing hard working people out of money

this is still news to people? that piracy outweighs legal sales? I can't beleive that this is still headline news. Piracy will never go away. Hackers and programmers are way more computer savy than those damn RIAA and MPAA.

Its strange that the people who pirate music & dvd's are treated with disgust, whereas the hi tech companies who produce hardware copying appliances never seem to take any of the blame. If the recording or dvd industry were serious about piracy surely they should sue these hi tech companies. Oh of course but that would be silly as theres so many conflicts of interest out there. ie SONY. (What hypocrits they are!!) I personally think that p2p sharing is a good idea in general. It introduces more music to more people, therefore the potential for music sales surely must be higher?? Its basically free advertising I may also add that i do not share files via p2p. Hence my knowledge of todays bands and artists are limited to say the least. This may turn into a worrying trend for the recording industry if all p2p sharing was deemed illegal

i think brian is onto something...the same industry that is persecuting us for "stealing" will allow a company to make a ripoff of a new product. for example sony is now coming out with a new dvd writer 2.4x. do you think bose, and samsung aren't going to use that same exact idea with their name on it...these people just want money, end of story. it's your choice whether or not you want to support them.