Music Group Plays Victim Card, Media Weep
Share the Music — Baptiste Pons via Creative Commons/Flickr.
An international music group claims piracy is responsible for a 30 percent decline in global music sales from 2004 to 2009.
In a report released Thursday the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry calls for increased crackdowns on digital piracy, saying that while sales from digital downloads are up 21 percent from a year ago, 95 percent of all music downloaded is pirated.
The IFPI is promoting two key findings:
- Piracy is responsible for a lack of music investment
In Brazil, music sales fell by 43% between 2005 and 2009, with a disastrous impact on investment in local repertoire. In 2008 there were only 67 full priced local artist album releases by the five major companies in Brazil – just one tenth of the number (625) a decade earlier in 1998.
- Piracy threatens all content producers
Today, however, creative industries including movie, publishing and television, regard “monetising” the online world and addressing digital piracy as their greatest challenges. Illegal streaming and film downloads now account for 40% of the movie piracy problem by volume (MPAA). Illegal distribution of TV content is growing faster than music and movie piracy
I’ll start off simply and put some cards on the table: people should not pirate music. It’s theft. And while not $150,000 per infraction wrong, it is stealing. Simple enough.
That said, I take industry reports such as this with pretty much the same grain of salt I take reports from coal lobbyists on the environmental effects of mountain top strip mining.
Here are a few things we know from outside observers with little to no skin in the game. A 2009 UK report tells us that yes, people are buying less recorded music than before. The report also tells us that people are spending more on music in aggregate (ie., going to concerts, buying swag and yes, buying music as well).
The Canadian government, in turn, issued a report of their own. Result: file sharing has “a positive effect on music purchases among Canadian downloaders.”
In Holland, a 2009 Dutch government report discusses overall societal gains attributable to file sharing.
Similarly, two Harvard Business School economists released a working paper that, in part, analyzed the ongoing effects of file sharing. As Michael Geist summarizes:
The paper takes on several longstanding myths about the economic effects of file sharing, noting that many downloaded songs do not represent a lost sale, some mashups may increase the market for the original work, and the entertainment industry can still steer consumer attention to particular artists (which results in more sales and downloads).
We can go on. A major IFPI claim is that less industry money is invested in new artists. Listen again to what they say about Brazil: “In 2008 there were only 67 full priced local artist album releases by the five major companies in Brazil – just one tenth of the number (625) a decade earlier in 1998.” (Emphasis mine).
The statistic sounds dramatic until you think how much has changed during that ten year period. It’s neither here nor there without contextualization so here’s some contextualization: in that ten year span digital tools emerged that allow more artists and musicians to record, produce and market work on their own without major label involvement.
As the Harvard Business School report notes, cultural creativity isn’t decreasing. Instead, it’s exploding. In 2000, 35,516 albums were released. By 2007 that number reached 79,695 albums, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In film, 3,807 features were created in 2003. That number increased to 4,989 in 2007, according to Screen Digest.
Who’s Buying What
TorrentFreak writes in a critique of the same report that when compared to traditional buyers, music sharers (ie., “pirates”) are:
- 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
- 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
- 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
- 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.
So while “five major companies” might no longer control cultural output, that doesn’t mean that cultural output is decreasing. It simply reflects that the means of production have switched elsewhere. This is a good thing.
While the IFPI might like to think — or imply — that the major labels are the entire music industry. They’re not.
They’re one piece of a continuously expanding pie that includes concerts, licensing, swag and other tie-ins. Unfortunately for the major labels, they’re holding the short end of the stick as this growth happens elsewhere.
Let’s not mistake the end of a one hundred year technological anomaly — the ability of a monopoly to record and distribute music — with a newfound need to wage copyright war across the planet as the IFPI hopes will happen.
This is exactly what the IFPI would like us to do though. It bemoans Spain and its “culture of state-tolerated apathy towards illegal file-sharing,” but enthuses about anti-piracy legislation passed in France, South Korea and Taiwan.
“Other governments, from the UK to New Zealand,” the authors applaud, “are proceeding with the introduction of [similar] legislation.”
The IFPI is smart to bring the entire media into this flawed conversation. By pointing out to their television, film and publishing brethren that they’re all in the same game, they line up sympathetic allies to fight a perceived common enemy.
It’s too bad their premises are misguided from the get go. Even worse that they’ll use flawed arguments to great effect when lobbying governments.
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This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.
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