Massive Music Piracy Plunge Fails to Halt Decline in Sales

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The good news: Music piracy is way down. The bad news: Music sales are also way down.

For more than a decade the music industry has attributed a massive decline in sales to music piracy. However, in a week where a report from the UK telecoms regulator indicated that piracy has plunged, no industry press releases hit the wire. Perhaps that’s because the effect on sales appears to be non-existent? In fact, the same research shows once again that those who download without permission tend to spend more on music than those who don’t.
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Music purchasers (like myself and many of you) are a dying bread. I still buy music, full albums/CD's, but not nearly at the frequency that I used to. Why? There's not a lot to get excited about. You have to really dig to find good music these days. The music studios aren't doing us any favors, that's for sure.
 
New music sucks whenever it has promotion. The only good music I've found in the last 3 years I found by myself without any fanfare or hype. Frequently I donated money to the artist and just downloaded it. The "industry" will die soon, and the world will be better off.
 
Combine the easy availability of cheap singles via legal downloads (no more buying a $14.99 CD for one good track) to a down economy which forces people to examine priorities (bye-bye cable, hello Netflix, for instance)--of course there will be fewer music sales.

The old model is dying, and the dinosaurs are roaring.

Google Music means I never have to buy another track again.
 
I buy music I like, and get the daily free tracks from Google Play, there hasn't been much of interest lately (maybe because I don't get to listen to Radio 1 since I moved to the US (and discovered crappy commercial radio), the only decent radio channel I found is the local University for any decent and diverse music types.
 
I still get my 10 free tracks a month from Xbox Music because of my legacy Zune account. As soon as that's up I'm going to go subscription only. Meets my music needs.
 
Once I went with a Google Play Music subscription I haven't looked back. Yeah it may use a shit ton of data but hey, I have unlimited :p
 
bpmurrGT said:
I still get my 10 free tracks a month from Xbox Music because of my legacy Zune account. As soon as that's up I'm going to go subscription only. Meets my music needs.
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Hah, I thought I was the only one with a legacy Zune account.
 
Because I'm not dumb enough to pay full price for lossy music. Start selling FLAC and I will be happy to buy a movie score every week.
 
I stopped buying CDs years ago with only very few exceptions: collector's editions of my favorite artists or if they come from PC or video games with bonus content like an artbook and soundtrack.

Other than that, most of my purchases have been through iTunes and Amazon. I buy the tracks I want and not the entire release. That and I listen to a lot of independent artists that aren't tied to a major music label like Sony or Warner Music. Amazingly they have better music than the crap I hear on the radio.

Not only that, it's easier to listen to streaming radio stations and music whether through Pandora, Spotify, or now iTunes Radio. I buy my music on the songs I do like when I hear them on those services. However, there hasn't been a lot of good music lately, and some artists don't even deserve to be on the radio.

It's the price of convenience unfortunately. It's easier to stream music than purchase them not knowing which portable media player or media player software can play them back. And, I think that's where a lot of consumers have decided to do than deal with the different copyright protections and DRM, and player restrictions.

But, there has to be good music out there to be worth buying. I listen to more country, indie pop and indie alternative, and foreign music than a lot of the [mainstream] American pop and rock music because of the lack of quality lately in this generation of music artists. Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, and whatever crap is on the radio lately isn't what I would consider "quality musicians" worth buying their music for.
 
Maybe they should produce more Vinyl records, sales are up for them.
 
if this helps put an end to retarded rappers making millions of dollars for saying a word I (as a white man) am not allowed to say, then I welcome the downfall of this do-nothing empire.
 
There are very few new CD's that I want. Not a lot of great material for the most part. I buy older stuff from Amazon on MP3's, but I already have a large collection, so not a lot of wants there. Satellite radio fills a void, and I've found some great new artists (well, mostly old ones, but new for me to discover). But, I still buy the albums I like.

There really haven't been any full albums I've wanted lately. A long time, really. Some artists can make an album - every track is a greatest hit candidate. Others artists are good with singles, and have maybe 2 good songs on an album. I buy what I like. Sometimes, that's 2 songs, rarely it's the full album.

Then, I look at pop music (top 40...). No way I'd buy that crap. There is no talent there. It's shit.
 
Column A is because of column B, in other words: music sucks so much they don't even care to pirate it.
 
I buy tons of music via bandcamp in FLAC format (and you have the choice or half of dozen formats to choose from) and all the money goes straight to artists. To each their own but I like supporting the artists. I still buy music from Google Play and Amazon mostly because it's not available on bandcamp and I don't have 1000.00 sound system setup to give a f*ck about 256k/320k mp3 vs FLAC.

Oh yeah and soundcloud is a great source for free money many of my favorite artists (Le Youth, Goldroom, R.A.C., Touch Sensitive, GrooveU, Dr. Benz and the list goes on brahs) release their music free on soundcloud for a day before it hits retail months later etc. :cool:
 
Sickb0y said:
I buy tons of music via bandcamp in FLAC format (and you have the choice or half of dozen formats to choose from) and all the money goes straight to artists. To each their own but I like supporting the artists. I still buy music from Google Play and Amazon mostly because it's not available on bandcamp and I don't have 1000.00 sound system setup to give a f*ck about 256k/320k mp3 vs FLAC.

Oh yeah and soundcloud is a great source for free money many of my favorite artists (Le Youth, Goldroom, R.A.C., Touch Sensitive, GrooveU, Dr. Benz and the list goes on brahs) release their music free on soundcloud for a day before it hits retail months later etc. :cool:
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Yup, Bandcamp! Awesome place to get really good music, and the artists get the money and not any grubby music studio that pays a penny or two to the respective artist. Like you, I get them in FLAC too.

I may be 32 years old, but I grew up on cassette tapes and vinyl records, and I miss that quality. CDs can't replicate it. It feels more raw and personal listening to vinyls than CDs. It's why I prefer a lot of digital music in FLAC, or as lossless as possible.

And, yes, the Top 40 list is a joke of musicians lately.
 
Outamyhead said:
I buy music I like, and get the daily free tracks from Google Play, there hasn't been much of interest lately (maybe because I don't get to listen to Radio 1 since I moved to the US (and discovered crappy commercial radio), the only decent radio channel I found is the local University for any decent and diverse music types.
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You can still stream Radio1 from their website or any decent webradio app (if you're willing to eat the data usage). I used to listen to Radio 3 religiously when I had sirius, and before they ruined the format of the website (went from lively and easy to use; to generic and soulless)
 
god dammit meant "soundcloud is a great source for free music" :D lol really need a cup of coffee right meow :(
 
Phatal said:
Music purchasers (like myself and many of you) are a dying bread. I still buy music, full albums/CD's, but not nearly at the frequency that I used to. Why? There's not a lot to get excited about. You have to really dig to find good music these days. The music studios aren't doing us any favors, that's for sure.
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there has been enough entertainment produced in any type of media to keep you entertained for centuries. there is a diminishing value of yet another spiderman movie, book about some weird feminist, rock album or brown/gray first-person-shooter. i do buy cds, but mainly because in the metal genre there is still a high production value in cover art and extras which makes them collectibles for me. however, there is only so much music i can listen to so i don't buy as much either.
 
No one wants what the music "industry" is selling, even if it is free.

You would think even their thick skulls could somehow comprehend that. But you know what? Who cares. There is so much music in the world we don't need middle men to provide it. I don't consider "music" a separate commodity that I need to go seek out and consume.
 
Advil said:
No one wants what the music "industry" is selling, even if it is free.

You would think even their thick skulls could somehow comprehend that. But you know what? Who cares. There is so much music in the world we don't need middle men to provide it. I don't consider "music" a separate commodity that I need to go seek out and consume.
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Look, Wrecking Ball is the pinnacle of musical talent and artistic expression. If you disagree, you're either too old to "get it", or you are a Marxist.
 
The "industry" has been hanging its hat on tweens for the last ten years.

Newsflash: Tweens. Don't. Have. Money.

Despite all of the idiots in the media screaming about how wealthy tweens are, they aren't. Do tweens have $20K entertainment systems in their media rooms? Nope. All the music made for we gen Xers and the baby boomers is either indy or small label these days (I hate the term indy). Suck it big record labels, your bullshit is about as valid as the opinions and incomes of the tweens you thought were going to save you from your own idiocy.
 
When Napster first hit and gained seemingly overnight success, that should have been a loud and clear indication to the Music Industry of how consumers wanted music delivered. But they chose to not embrace this kind of delivery system at the time and instead, they started sueing anyone and everyone that they could in oder to try and curb this new accursed kind of music delivery method and still push people to buy their grossly overpriced physical media... I haven't bought a physical CD in probably 7-8 years now and buy my individual song picks or a full album if it's an artist/band/compilation I like and the price is right from Amazon MP3. The RIAA is still trying to live in the fucking stone age of music media and they prove it each and every time they blow the whistle on piracy being the reason for anything bad happening to sales, even when there's raw proof staring at them in the face that piracy is not the cause! Too many assholes making too much money from both artists and consumers because they've created a monopolistic business model that they won't dump minimal resources into to figure out how to change and get with the times.
 
Violent video games are KILLING the music industry. Jack Thompson said so.. "Gamers are too brain-impaired to buy shitty music from no talent lame artists any more. The $800 million spent on Grand Theft Auto 5 is $800 million the music industry isn't going to get."

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bigstusexy said:
Not the only one :D
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add me to that, my 1st gen zune outlasted many a friends ipod, and i still use it on car trips when i deal with a flaky rental stereo that doesn't like large flash drives.

also have my zune legacy.


as for music...I am also a buyer, or was a buyer i should say. The thing is, there just isn't enough to look forward to, i do buy bands that i support, both large and small. However, most of the stuff i am happy to purchase is rather difficult to buy (think japanese underground bands or russian underground technical death metal), hell most of it is almost equally as difficult to pirate (the japanese stuff especially). That said i find myself finding less and less new bands, or when i do not having any avenue to purchase them.

also, i have no issue with digital music, i have an entire section of my home server set up for music, but if i'm going to buy digital, we need to make with the lossless adoption faster, and to help with that maybe make an actual "app" priced piece of software that will one click lossless to mp3 so that the mainstream can do it easily, since adoption into the hardware realm will take even longer (even some smartphones have issues with lossless).
 
Almost every FLAC on TBP these days is like a 128kbps MP3 transcoded to FLAC. I wouldn't be surprised if it was RIAA employees doing it purposefully just to sabotage the content.
 
All this really means is that the music coming out lately just plain sucks.
 
Who wants to buy the fucking garbage they're attempting to call music anymore? I wish all the major record labels would just fuck off and die already.
 
Sure this isn't just a shitload of people moving to encrypted/VPN connections that the metric-sniffers aren't detecting as piracy?

Then again I have no idea how they're capturing these metrics, so...yeah.
 
dgingeri said:
All this really means is that the music coming out lately just plain sucks.
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Hardly. What it really means is that people don't listen to music like they used to anymore. I work with kids daily and music means nothing to them these days. And why should it? They have ipads, the internet, free streaming music, video games, and a host of other distractions that previous generations didn't have. Most of them listen to music on Youtube...why buy the song when you can stream it from a ton of different websites.

When I was a kid there wasn't internet, cable TV wasn't around, and we didn't have computers. The only thing we had to was talk on the phone (no texting), go play, or sit around and listen to music. Times have changed. Your father said the same thing about your music, his father the same about his, just because you're old and can't see history repeating itself doesn't mean that today's music sucks.
 
bigstusexy said:
Column A is because of column B, in other words: music sucks so much they don't even care to pirate it.
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Auto-tune was the death-knell.

No one actually Writes Music anymore; don't get me wrong, I like all kinds of music.

But the Writing pretty much quit for everyone but a few artists.

I still buy their stuff, but most of my money is going into older music.
 
DrBorg said:
Auto-tune was the death-knell.

No one actually Writes Music anymore; don't get me wrong, I like all kinds of music.

But the Writing pretty much quit for everyone but a few artists.

I still buy their stuff, but most of my money is going into older music.
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You must not be a hipster.
 
As other have said, most current music is so bad, it's not even worth pirating, yet somehow they don't understand why sales are down?
 
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