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thesweetcheat T
thesweetcheat Nov 21, 2009 13:15:37
Replying to Robot Emperor

There are some very good points being made here and in the replies. Two things that I would say though:

1. This proposed legislation does not differentiate between sharing files of music that is already available to buy in shops/legally on-line and music that is otherwise unavailable and never likely to become so. This is where it becomes draconian in the extreme. You will criminalise people who are more than willing to buy the legally available product for the fact that they also obtain otherwise unavailable music "illegally". That is hard to justify and certainly won't do anything to support the music industry or artists.

2. There is a suggestion here that "the kids" do not value music in the same way that "we" do. I cannot agree with this. Music is as popular as it ever was, sales of ipods and viewing figures of X Factor alone indicate that. Interestingly, many teenagers are buying 7" singles (often of music they have also donwloaded) because they still love the cachet of having the physical product. Many of them don't even have anything to play the records on. See linked article on this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7750581.stm

CD sales are declining, but partly this is industry, rather than customer, driven. The HMV chain now prioritises games and DVDs. Buyers who want CDs won't find them there anymore and CDs have become increasingly marginalised partly because of this lack of highstreet availability.

J Joolio Geordio
Joolio Geordio Nov 21, 2009 16:58:30
Replying to thesweetcheat

thesweetcheat wrote:
CD sales are declining, but partly this is industry, rather than customer, driven. The HMV chain now prioritises games and DVDs. Buyers who want CDs won't find them there anymore and CDs have become increasingly marginalised partly because of this lack of highstreet availability.
I think its retail driven rather than music industry driven or consumer driven. The record companies major and independent alike are concerned that they CD sales are falling and they are being afforded less shelf space at retail. This reduction in shelf space is partly due to lack of compelling releases and partly due to retailers particularly the non traditional music retailers e.g. the supermarkets preferring to use that shelf space for something (could be video, could be games could be something non home entertainment related) which is a higher value item than a CD.
As I said music companies large and small still want us to buy CD's and the fall in demand, be it due to lack of good artists or due to the large amount of illegal file sharing or friend to friend copying on CD-R concerns them as they haven't truly got to grips with the legal download world and put an effective digital distribution business model in place to replace the loss in sales from CD's. In 2007 in the UK CD Album sales fell by 30 million units vs. 2006 - while legal album download sales reached 6 million units.