Although we hear the music industry constantly complaining about file sharing, apparently the worst piracy is still indeed physical CD piracy with 1 in 3 CDs sold being a pirate copy, costing the music industry an estimate 3.8 billion Euro in lost revenue in 2004. When consumers download music, there is still a good chance of them purchasing the albums they downloaded if they like the music, however with CD piracy consumers are very unlikely going to fork out again for a legitimate copy of the same music.
However, despite the major music piracy problem, it has finally stopped rising due to governments taking steps to fight it, according to the Recording Industry Commercial Piracy Report 2005. As a result, overall piracy levels (consisting of discs & tapes) fell slightly between 2003 and 2004, while amount of CD burning equipment seizures has doubled. At present, piracy has grown at its lowest level in 5 years; although the current piracy rate is still double that of back in 2000. Between 2003 and 2004, CD piracy rose 2% to 1.5 billion units, while Cassette Tape piracy fell 28% to just 390 million units.
Currently, pirate music sales exceed legitimate sales in 31 Countries, with China and Russia tying in for the 1st and 2nd worst countries for music piracy respectively. Spain on the other hand which use to be one of the world's top countries for legitimate music sales has seen a 1/3 of their sales replaced with CD piracy, thus making it the top priority country named by the IFPI report for urgent government action. heystoopid used our news submit to let us know about the following news:
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Despite the huge scale of the problem, some governments have taken encouraging steps to address music piracy in the last 18 months, according to the recording industry Commercial Piracy Report 2005, which is published by UK based industry association IFPI. A total of 1.2bn pirate music discs were sold in 2004, which is 34 per cent of all discs sold worldwide. But growth in disc piracy has slowed to its lowest level in five years, partly thanks to stepped up enforcement efforts in countries including Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, Paraguay and Spain. Industry and government enforcement efforts are also reaping results. The past year saw record levels of pirate production taken out of action, while seizures of commercial CD burning equipment in 2004 were twice the levels of 2003.CDFreaks. Sales of pirate music exceed the legitimate market in a record 31 countries in 2004 - including, for the first time, Chile, Czech Republic, Greece, India and Turkey. Read the full article here. |
As previous studies have shown many times that file sharing has very little effect on music, it is quite clear that the music industry should put less resources into suing potential customers, but instead put these resources into tracing and fighting off street piracy. Unlike music downloaded from the Internet, pirate CDs are often created to look like the real thing, which means that many consumers are fooled into purchasing what they think is the real thing. As a result, these consumers feel they have already paid for the album and thus would unlikely buy it again; even if later on they do find out that what they were purchasing was illegitimate. However quite a lot of consumers who download music do so to sample it, especially if they are unsure about an album.
heystoopid added: The RIAA & IFPI are at it again with bent figures and corrupt inaccurate and unreliable data in press releases for the annual report. Then again, if one was to believe these figures, then the bulk of the annual sales of blank CDR's are utilized for other than data back up and storage. Ahh, we live in interesting times where major organizations can claim fictititious information as reality!
Source: Digital Media Asia News
