darwin03 used our news submit to tell us "So much for huge losses of money despite the fact they have been pushing a lot of poor music. 6.3% loss of CD sales but digital delivery sales of 6%, I don't know about you, but 0.3% of a fall in sales of CD's doesn't sound like a lot of piracy or copying to me. It just shows that if they give the consumers what they want at a decent price they will still sell their poor music and make ridiculous profits. Record company's need to get themselves into the digital age instead of the dinosaur age, but most of all, look at providing quality music and customer service."
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Digital delivery now accounts for 6 per cent of total sales, almost cancelling out the 6.3 per cent fall in sale of compact discs. In Australia, the Australian Performing Right Association does not include downloads in its figures which, in line with world sales, declined 7.54 per cent in the six months to June 2005 to 22.7 million units. The Australian Record Industry Association blamed the declines on illegal downloads and copying and alternative technologies such as computer games and mobile phones. But the latest worldwide download figures suggest that the market isn't as sluggish as first thought. "More and more people in a growing number of countries are turning to the new legal ways of downloading music on the internet or via mobile phones," phonographic industry chairman John Kennedy said. |
These figures have been floating around for a couple weeks and we even reported them here already, but these new comments are important to share, as it does hammer home the true nature of todays digital marketplace and shows that there is a recognition of this paradigm shift being talked about.
There is a similar situation going on with the movie industry, that constanly reports that box office sales are slipping, yet fail to acknowledge the fact that they have divided (somewhat) their customer base with a new product, the DVD! Like a broken record, they never seem to mention this extremely profitable segment that they never enjoyed before, doubling up the profits and even making box office dog profitable with the digital release. In fact, the movie DVD can be even more profitable than the box office, yet they still want to blame piracy at least partially, for the loss of theater goers and any mising revenues that they expected to receive.
It is important to remember that even though piracy is a factor and it is a problem, we cannot use this as a way to point to lost profit. There is no way to know that a person was going to purchase the legitimate product if the pirate version was not available.
Source: The Age
