After all the RIAA's effort on filing lawsuits currently totalling over 3,000 and the approval of the Pirate Act, there is more and more research aiming to prove that file sharing is not the culprit. Video games and DVDs which are widely available on P2P networks are still selling very well with DVD sales still on the rise. Also, many industries suffered significant decline following the Sept. 11 economy decline.
Now the recording industry claims its lawsuits are finally paying off after US CD sales have risen by 10.6% in the 1st quarter 2004 from last year. However music downloads are also back on the
rise, up 5 million to a total of 23 million over the same period.
This indicates that CD sales seem to depend on how well file sharing is
doing, thus contradicting what the music industry claims. These figures are backed by Mr. Oberholzer-Gee a professor at the Harvard Business School and Mr. Strumpf visiting from Cato Institute.
One simple solution already shown to satisfy most home users as well as overcome current loses without these lawsuits would to be to charge a $ 5 flat rate fee per month. This could be placed on the consumer's broadband bill for an unlimited legitimate file sharing service and income could be then split among to the artists based on the number of downloads per song they achieved. Thanks to cd11 for submitting the following news via our news submit :
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The association argues that file sharing is directly responsible for the widely reported slump in CD sales from 2000 to 2003. This, however, ignores the fact that the economy was in a post-Sept. 11 recession and that many other industries suffered even greater declines in their sales at the time. Still, it is reasonable to assume that downloading was a cause of some drop in CD sales. But this simple narrative is a bit more complicated. The two primary direct competitors for young music buyers' dollars '” video games and DVD's, both also widely and freely traded on the Internet '” continued to do quite well. And during the first quarter of 2004, CD sales in the United States rose 10.6 percent over the previous year, an upturn that the recording industry association confidently attributed to its lawsuits. But a report issued in April by the Pew Internet and American Life Project stated that the number of people who said they had downloaded music files during the same first quarter had increased by 5 million, to a total of 23 million, from the project's previous survey in late 2003. In other words, at the exact moment file-sharing activity rose, so did CD sales. These numbers supported an economic study by Profs. Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman S. Strumpf. Their findings indicated that file sharing had no measurable effect on music sales. "At most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction of this decline," the professors concluded. These men are not anti-copyright activists by any measure '” Mr. Oberholzer-Gee is a professor at the Harvard Business School and Mr. Strumpf is a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute. |
The flat rate unlimited downloading model does seem to be to be solution such as with Napster's unlimited download subscription and with Microsoft's upcoming Janus technology, however there are plenty of strings attached including the following:
- Recording these downloads as an Audio-CD is not allowed
- Music is limited to the consumer's PC (and soon Janus supported equipment)
- The provider chooses the audio codec and bitrate; even if insufficient for the music
- Editing is not allowed, thus eliminating creativity using downloaded music
- Playback is limited to approved portable audio players
- Downloaded music expires after a certain period of time
With many broadband services charging up to $ 50 per month, I am sure that most would have no problem absorbing the $ 5 flat-rate suggested solution in their subscription fee and using this to promote their service.
Source: The New York Times
