The heads of the Russian and international music industry this week came together in Moscow to support a new organisation that will develop the legitimate music market and fight the country's high levels of copyright piracy. The new organisation will be called: The National Federation of Phonogram Producers (NFPP).
Russia has a big potential music market but currently suffers under high piracy rates. (World's second highest) The organisation should fight piracy alongside other music rights holders and lobby the Russian Government for effective copyright legislation and professional anti-piracy enforcement.
Russia has a vibrant domestic record industry, a music market of US$223 million (ranked 22 globally) and a growing number of internationally successful artists. All of the major international record companies have subsidiaries or offices in Russia and are aggressively marketing local repertoire. There are independent projections that Russian music demand has the potential to double in size by 2010. But market development has been stunted by poor copyright laws, inadequate anti-piracy enforcement, and undeveloped systems for revenue-collection. |
According to a global piracy survey shortly to be released by IFPI, Russia's music pirate market is worth US$240 million and is second in size only to China. This equates to huge losses for local artists, songwriters and record producers. Russian piracy is also a huge industry of illegal tax evasion that robs the government of tens of millions of dollars of tax revenues each year.
Yuri Slyusar, Chairman of the Council of Directors of NFPP and General Director of the Russian independent company Monolith, says: "The creation of NFPP is a great achievement for the Russian record industry. It gives all record companies in Russia, national and international, a much stronger voice than we have ever had before in developing a successful legitimate Russian music industry and in fighting the problem of piracy. We must win that fight with the support of the Government, or else piracy will silence our artists and destroy our recording industry."
Music piracy is pretty big in Russia, when I was over there, about five years ago, I was able to buy almost every new album for only 3 dollars. I don't know how much the country evolved in the last five years, but reading this article I have the idea piracy is still a big issue over there.
Beware that this is not home piracy. The CDs you can buy over there are made by professional pirates and are made just to make big profits.
Source: Mi2n.com
