The Inquirer has posted an interesting article on the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and their piracy figures. On April 9th the RIAA released press statements in which they stated that music sales had fallen 8% worldwide and 10% in the U.S.
As always the RIAA has blamed piracy for the sales drops but the problem is that the organisation doesn't seem to take other external influences into account such as alternatives for recordable CDs and prices:
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Fortunately we have the data for 2001 and 2002 from Nielsen-SoundScan to rely on, and so in the manner used by Ziemann we can look at the last 6 years of music sales.
From this table it seems clear that new releases are not a significant part of the music business. In 1998 and again in 2000 a reduction in the number of new releases was accompanied by an increase in total sales. In 1999 a large increase in new releases was not matched by a large increase in total sales, but equally a drop in new releases in 2001 was not met with commensurate drop in total sales. The conclusion from this multi-year study must be that it is unlikely that any piracy of new releases is having the kind of impact on total units shipped than the RIAA would have us believe. |
A lot of things that are mentioned in the article have also been mentioned by our visitors but it's an interesting article to read. Discuss this subject in the CD Freaks Living Room.
Source: The Inquirer
