Surprise: CD sales drop in 2005
The music industry majors have done their very best to scare away their customers in 2005. This included taking computer illiterates to court for filesharing and willfully exposing customer’s computers to attacks (no, I’m not linking to any Sony Rootkit stories now. You can hardly go outside these days without one flying in your face.) Another measure taken to get rid of buyers was downgrading the value of the CDs on sale by riddling them with Digital Restrictions Management.
Still, the industry greats act surprised at a drop in sales for 2005. There is a nice opinion piece on The Register that points to a few corners where the problem might be hiding.
As it had me nodding my head after almost every paragraph, I’ll quote a few:
Well, there aren’t many sites left to shut down. In fact, without major media hubs to go after, the music publishers are now reaching to examine sites that post lyrics to songs. (We’ve bought many a song after lyric hunting, but that’s surely because we’re odd, totally unique, not mainstream creatures.) Along with the evil lyric mongers, consumers will likely be targeted by another 10,000 or so lawsuits in 2006. Then the RIAA can wait for the year-end data and say either that its war on piracy really boosted sales or that piracy continues to undermine the very fabric of the creative process, and this pattern will continue until the music industry enjoys a protracted boom. Sadly, the RIAA’s current line of thinking and method of operation prohibits such a boom. Without question, the lawsuits against children, parents and grandparents don’t help the music industry’s public relations campaign. Nor do advertisements portraying download-happy consumers as criminals. It is wrong to grab this music without compensating artists. That’s clear. What isn’t clear is if suing thousands of people a year to prove a point is a punishment that fits the crime or a strategy worth pursuing.
The obvious motivation behind the music industry’s fight against music trading on the internet is that it hoped to cash in on the new online music formats just as it had done with the move from records to tapes and then CDs. The pigopolists wanted you to buy entire music collections once again. The labels, however, didn’t come up with online stores quick enough and have spent the last few years trying to stop companies that did create such stores.
It won’t happen in 2006, but eventually the music labels will realize how wrong they’ve been. This cycle has run its course before, dating all the way back to the player piano and the first recordings of live performances. One day, a smarter than average pigopolist will realize that DRM-laced downloads, gimpy online services and lawsuits aren’t the best means for winning consumers’ hearts. That’s when music sales will rise again.
Enjoy.