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It might be hard to get up circulation.All your older industries like video rents, books, music are all down and not to piracy as the big suits at DRM want to make you think.
I do believe that folks nowadays do a lot of different things weekly and it all starts with surfing the internet for hours at a time when you could be reading that new mag or renting a video , etc.
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@gorehound: "It all starts with surfing the internet for hours at a time..."
"...Not to piracy as the big suits at DRM want to make you think."
Again with the delusion. The cognitive dissonance on this issue is astounding. It also leads me to believe people can convince themselves of anything if it is in their own self-interest. Explains a lot of human history.
Look, the music industry alone has declines 10-12% a year since Napster. Continuously. Now, I don't particularly like the RIAA. They fucked up, and their tactics are grotesque. Downloading a $15 CD should be a minor fine, not $80,000. That, however, does not make downloading music illegally right.
We haven't yet crossed the bandwidth threshold to see the same effect in movies, and we probably won't anytime soon with how far American keeps sinking in worldwide bandwidth rates, but you can expect the same there someday. It's definitely already affecting video rentals.
Now, I don't care if anyone does steal shit online. Go for it. It's human nature to want something for less, and we're all hypocrites when it comes to the law. (Read Freakonomics for mathematical proof). Just don't act like a hero for getting free shit. That's what pisses me off. You're not fucking Robin Hood.
"Oh, but CDs are too expensive. That's why I steal. Power to the people!"
I love how when people don't know where the money is going, they assume it's all going into someone's pockets at the top. A $15 CD?
$1.00 is going to the artist
$3.75 is going to the retailer
$3.75 is going to the distributor
$3.00 is going to the label
$0.75 is going to the mechanical royalty
& $2.50 is going to research and development (R&D)
Now, as for R&D - most bands CDs don't make their money back, and this covers their costs. Without this, labels can't afford to cover recording costs for new & unknown bands. Guess what is also the first to be cut when sales fall? Yep. This is part of the reason for the current dirge of music we have now.
Just... do whatever the hell you want to do. I don't care. Just don't pretend that sitting on your ass while your computer downloads the latest CD from some band that hasn't even made the radio yet that you're fighting the good fight. It's sad and pathetic self-delusion.
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@Paul_Is_Drunk: perhaps that rant could have been avoided had gorehound included the word "...and not >only< to piracy...".
talk all you want about declines in music/movie revenue - the simple fact is that the RIAA/MPAA etc have not once been able to show the real relationship between a downloaded CD and the loss of a CD sale...the entire entertainment industry is just at the beginning of a fundamental change in the way it delivers/sells it's products...
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@goldfarb: The picture is more complicated. Artists that haven't sold well in years have racked up significant sales as a result of giving their products away. Most of the people that whine about piracy seem to be either bitter that they can no longer afford gold-plated faucets, and people that are bitter that they're not really popular enough to be pirated.
Declining CD and magazine sales these days are no mystery: they're discretionary spending, and people have less money.
The longer trend in declining sales is something I'd like to attribute to the democritizing nature of the internet. I can find the music I like, instead of reflexively buying whatever payola crap is on the radio; I can find the fiction I want to read, instead of whatever the magazine publisher decided to filter for me. An inevitable consequence of that is that the former gatekeepers of these cultural channels are going to have people flooding around them.
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@Palliard: Less discretionary spending, not necessarily less discretionary money. Absolutely, the internet eats up a lot of time people used to spend specifically listening to purchased music (and there is nothing to indicate that people are spending that online time just listening to music via the internet - if that were the case, internet radio would be more successful than it is). People are reading, writing and communicating directly in dozens of ways, leaving less discretionary time for solitary enjoyment of music. They're obviously not spending as much money to fill that decreasing window of time.
There is also a lot of unreported revenue going directly to a wide range of self-published artists and small distributors - people who can break even or better via the internet on a small scale, but not under the overhead of the large publishers or record companies. This money is earned, taxed and thoroughly appreciated by numerous artists, but never is included by the "industry" figures because it doesn't travel through the large labels, making the "industry" figures even lower than actual monetary tallies.
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