There's a blurb on Ars Technica about CD sales dropping 20% this Christmas and it also pointed out some things I'd been thinking about.
I won't argue that file sharing is a bad thing, and in the pre-litigation days I would've said that the artist and label deserved their compensation for their work. After the litigations began the RIAA can go, well, you can imagine. Now we live in the age of digital downloads from retailers such as Apple and Amazon. We can download the tracks we want and skip what we don't. Brilliant! Now let's think about this, the RIAA believes that the lossless rips that we, the consumer, make with CDs that we bought are "unauthorized copies" yet now condone purchasing individual tracks (generally in a lossy format and now becoming DRM free) and getting only a fraction of the revenue that would be generated from a full album sale is acceptable? Sure, a lot of albums have a few dud tracks and a couple of gems and it can be a little frustrating plopping down the full price of a CD and only end up with a couple tracks you like, but that's how it's been since the beginning. Single track downloads are driving the decline of CD sales, those of us who rip should be commended by the RIAA for buying the whole album, warts and all. There have been so many articles about how the labels were unhappy with Apple's $0.99 pricing that there were a lot of threats about pulling out of their store. In this case the RIAA has less control over their margins, unlike CD sales where they're priced more favorably for the RIAA. The RIAA can't allow legal digital downloads while still crowing that file sharing is killing CD sales. Sooner or later the general public will figure out (more aptly have it pointed out to them) that legal downloads are killing the CD. If there wasn't already enough dislike towards the RIAA already just wait until the masses realize that they have been misled. Consumers vote with their wallet, and the RIAA wants your vote. Here's the Ars link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071231-ho-ho-horrible-music-sales-plunge-20-percent-this-christmas.html -- 4mula1 SlimServer 6.5.4 + Solaris 10 x86: Because Linux would've been too easy! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4mula1's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3439 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=41571 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
