Filesharing is not why CD sales are tanking
I am the bane of the RIAA’s existence, yet I’m one of their best customers. Why? I download music. I also buy several times more music than the average consumer. It’s clear that I’m not at fault for tanking album sales, because I buy so much, yet the approach the RIAA takes is to try and scare me out of downloading, not convince me to buy more.
I do not believe music is public domain and that I have a right to it. I do believe musicians should be compensated for their work, and the majority of them aren’t compensated enough. This is why I also believe it’s extremely wrong to profit by exploiting their work, which is why I would never buy or sell a bootlegged copy of an album. Artists have families to feed too.
It’s painfully obvious, however, that the RIAA threatening to sue their best customers, and in actuality suing children and old people and sending them into horrendous debt, is not going to solve this problem, because the problem isn’t downloading. The music industry can do some simple things right now to fix their profits.
- Spend less on advertising and glitz. A million dollar Britney Spears video is not going to make me buy her album. A huge chunk of money goes into marketing, most of which goes ignored. An advertisement has never convinced me to buy an album. Gimmicks like flipbooks aren’t going to make me any more likely to purchase a CD for collectability. The fact is CDs are disposable, and pressed in large numbers, which means it has little to no value for a collector.
- Drop the price of CDs to $3 and under. They’re already selling albums on iTunes for $1, and we know the the packaging costs pennies. The artists hardly make any money off the album sales anyway. There’s two types of downloaders, the people who download tons of music (and also buy tons) and the people who download the single. Either one of us would gladly spend the price of a latte to avoid the hassle of a filesharing program.
Then actual albums will be sold instead of singles, providing more realistic feedback about what customers want. What is lost in per unit profit margin will be more more than made up for in volume. By moving more units this way, a wider audience will be reached, and bands’ live performances will become more lucrative.
- Improve the quality of albums. Everyone knows this big label business isn’t heartfelt and sentimental. There are teams of people engineering songs to move as many units of disposable music as possible. Why would I buy an album when only 3 of the songs on it are good?
Some facts about myself as a consumer which might better inform you why I’ve drawn these conclusions:
- I try to stay away from RIAA music, legal or not, because I don’t want to be sued and I also don’t want lots of restrictions on my music. If I buy an album, I should be able to put it on my iPod or my girlfriend’s iPod, we live together.
- For this same reason I rarely use iTunes, because the hassle of the store compounded with difficulties of DRM is not worth the bother.
- I spend a lot more money on music per month than the average person, I won’t tell you how much, because my girlfriend will probably kill me, but you can see some data on just my vinyl collecting alone here.
- Before I had an iPod, I bought mostly cds, now I buy almost exclusively vinyl.
- When I bought cds, they were almost always used. If they were new I was most likely buying them directly from a band at their show. The exception to this would be a band I really loved, then I would buy their album the day it came out.
- I primarily download music because I want to hear it before I invest $12-$18 on something I may never want to listen to again and can’t be bothered to resell. (This also means I keep almost everything I buy rarely reselling.) So anything I download that I like, I almost always purchase.
- The other reason I download music is if I have an album on vinyl and want a digital (portable) copy. Or if it’s out of print so the only way to get it is to download or pay eBay prices
- The music I listen to is usually released by small independent labels. This makes me want to buy this music more, because I know I’m helping to support the artist (generally musicians on indies are compensated more adequately.) I don’t really care about spending money on Kanye West so he can have $300 sushi every night.
- By downloading music I find more bands I like that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. In turn I go see these bands when they come to my town and I buy shirts and records at the shows.
Some labels are starting to take a proactive approach. Merge, for instance, usually offers a free download of any album you buy on vinyl. I belive Matador is doing this as well. For me this means every time something I like on one of these labels is released I will immediately buy it, because I get the vinyl version with the nice big album artwork, and I get a version I can take in the car and to the office.
It boils down to this: the music industry’s problem is not file sharing, their problem is selling a low quality product at an exorbitant price. When gas is $4 a gallon I’m not going to spend $18 on a cd. Give me a product I want to buy, at a reasonable price.
