In a story posted on The Verge, the RIAA is quoted:
Glazier sees these delays as hugely damaging, saying that each day a piracy-facilitating website stays online can cost millions of dollars to “American companies, employees and [the] economy,” and be “an ongoing threat to the security and safety of our citizens.”
As Jamie writes: “Classic scaremongering if we’ve ever seen it.”
Looks like the RIAA is running out of ideas to prevent what it thinks is a major problem.
Funny thing is, last year marked the first year that digital music sales eclipsed physical CD sales. A single song from Adele’s new album 21 sold over 5,813,000 copies! Her album sold over 1,801,000 digital copies.
To be fair, physical media, CD’s, didn’t fair as well, they dropped 20% last year.
Are we to assume that the drop in CD sales is due to piracy? One thing to consider before jumping on the piracy bandwagon is that there is been a strong upswing in adoption of subscription services like Spotify, Mog, Rdio, as well as free services like Pandora. In this economy, people are less likely to put out real cash for music that they are not sure of. The subscription services and free services give listeners options to “try before they buy” giving them a chance to make sure they will really enjoy what they are paying for.
Plus, have you tried to “pirate” music these days? I try to keep track of torrent access in general and find that it’s getting harder and harder to find torrents of albums now that it has become easier and easier to purchase DRM free music from places like iTunes, Amazon and now even Google.
I have to wonder a little if the current economy has more to do with the slight down tick of music sales rather than music piracy.
0.000000
0.000000
Dave M.
