Rip. Mix. Burn. Continued...
A good rant in the latest Wired magazine, in response to the "Fall of the Music Industry" stories in the February edition. Close ties there and in the reader feedback to the whole World of Ends thing.
This letter, from Dave Haynie in New Jersey, well worthy of note:
Money for Nothing
"...CD shipments went from 1.1 billion units in 2000 to 968.6 million in 2001; income went from $14.3 billion to $13.7 billion. That's a 10.3 percent decrease in units, a 4.1 percent decrease in sales. But if you look at the actual number of releases, there were 12,000 fewer albums put out by the major labels in 2001 than in 1999. So in fact, the industry has dramatically increased its per-album profit. It's pretty clear - labels cut back on new artist investments and raised album prices. You can go through all of the RIAA-posted statistics, and not only don't you find its lost $4 billion, you can't even begin to find any loss not attributable to its own sales and marketing. Piracy isn't a factor."
Sadly, some readers are still clearly finding it hard to let go of the status quo. A letter from Aaron Luis Levinson is particularly troubling:
"As for piracy and file-sharing, labels should simply upload hundreds of low-grade, truncated files of their songs, forcing P2P users to sift through the ersatz files to find one barely worth burning. Once Gnutella and Kazaa are overrun with these files, things will slow down considerably."
Which strikes me as not only frighteningly dumb, but also remarkably close to one of the closing comments in World of Ends:
They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you."
But then, Mr. Levinson is a Grammy-nominated record producer who clearly points out that he has "a vested interest in seeing the record business survive".
