Newsflash: No One Buys Music on the Web–Except for the People Who Spent Billions Last Year
by Peter Kafka
Posted on January 16, 2009 at 3:46 AM PT
Web folk have a fairly justified suspicion of anything they hear from official music industry reps these days. But this stat seems about right to me: 95 percent of all songs downloaded on the Web last year were stolen, says the industry’s international trade group.
The IFPI estimates that some 40 billion tracks were stolen/shared last year, though it’s not entirely clear how the group came up with the math. Regardless of the methodology, that’s bad, right?
Depends on how you look at it. The IFPI also notes that people spent some $3.7 billion on digital music in 2008, which is up about 25 percent. Figure about half of that comes from Apple (AAPL), which moves about two billion tracks a year from its iTunes store. The remainder would be from mobile, with a very small smattering from services like RealNetworks’ (RNWK) Rhapsody and a few dollars spent on ad-supported services like News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace Music, etc. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site.)
But the standard summation still applies: The growth of digital has yet to replace the decline in physical sales–overall music sales dropped seven percent last year.
Comments
good post and much more concise than what I wrote this morning http://drownedinsound.com/news/4136081 but it additionally includes a couple of potential solutions to bring some slices of that money back into the industry
Posted by Sean Ada,s at January 16th, 2009 at 4:33 amTo see how absurdly false the music industry’s claims are, just take their numbers and do some elementary math: if $3.7 billion represents 5% of the online music, with 95% being stolen, that means that in fact $74 billion worth of music was stolen.
Of course in the age before the internet and thus before “stealing” the music industry never made anything approaching an order of magnitude of that sum.
Which leads me to believe that music industry execs flunked fourth grade math and are congenital liars.
Posted by Ted Todorov at January 16th, 2009 at 8:45 am