{"id":265,"date":"2008-04-20T14:35:35","date_gmt":"2008-04-20T14:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/?p=265"},"modified":"2021-04-20T21:48:26","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T21:48:26","slug":"rolling-stoned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/?p=265","title":{"rendered":"Rolling Stoned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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And the music industry says file sharing is killing their sales.  I recently received by unsolicited copy of Rolling Stone in the mail. And much to my surprise and delight there was actually an article on the music industry and not the usual political drivel that now dominates this once beacon of music news.
Note that the article is running down how the music industry is losing money to file sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A lot of the music industry\u2019s case is speculation. I can tell you what\u2019s wrong with speculation in two words; Gasoline Futures. Now everyone knows that gas is going up in price. Not a whole lot of people know why. It turns out that there is a group of people of Wall Street that basically gamble of the price of gasoline. They buy low and guess that the price will be high later when they sell it. So in reality, the gas is out there, just people are hoarding it. And of course, who are the oil industries to say Wall Street is wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now that we see how speculation can color the cost of items, let\u2019s look at what the music industry is saying. They are saying in the past year(2008) their sales of CD\u2019s have dropped due largely in part to file sharing, this year being one of the bleakest. I will contend that file sharing does and will continue to take a portion of profit from CD sales. I will also go on to say that file purchasing services like iTunes and now Amazon will drive the CD sales down. However, those should not be counted for they are part of the overall sales picture. Sales are bleak, hardly. The music industry continues to outsell itself every year. So where does the speculation fail?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing about statistics is that with the right data you can represent anything the way you want. Politics is a good one. If I poll registered voters and ask if they like a certain candidate, say Hillary Clinton. And I have an equal number of republicans and democrats. The results should be a non-surprising 50\/50. If I poll registered voters and lean the pool of voters one way or the other the result will be skewed based on my voter pool. It is still a pool of registered voters. It is a valid poll by all sense of the word. But certain information was selectively left out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is what the music industry does when they want to make a point about file sharing. They leave out small but important pieces of information. One of the pieces they left out was the lack of original music from the past three years. In the article it listed the top grossing concerts of the last two years. Who was number one? The Police followed by a who\u2019s who of established acts like Van Halen and Bruce Springsteen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you really analyze the data you start to see a pattern. No one has stepped up and laid down anything original in the last three plus years. Its not that people won\u2019t buy a CD or music online, there just hasn\u2019t been anything that really stands out as original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With all things there are exceptions. The Foo Fighters have put together an impressive CD with an excellent fan following that attend their concerts. And there is original music out there along with some really good shows. But, they are not major acts or have the support of the music establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom line is that the music industry is not losing money. Through music downloads and technology they have realized they can streamline their operation and make even more money. When you hear about Capitol records laying off employees it isn\u2019t really because sales are down. You still need a workforce to produce a product. It\u2019s just that a lot of it can be done with a few mouse clicks now as apposed to a manufacturing facility. A professional CD duplicator can be purchased for under $10,000. That is a drop in the bucket for a small to medium sized business. Businesses will spend more than that on network infrastructure and phone systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Radiohead recently released their latest CD for download at a price of, well, you decide. Was it a stupid move? Hardly, Radiohead fans fed the band their hard earned cash and the publicity earned new groups of devoted fans. And guess what, if you really need to have that CD in your hand you can still buy it. Score one for the artist. The music industry and their propaganda machine need to grow up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And the music industry says file sharing is killing their sales. Says who?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":339,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3],"tags":[39,13,37,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/askrealmen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}