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From the desks of the same folks who have wasted millions (billions?) on unsuccessfully fighting music piracy comes this latest bit of crackpot legislation: the state of Tennessee is close to passing a bill that would make it illegal to share your Netflix or Rhapsody account, or, as the bill is worded, any “entertainment subscription service.”
Album sales in the United States have taken a big dip so far in 2008; according to Nielsen Soundscan [via Digital Music News], aggregated physical and digital album sales dropped 11% from the same period in 2007.
Though digital album sales are up 34% from a year ago and comprise 15% of the overall album market, the jump is not nearly enough to make up for lagging physical sales. Making matters worse (for the record industry, anyway), single digital track downloads moved up 30% to 524.7 million units. While this may seem encouraging on the surface, the record industry is losing money on the lower profit margins that digital singles offer compared to full albums.
What this means: no one wants to pay for music!! I can’t remember where I read this, but I recently saw that something like 40% of ISP bandwidth is used by illegal downloaders. But make it easy and affordable, and the people will come.
In case you live in an Internet-less black hole, there’s some big news going around today about Minnesota woman Jammie Thomas being found guilty of copyright infringement for sharing music via Kazaa; Thomas now has to pay $220,000 in damages to the record labels that sued her. Companies suing their customers… that strikes me as a GREAT way to drum up business in a failing industry. Great job, guys, this will surely help your public image.
Now, before I go on a rant, I would like to say this: I am not a record label hater. I fully understand the need for marketing dollars to help a band gain exposure, pay publicists, tour support, advances, yadda yadda yadda. I get it, and I am not of the “all record labels are evil” ilk.
However, those in the record industry (please note the distinction between record industry and music industry), and in particular the major labels, need to take a collective step back and realize the following:
