RIAA VS The Economy
 

# Introduction

The news these days is plastered with stories of the untold billions of dollars the recording industry is losing to digital piracy. On a recent plane flight from coast-to-coast, after the main movie the airline showed a series of short films, including one about how digital pircay was wrecking the music industry. Hillary Rosen, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lobbyist frequently talks of the billions of dollars each year the industry is losing in the wake of the "plague" of digital piracy.

Yet at the same time, this country is in one of the worst economic situations in decades. The states are facing budget deficits not seen since the end of World War II. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has dropped over twenty percent in the last two-and-a-half years; the NASDAQ has lost over seventy percent of its value, from a peak of around 5,000 to its current level in the neighborhood of 1,500. Is it even remotely possible that this could account for some percentage of the sales decline the RIAA members see?

This page presents a brief examination of market trends and sales figures of the economy at large versus the sales figures of RIAA members. This is by no means a complete economic or statistical analysis -- I have a minimal background in those fields -- but rather an attempt to gauge trends in the economy at large and RIAA sales figures.
get the facts and figures and the rest of the story here

p2p jihad
 

Wouldn't it be great if after showing the film, someone hijacked the plane and crashed it into RIAA headquarters in Washington D.C.?

You're a sick fuck


Ð :S:

lol...i missed that :)

Not only is there the riaa's absurdities, but even more absurd is the fact that the US govt would even act in their interest. But in reality very predictable. What was I thinking.

There is only one rational thought that properly describes a proper reaction to this. Secede...


And BTW Brute Force, While i enjoyed the potential for irony, I fear the tyranny to much to even consider a joke about airplanes and Washington DC.

But I Will laugh.....

obviously the poor economic situation is why record sales are poor

the music industry is just trying to use p2p technology as a scape-goat for their internal problems. lack of creativity is definitely one of the many inside problems. the fact that the recording industry have done literally nothing to lure people away from spyware-infested crap like kazaa truly shows how interested it is in changing the way the labels do business

when people get laid off from work and are on a tight budget, they'd rather buy bread, eggs, and milk instead of some cheesy CD

and i guarantee you, even if the music industry is successful in shutting down every p2p network out there, people still won't be buying music. wanna know why? well, let's see.. what does the music industry offer today? nothing but fucking crap.. all this violent rap, hip-hop, west coast vs. east coast bullshit, seeing how all the violence from the streets is brought into and communicated through music

it doesn't matter that most of these so-called musicians are convicted drug dealers, pedophiles, have participated in drive-by shootings, or never went past fifth grade in school. nah, none of this is important nowadays. interesting role models to say the least

when signing a band up i think these types of muso is preferable to straight wholesome rockers..because they can trap them into conracts and use dugs to keep them subordinate..

i would say quite a few record execs have done ok squeezing doh out of bands like the rollingstones...over the years,
someone still rakes in the money from joplin&hendrix's music...to have one of your big acts OD can be like winning the lottery in the music biz it seems..

i like ppl like henry rollins who have their head screwed on straight...but ppl like him will always opt for the independents i guess..

Liebowitz finds that MP3s are hurting the music industry
 

An economist who had previously argued that there was no evidence of filesharing hurting the CD business now says there is evidence:

The bottom line: MP3 downloading is harming sales. No other explanations that have been put forward to explain the recent decline hold up under analysis.

Liebowitz has seesawed back and forth, but as far as I know he is the sole source of non-crap economics related to filesharing. Anything that brings down the hysteria is a good thing, so I'm happy to see even news that could hurt us in the short run.

Liebowitz' paper is worth the read if you have time. It's long but not dense, and it's full of interesting nuggets of information. Also, something you get from reading the whole thing that you won't from reading the headline is how hard it is to figure out whether MP3s hurt RIAA members.

. Two key quotes from the paper:

If the analysis in this paper is correct, MP3 downloads are causing significant harm to the record industry. It is not clear, however, whe ther such downloading in our current legal environment will cause a mortal blow to the industry. I suspect that the worst damage to the industry is behind us, but we will know soon enough as new data are made available.

and

The goal of this paper was to provide some empirical analysis to replace what has often been little more than emotional wrangling and haranguing on both sides. Answers to difficult policy questions are not likely to be well informed without such an understanding of the empirical backdrop to the issues.from