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Piracy Statistics Do Not Existby George Ziemann -- March 6, 2009 Looking over the list of search terms that brought people to this site, the number one answer right now is music piracy statistics. At number four is internet piracy statistics, followed by piracy statistics (8), statistics on piracy (11), music piracy stats (12), and piracy stats (18). None of these people found what they were looking for, but they were sent here anyway, so I thought I'd collect all those search terms together on one page, so we can bring everyone to the same place and pull in those who came for music piracy facts (15) as well. To my knowledge, the only numbers that the RIAA has ever produced in this repect are the 2002 "antipiracy statistics," which is an account of how much physical pirated goods are confiscated. In this case, we see the results of giving a label the same "piracy" weight as a CD the year before to inflate how awesome they were, resulting in a 99 percent drop in pirated goods seized in 2002, when they failed to find another big-ass pile of labels. Labels. There are bullshit statistics and those are the only kind you'll ever get from the recording industry. As for "internet piracy," they can't keep any statistics because they are so technologically clueless. Let's face it, if their tech unit knew anything at all about computers and the Internet, they would know that what they're trying to do is futile. To expect they can quantify the traffic and evaluate which people will be lost sales, those who don't have any money anyway, and those who are honestly just checking it out to see if it's something worth buying, well, that's a stretch into science fiction. Perhaps BigChampagne or some other tracking group has a more accurate picture of what's going on, enabling them to sell that information back to the labels (the same basic function SoundScan provides). Plus, they'll tell you which albums are scheduled to be "leaked" onto p2p. What you'll hear from the RIAA is more likely to be the sad story of how much piracy costs them every year. This, too, is an imagined number, based on what they used to make before Bush took office, the RIAA hired a Republican leader in response, who tried to emulate the party line by suing the music industry's target demographic. The lowered sales caused the labels to tighten up. Half the artists were cut from the labels' rosters. Edgar Bronfman (Warner Music's CEO) will tell you he is losing billion$ to pirates. I think the RIAA's collective arrogant attitude, view of the audience as thieves and, most of all, the practice of suing college kids for replacing radio with peer-to-peer, has hurt sales worse than the imaginary piracy losses. College kids have to save their money for beer. They'll buy the album after they get a job. Unless you sue them, in which case they'll never buy one of your damned records again. The RIAA has sued enough college kids to fill Harvard University's stadium. None of them will be able to afford to go to another concert for a while, though. If the industry had any real data to support their theories, they would be proudly displaying it. It would be easy to find. But there simply isn't any. |
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