Following this report was one about a BPI (British Phonographic Industry) report saying CD sales were down 15.7% in 2005. Then the punchline: piracy is to blame! Well, you had to expect it.

Of course, trying to blame reduced physical sales of product on piracy, it wouldn’t have helped to report an increase in digital music sales. So they didn’t.

The real reason for the drop in CD sales is more likely due to a combination of increased digital sales, the Sony rootkit fiasco and the boycott that followed.

Nice bit of spin from the BPI…

Tom
http://www.soundnet.co.uk

With the smoke and mirror campaign, they have done their best to say all the problems are counterfit and piracy. It is with absolute straight face that they can not envision that less and less are wanting their products. It is with the attitude we made it therefor it is guarenteed to sell.

Well here’s the news for them… NO IT ISN’T. I don’t want it and further the industry is daily alienating their customers. Those customers are saying we don’t want this, we don’t like it, and it isn’t worth the money. It is so bad that now the industry can’t even put up long term #1 hits. They are lucky if a #1 hit lasts one business quarter. With that sort of return, there goes the catalog sales, of which is 1/3 or thereabouts of their annual sales. There are no long term artists other than those of 30 to 40 years old.

Simply there appears to be no future for professional music with the cartels. Sales are drooping for the cd of legal sales and many stores are starting to carry more blank cds and shelf space for those blanks than they are carrying of the cartel offerings. Since business have to offer what the customer wants or not sell, that sort of shelf space put up for blanks tells the tale of what is important to the buying public.

On line legal sales are dismall. The one shining spot on the on line is Apple. But Apple isn’t really so much an on line seller of music as they are an on line seller of their main products such as the iPod. Apple pushes the product line at every point and chance. The music is as much a side line as it is a protection against lawsuits over the iPod. The online sales are so bad that they are still totaling the total sales since day one in trying to impress others that it is the place to be. With the glaring problems of incompatibility between gadgets and music services, no one really wants to invest heavily in a product that might not be “the thing” next year. If the industry chooses a different format to back, then Apple may well be an island to itself. Certainly as it is now, you can’t get a complete catalog to chose from with only one service. To access them all you must have a world of different devices to play them back and take them with you. Who wants that?

The industry are late comers to where they should have been foreunnersin leading the tech advances. They are playing catch up and it is so bad that they have gotten laws to advantage them while they try to maneuver into market share. Being too late, they have done nothing but hamper the process and are winning no friends in the marketplace with all this.

Revenue declines and who cares? We don’t, only the middlemen care and we are better off without their fingers in the pie for a service we don’t need anymore.

It would be the rise of e-bays and amazons that make it easier to buy used cds and dvds and save $$.

It is efficiency of the market.