p2pnet - rss feed: EMI sidles up to YouTube
p2p news / p2pnet: EMI, one of the members of the Big Four Organized Music cartel which aims to reclaim lost territory by suing consumers into buying ‘product’, is trying it on with YouTube, Revver and “other video upload sites”.
EMI and fellow Big Four conspirators are blaming their self-inflicted wounds on disenchanted former customers who are spurning the industry’s over-priced, low quality offerings in favour of the free p2p networks and independent musician and paid download sites, with Russia’s AllofMP3.com to the fore in the latter category.
The labels claim a significant portion of sales failures is down to file sharers, calling them thieves and criminals. And the same could happen with music videos, they assert. However, with file sharing, nothing is stolen or sold, and it’s never been shown that a digital file download equals a sale lost to the corporate sites, or retail outlets, come to that.
The RIAA, owned by EMI, Warner Music, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, fired cease-and-desist notices at YouTube users sharing videos and now it, and the three others of its ilk, want to promote download sales of music videos, subscriptions and advertising-supported streaming of trailers, music videos and other promotional material, as CNET News points out.
Thus, Thomas Ryan, EMI Music’s svp of digital and mobile strategy, hopes “commercial relationships” with YouTube, et al, “will help us remove infringing material that someone uploaded and we’re not being compensated for,” says the story.
If he’s suggesting the companies are losing out because people aren’t buying corporate tracks, they’ve already been created for CDs and are in effect being re-cycled at exorbitant prices through sites such as iTunes.
If he’s saying a file downloaded means a sale has been lost, somewhere, somehow, he doesn’t explain how the implied direct causal relationship works.
In The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, a still relevant 2002 study, according to the RIAA (2002), “the number of CD’s shipped in the U.S. fell from 940 million to 800 million - or 15% - between 2000 and 2002 (though shipments continued to rise during the first two years of popular file sharing, 1999-2000),” said Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Predictably, the labels claimed the decline was caused by file sharing.
By analyzing direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period and comparing it with actual music buys during that time, Oberholzer and Strumpf concluded spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales.
Even under the worst-case example, “it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy,” they said. “After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.”
Nor do downloads replace CD buys, they said.
“While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing,” stated Oberholzer and Strumpf.
Their studies concentrated on the American experience, but another study by Dr Tatsuo Tanaka of Keio University in Japan, using the now famous Winny p2p application, concluded there was, “not sufficient evidence that file sharing systems are responsible for the recent decline in CD sales”.
Based on micro data of CD sales and numbers of downloads, “we found that there is very little evidence that file sharing reduced music CD sales in Japan,” said Tanaka. “We controlled simultaneous bias between sales and downloads by instrumental variables but did not find correlation between CD sales and numbers of downloads. Although there were large differences in the numbers of downloads among CD titles, these differences did not affect CD sales.
“We also carried out a user survey on file sharing and CD purchases with consideration to the potential bias of respondents trying to understate their illegal copying activity. This survey also showed that file sharing had very limited influence on CD purchases.”
He suggests copyright laws should be relaxed rather than tightened to allow for more positive effects of broadband internet file sharing.
Nor are these studies by any means unique.
According to CNET, Ryan, meanwhile, says EMI is interested in protecting videos it produces, or produced by someone else but which infringes on its intellectual property, “for example, someone lip-syncing a protected song or who has remixed a music video clip, and one solution is “digital tracking technology”.
However, “those goals can be diametrically opposed to emerging trends within sites like YouTube and Revver - which have thousands of young people uploading their own versions of videos for distribution, or are redistributing copies of their favorite music video without the permission of rights holders,” says the story, continuing:
“Ryan pointed to fingerprinting technologies, designed to automatically identify and block transmission of digital-video files, such as those from Audible Magic or Snocap as possibilities.”
YouTube representatives were not immediately available for comment, adds CNET.
Digg this story.
Also See:
to the fore - AllofMP3.com statement, June 5, 2006
cease-and-desist - Videos: new RIAA p2p targets, June 3, 2006
CNET News - EMI courts YouTube to help fight pirates, June 14, 2006
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June 15th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Thus, Thomas Ryan, EMI Music’s svp of digital and mobile strategy, hopes “commercial relationships” with YouTube, et al, “will help us remove infringing material that someone uploaded and we’re not being compensated for,” says the story.
Yet you can go onto the bands website and stream their videos for nothing… what exactly are they not being compensated for????
June 16th, 2006 at 1:52 am
the more appropriate question is “what is there to compensate for?”
music videos are promotional tool. Something that helps a band sell more albums, get more airplay, and hopefully, more people to their shows.
What EMI is trying to do is akin to making someone purchase the ability to watch a movie trailer (note my use of “the ability,” as even though you purchased it, you don’t own it). Screw that, I just won’t watch the trailer. I don’t see why people would pay to watch a promotional video, especially as you note, bands do it for free on their websites