Big Music hope for the future
p2p news / p2pnet: Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, under federal and state investigation in the US, continue to accuse their own customers of being thieves and criminals, using spurious lawsuits to try to terrify them into kick-starting the as-yet undeveloped corporate online music market.
The labels have had zero luck with their bizarre sue ‘em all marketing campaigns, but a trend offering hope for the future is emerging in Britain.
And it harks back to the past.
Once upon a time 45s, those shiny, round vinyl things with big holes in the centre – 45s – were where it was at. They were called singles.
Corporate downloads barely make a blip in the graphs compared to what’s happening in the real world of online music where indie sites and the p2p networks rule. However, digital downloads, “will regularly break the one-million- a-week barrier this year as music fans push sales of singles to their highest for six years,” says The Herald.
Yes, singles.
Stacked against the fact that this May, globally, the number of p2p users simultaneously logged on to the p2p networks at any given moment was 9,735,661, as p2p research firm Big Champagne told p2pnet, four million corporate downloads a month doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. But it does amount to a start, albeit it a tiny one.
This “digital revolution,” as the Herald is somehow able to call it, and which it says is, “currently rejuvenating the music industry,” will result in 50 million-plus singles being downloaded this year.
But the interesting this is it’s, “bolstered by the grey downloader, or the over-50s buyer, many of whom are replacing their vinyl collections,” says the story, going on:
“For the first time many more obscure singles are available since they were originally issued in the 1960s or 1970s as bands and individual artists as well as record companies broaden online back catalogues.
“A total of 16.7 million singles were downloaded or sold in shops in the second quarter of 2006, according to new figures yesterday from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
“It represents a lean back towards the single, sales of which dropped with the onset of internet file-sharing and CD-burning in the 1990s.”
David Belcher, Saga FM DJ and Herald writer, is quoted as saying:
"For the over-50s, the range is always growing. Whereas before you could only replace CDs of your old vinyl and those were essentially what the record companies had sold you already and you were only getting the big selling artists.
"Now you are getting the artists themselves. A lot of them have got the rights back to the material that the labels didn’t want to reissue. Among those veteran musicians attracting the attention of the more mature internet users are the Rolling Stones …"
(Thanks, Nell)
Digg this.
Also See:
sue ‘em all – RIAA blackmail income, April 6, 2006
The Herald -How silver-haired surfers are bringing the single back to life, July 11, 2006
hill of beans – P2p file sharing escalates, July 3, 2006
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