Mainstream Press Waking Up To The News That Musicians Are Making More Money

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

I believe that we were the first publication to report on the study released by PRS in the UK, way back in July, indicating that overall music revenue was up, even as the sale of recorded music was dropping. It showed how live revenue was making up a good part of the difference, and other aspects of the business were making up more than the rest. While we've pointed to that study numerous times in the meantime, we've been quite surprised that no mainstream press picked up on this seemingly remarkable news -- as it went against the prevailing favored narrative (as pushed by the RIAA) that the music industry was in trouble. Especially when combined with the recent Harvard study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, that also showed that revenue in the overall music ecosystem was significantly higher today than in the past, it really was quite amazing that the press (and politicians) continued to spread the lie that the music industry was in some sort of trouble. It's not. It's only the business of selling plastic discs that's in trouble.

The good news is that the mainstream press seems to finally be waking up to this. As a bunch of you sent in, the Times Online in the UK has published a nice study highlighting the PRS numbers, complete with some very nice charts, showing that musicians themselves are making more than ever. The other interesting part: for all the talk about how recorded music sales losses are hurting artists, the chart proves the point we've made over and over again: musicians see such a tiny part of recorded music sales that this has had almost no impact on their revenue at all. The amount of money musicians make from recorded revenue has remained just about constant.

Source: Times Online Labs blog

It's great that the press is finally starting to dig into this -- and the Times Online even admits that perhaps it should not have let Lily Allen claim in its own pages how much "harm" was being done to artists due to file sharing, because the numbers simply don't support it (of course, we pointed this out when the whole Allen mess was going on...).

Now, some people have raised some concerns over the numbers -- specifically, there have been some claims that the "live" numbers are distorted due to so-called "heritage" acts and legacy acts, who have been around forever and still pack large stadiums with increasingly higher ticket prices. And, indeed, that almost certainly has some impact on the numbers. It would be nice to see a similar report that starts to break out some of the details -- and we've been talking to a few people who are trying to dig deeper into the amount of "live" and "alternative" revenue streams to better understand where the money is going. Hopefully we'll have more complete data soon, but the initial things I've seen suggest that the original point remains true. Artists across the entire spectrum of the industry are making more in live revenues than they have in the past -- and, in part, the increase in live revenue is due to file sharing. In talking to different musicians, we've been hearing plenty of stories about how they're strategically pushing free versions of their songs on local audiences before embarking on tours or even individual shows -- and they're seeing larger turnouts than in the past because of it.

Hopefully, with more mainstream publications finally picking up on this, both the press and politicians will begin to recognize that the only real "crisis" in the music industry is for those who have stupidly relied on selling plastic discs for way too long. There are plenty of revenue opportunities for musicians, and because of that (in combination with better and cheaper tools for music creation), the actual music industry is thriving at levels never seen before.

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Yet Another (Yes, Another) Study Shows File Sharers Buy More

from the how-many-more-do-we-need? dept

Pretty much every single non-industry-backed study has shown this same thing, but just for the record, here's yet another study showing that those who engage in unauthorized file sharing end up buying more media. The study, looking at the UK (home of the new proposal to kick people off the internet), wasn't even close. Those who engaged in unauthorized file sharing tended to spend £77 on media per year, while those who did not spent about £44. And yet file sharers are the enemy? And the industry wants to kick them offline so they discover less new content? How will that help?

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Bad Science's Ben Goldacre Rips Apart Bogus Study On File Sharing

from the there-goes-another-one dept

Over the years, we've found that every single industry "figure" or "study" on the harm done by unauthorized file sharing wasn't supported by anything factual once you started to dig into the details. So, when we saw yet another report claiming huge "costs" associated with file sharing in the UK we dismissed it pretty quickly noting it made many of the same mistakes as previous studies had. Apparently, it's even worse than that. Ben Goldacre, known for his excellent Bad Science blog has now taken the time to pick through the details of that awfully bad UK report, and found it laughable.

The big numbers being quoted, such as the £10 billion in losses? Not from any actual study. It's from an IP lawyer's press release, with nothing backing it up, other than "Rights owners have estimated" and that number includes both counterfeiting and "piracy" which are related, but different.

The other big figure quoted in the media? £120 billion worth of downloaded materials per year? Yeah, turns out that's based on (a) using a ridiculously high price of £25 per downloaded item and (b) totally and completely made up. You see, the number was already questionable, but the actual number in the report was not £120 billion, but £12 billion. Yet, the group blasting the report out to the press put the wrong numbers (just an order of magnitude off) in the press release, and only quietly changed it after one reporter caught the error. Goldacre asked the group what it was doing to alert the many, many reporters who went with the bogus number, and the group suddenly told him the interview was off the record.

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More Interesting Northern European Analyses Of The Music Industry

from the history-and-data dept

I'm not entirely sure why, but it appears that a bunch of folks in the northern parts of Europe are doing some rather interesting analyses of the recording industry in that region. Perhaps it's the fact that so much attention has been placed on those regions thanks to file sharing services like The Pirate Bay and Mininova (both based there), but either way, we keep seeing studies from such countries that seem worth talking about. Last month, it was a detailed and fascinating study on file sharing in the Netherlands, which suggested (again) that it was a business model issue rather than a legal one, and now a bunch of folks have sent in a study from Norway claiming that those who download are much more likely to buy music than those who don't. We've seen analogous studies saying similar things in the past, so this is no surprise.

Separately, a couple weeks ago someone sent in (and I have to apologize, because I can't find who it was now) a long but fascinating study from Finland on the history of two of the more successful record labels (warning: pdf file) in that country. The key finding shouldn't be all that surprising. Both record labels were more successful when they focused not on how to make the most money, but on experimenting with new business models and embracing the music for the sake of the art, rather than solely as a business proposition. This is a point that often seems to get lost in these discussions. If you focus on doing something you love, the opportunities to make money tend to provide themselves. If you focus just on making money, you often find that you hate what you do... and the money isn't as readily available.

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Latest Unsubstantiated Claim: Twitter Makes You Immoral

from the oh,-please... dept

What is it with these bizarre exaggerated claims about the "harms" associated with modern social networking tools? There was just a totally exaggerated report claiming that social networking was harmful to your health, but when you looked at the details, it didn't actually say that at all. The latest, is the claim that new research says that Twitter can make you "immoral." Really? Well, if you actually read the details that doesn't seem to be what the report says at all. Instead, it seems to note that if you only interact with people through short bursts of information, it may take you longer to recognize the emotional impact of what's being said because it's harder to spend the time to reflect. It's difficult to see how that finding is really all that new or surprising. But it says nothing about Twitter somehow turning moral people into immoral people, as the original story suggests.

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Fun With Headlines: Is Social Networking Good Or Bad For Friendship?

from the how-about-neither... dept

Headline writers for the press are always trying to generate some attention, but it's amusing when they present a headline that seems to go entirely against what's said in the actual article. Professor Nancy Baym, who has been studying the power of online communities, discovered this when her latest research was released. Marketwatch ran a press release about her research declaring: Social networking, not for real friends, which certainly seems attention grabbing, if it were not for the fact that her research doesn't say that at all. What the research actually notes is that you may have weak relationships focused on a narrow topic, with folks you connect with on various social networks -- but it also notes how that's a good thing. She doesn't say that social networks aren't for real friends, even if that's what the headline reads.

Amusingly, another article covering the exact same bit of research runs with a different headline: Facebook friend collectors 'are normal' -- (suggesting the opposite of the Marketwatch headline) and quoting Baym:

"You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30 or 40 or 50.' But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn't otherwise have.... They can really open up access to resources that we wouldn't have otherwise."

That doesn't sound like "social networking isn't for real friends" at all. But, apparently, accuracy doesn't make for as good a headline sometimes. Then we've got USA Today, which seems to totally contradict the Marketwatch headline, by noting: For teens, a friend online is usually a friend offline, too. Apparently, the people at Marketwatch and at USA Today seemed to think they were reading different studies.

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Yet Another Study Shows How Patents Create Suboptimal Innovation

from the add-it-to-the-pile dept

Over the years we've covered numerous different economics studies that have shown how damaging patents are. Most of them have looked at the historical evidence, comparing different societies (one with patent protection and one without, or with weak, protections) at the same time, or comparing what happens right before and right after changes are made to patent law in terms of innovation. The vast majority of the evidence shows that patents create suboptimal results -- often slowing down the pace of innovation. They're usually used not to encourage new innovations but to allow companies to stop competition, and thus slow down the pace of innovation. I've been meaning to put together a comprehensive list of the research, and I hope to get to that soon.

However, now there's a new study to add to the list -- and this one is based not on the historical evidence, but trying to model different methods of rewards for innovatively solving a complex problem. And, once again, the study found that a free market solution greatly outperforms a patent monopoly solution where the "first" provider gets a monopoly. The research was led by economist Peter Bossaerts and a team of others -- and it made a point that won't surprise anyone who's studied the economics of monopolies. Patents tend to function just like any other monopoly system: it shrinks the overall market, decreases net social benefit, provides monstrously excess rewards to a single provider and harms everyone else. In fact, the research found that the patent system created a massive disincentive for many people to participate in the very process, even if their contributions could have been quite helpful in speeding along the innovation.

It's just one study, and the experiment is a bit simplistic -- but hopefully others will build on this research to create more complex models as well. In the meantime, though, it's yet another bit of evidence to throw onto the large and growing pile of studies showing how damaging patents can be. And, given how so many of them seem to approach the question from a different angle and still all come to the same or similar results... at some point you have to wonder why no one creating policy ever looks at this mountain of evidence.

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A Tale Of Two Studies On File Sharing...

from the guess-who-paid-for-the-terrorism-one? dept

I've recently come across two separate studies concerning file sharing -- that seem to come to vastly different conclusions. The first, as pointed out by Michael Scott, is a very long (128 pages), but very thorough research report analyzing pretty much everything having to do with file sharing in the Netherlands, commissioned by the government. It studies the economic angles, the legal angles, the cultural angles -- and then compares the local results to international results. While you might quibble with some of the methodology here or there, the overall conclusions of the report are pretty strong and clear: file sharing is not a problem for the overall industry. File sharing has, in fact, created a net benefit to the economy and society in both the short and long term, and that will likely continue. The direct impact on sales of file sharing is minimal (though it depends on the category). In fact, the only areas actually in trouble right now may be the sale of plastic discs (CDs and DVDs), but much of the damage has nothing to do with file sharing, and there are indications that the "lost" money can be made up in other ways. The report recommends moving away from criminalizing user activities, and focusing instead on encouraging new business model development. A quick excerpt from the conclusions:

The short-term net welfare effects of file sharing are strongly positive given that it is practised by consumers whose demand is driven by a lack of purchasing power. To the extent that file sharing results in a decline in sales, we see a transfer of welfare from operators/producers to consumers, with no net welfare effect.

The market for CDs and the market for DVD/VHS rentals are the only sectors of the entertainment industry that are suffering from a slump in sales. Whereas this may be attributed in part to file-sharing activity, file sharing is not solely to blame for the decline. The markets for DVDs and console games continued grow impressively after P2P services were introduced, and the cinema market showed sustained growth between 1999 and 2007. The total entertainment market has remained more or less constant, suggesting budget competition among the various products.

As long as the markets for games and films are on the rise or remain stable, there is little reason for concern that the diversity and accessibility of content is at stake. File sharing has significantly enhanced access to a wide and diverse range of products, albeit that access tends not to have the approval of the copyright holders.

In other words, pretty much everything that plenty of folks around here have been saying for a better part of a decade is pretty much true. File sharing isn't damaging -- and, in fact, can represent a net economic improvement, and the business troubles faced by a few small parts of the industry are really business model challenges, rather than legal ones. The report makes it clear that focusing on legal solutions to dealing with file sharing is a big mistake that tends to only backfire and seems to be totally misdirected.

So, what's the other study? It's also quite long, but is full of fear mongering about piracy. It just so happens to be funded by the movie studios claiming that piracy is helping to promote terrorism -- and because of that, the US government needs to devote stunning levels of new resources to stopping piracy at all costs. So what does this report recommend?

• Fully funding and implementing the PRO-IP Act (PL 110-403), which toughens civil and criminal laws against counterfeiting and piracy, provides enhanced IP enforcement and prosecutorial resources, and improves IP coordination within the executive branch.
• Supporting the introduction, passage and enactment of a Customs and Border Protection Reauthorization bill to better address trafficking in illicit goods.
• Supporting the Baucus-Hatch legislative improvements to the USTR's Special 301 process to help deal with other countries that fail to live up to their international IP obligations.
• Concluding negotiations for a substantive and enforceable Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) with major trading partners.
• Pursuing trade agreements with strong global IP protections.
• Expanding U.S. leadership on IP protection within the G8, the Security and Prosperity Partnership for North America, and other bilateral and multilateral frameworks.
• Building coalitions in favor of strong IP protections at international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, and U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
• Engaging Beijing to improve China's IP legal and regulatory regimes through the implementation of new patent, trademark and copyright laws.
• Pursuing reforms on data exclusivity, incremental innovation and optical discs legislation in India.
• Working towards improved retail and copyright enforcement in Russia, as well as the successful implementation of IP reform through Part IV of its Civil Code. 

Which of the two reports is more credible? Which do you think will have more impact on government policy in the next year or so? The answers to both questions are unfortunately obvious and extremely disappointing.

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Social Networking Will Kill You... Or Maybe Not

from the scary dept

A story doing the rounds says a new article in a British biology journal claims that social networking is harmful to your health, running under headlines like "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer." Apparently replacing face-to-face human contact with online socializing "could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance," according to the BBC, leading to an increase of serious health problems -- or, put a slightly more sensationalized way, Twitter will kill you. Charles Arthur at The Guardian's tech blog actually bothered to read the entire article, not just the press release, and says the breathless stories are based on more on bad journalism than junk science. The original article doesn't ever really get into the direct effect of online social networks, beyond saying people are spending more and more time on them, and never mentions any by name; it just says people are spending less time with other people, and that biologists should work to create more awareness of the detrimental effects that can have. But hey, that's way less interesting than saying MySpace is going to rot your insides.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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European Parliament Study Finds Video Games Are Good For Kids

from the put-away-your-moral-panic dept

For the past decade or so, the press and certain politicians have been somewhat successful in building a moral panic about video games and the supposed harm they do to children. The problem is that there's almost no evidence that this is true -- and almost all of the evidence that claims this is true doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Often, the moral panic-inducing results are actually either the researcher or (more likely) the press coming up with a conclusion that does not match with the actual study results.

However, in just the last year, we've finally been seeing prominent researchers and politicians start to push back on this notion of video games causing harm. Last year, two Harvard professors came out with a book reviewing all of the research and adding some of their own, all of which showed no evidence that video games made kids violent (in fact, it found that it was the kids who didn't participate in video games that you should be worried about.

Perhaps even more surprising, though, is that some politicians are now pushing back, as well. A study done in the EU Parliament is now noting that video games are actually good for kids, noting that they can help "stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society." The report does, unfortunately, still claim that in some cases violent video games may stimulate violence (though, without much proof), but it's still surprising to see a political report on video games that sees them as being useful.

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Is Kids' Openness About Risky Activities Good Or Bad?

from the just-wondering... dept

There's a moral panic style study being released that claims that many teens "display risky behavior" on MySpace. Of course, when you look at the details, it's not quite so fear-inducing at all. Basically, some kids talk about drinking, drugs and sex online. That's nothing new. But the way this study is being presented, it makes it sound as if the risky behavior is the fact that kids are talking about this stuff. The article doesn't talk about the actual drugs and sex so much as the talking about it, as if that's the problem:

Many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp's MySpace do not realize how public they are and may be opening themselves to risks

That seems backwards to me. It would seem a lot better to find out that kids are actually talking about this stuff openly, where they can (hopefully) get good advice to keep themselves safe, rather than keeping quiet and experimenting totally in secret. Yes, there definitely are some risks involved in talking about this stuff publicly. For years, we've wondered what will happen when the MySpace generation runs for office, and we've also seen how social networking profiles can be used against an individual in pursuing a career. Of course, there are some who wonder if this widespread openness will lead to a more accepting population. For example the fact that Barack Obama used cocaine at one point in his life was barely mentioned at all during the campaign -- in part because he had openly admitted to it years earlier. It's only the surprise "gotcha" type info that seems to cause real problems.

That isn't to say that kids today shouldn't be at least aware of the potential consequences of over-sharing information, but I worry that a study like the one being discussed here leads to eventual misplaced blame and worries over a problem that might not be nearly as significant as some make it out to be.

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Shocking: Teens Talk Sex Online

from the well-what-do-you-know? dept

Forty percent of US teens have sent sexually suggestive electronic messages, a new study says, adding that one in five have sent "nude or partially clothed images of themselves" via email or mobile phone -- fulfilling Mike's earlier prediction, following an overblown report about kids getting naked on cameraphones, that we'd soon be warned about this widespread phenomenon. Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that this was an online survey, so drawing conclusions about how all teens behave from it seems a little shaky -- but hey, it makes a good headline, right? We'll also suspend our disbelief that teens -- who are likely communicating in similar ways, about similar things, offline -- would do this sort of stuff.

As with so many of these reports about kids' online behavior, any sort of positive takeaway here gets buried. In this case, about 80 percent of those surveyed realize that sending these messages or photos online could cause regret later or embarrassment, and three-quarters of them say it can have serious consequences, illustrating that they have a decent understanding of the ramifications of their actions. Doesn't that paint a little more positive picture of teens, that they aren't just leaping blindly into some morass of sketchy behavior and putting themselves at risk? This parallels earlier reports that have found teens do a decent job of looking out for themselves online. It just makes you wonder if maybe giving teens a little more credit and going from there, rather than trying to paint pictures that scare parents and politicians into action, might be a more effective way to protect teens from all these supposed online problems.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Useless Studies: Given The Choice Of No File Sharing Or No Internet, Guess What People Choose?

from the what-do-people-do,-not-what-they-say-they'd-do dept

A study by Entertainment Media Research claims that 72% of file sharers would stop file sharing, if sent a letter by their ISP threatening to cut them off the internet. This, obvious, supports the entertainment industry's effort over the past couple of years to get ISPs to act as their enforcers. It also ignores the fact that the EU has rejected such three strikes policies as a violation of users' rights. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something, plenty of people will probably do it, but that doesn't mean that it's right. Furthermore, what the study is really asking is, which of these two scenarios is preferable: no file sharing or no internet (which, by definition would mean no file sharing). Guess which people are going to say?

Unfortunately, results like this just mean that the industry will probably keep up its campaign to push for ISP enforcement, rather than actually coming up with better business models that embrace file sharing as promotion and a natural part of the market. They'll claim, of course, that this shows such an "educational campaign" will be effective -- ignoring the implicit "gun-to-head" part. However, as we recently discussed, there's little to indicate that the educational campaign has actually succeeded at all over the past decade, and there's little to believe that letters from ISPs will really be particularly effective in the long run. In a survey, of course people will say that they'll stop the activity to avoid getting cut off the internet. But that won't be because they think it's right or are comfortable with it. So the second a new, more secure or more underground method of file sharing comes along, they'll jump on that as well. If the entertainment industry wants to keep pursuing three strikes rules by promoting delusional studies like this one, that's it's choice, but it won't get the industry any closer to solving its business model problems.

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Does Email Make You Lie More?

from the just-a-little-bit dept

Does a more impersonal means of communication make it easier to... stretch the truth? Apparently, a new study found that people tend to lie more in email when compared to a written note (paper?!? pens?!?). The study involved people being given a pool of money and asked to divide it with someone else, who they could communicate with either via email or via written note. While pretty much everyone lied about the total amount of money, those who communicated over email lied by even bigger amounts. The writeup doesn't really suggest why this is, but it makes you wonder what factors could be involved. People often talk about how sitting at a keyboard can make people "mean," but they usually attribute it to the anonymity factor. However, could the "coldness" of typed words feel less personal as well?

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Once More, With Feeling: The Internet Isn't At Risk Of Running Out Of Bandwidth

from the no-exaflood dept

For years, we've been hearing telco execs, telco lobbyists and politicians screaming over the coming death of the internet due to an "exaflood" of bandwidth, as things like internet video and bittorrent totally overwhelmed the internet infrastructure. There was little proof that this was actually an issue, and plenty of evidence suggesting that ordinary infrastructure upgrades would more than handle all expected growth. And, in the last few months we've been seeing more and more public reports supporting this position. In August alone we saw two separate reports noting that internet growth was actually slowing rather than increasing at an alarming rate.

And now there's a third such report, looking at internet backbone traffic and noting that there's little to worry about:

For the second consecutive year, the rate of underlying international Internet capacity deployment outpaced global Internet traffic growth, leading to lower utilization levels on many Internet backbones. Between 2007 and 2008, average traffic utilization levels decreased from 31 percent to 29 percent while peak utilization fell from 44 percent to 43 percent.

Yet, if you listen to telco lobbyists, execs and politicians, they'd have you believe that over the past couple of years, the growth of BitTorrent and internet video was flooding the networks. Hopefully, with so many reports pointing out the opposite, politicians will finally start pushing back the next time a lobbyist or exec starts claiming that the internet is at risk of running out of bandwidth.

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Industry Study Says Recording Industry Should Embrace Piracy... Sorta

from the not-quite dept

Slashdot points us to the news that a new study, by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and Big Champagne, a company that measures file sharing activity claims that the music industry should embrace piracy rather than continuing to fight it. Specifically, it points to the success of Radiohead's "name your own price" promotion, and the fact that the music was still widely available on BitTorrent, even though you could download it for free from Radiohead's own site. This, the study's authors, suggest, show that stopping piracy has little correlation to "success." That's not a surprising finding as plenty of previous reports have shown the same thing. In fact, albums that are considered a success tend to have a lot more unauthorized file sharing than those that are not. It's not hard to understand why, either: popularity is popularity.

Slashdot highlights the fact that this is a study done by the music industry itself, suggesting that maybe the industry is open to changing its strategy. But, that's not quite accurate. The "music industry" is made up of made different parts, with very different motivations. The two players who did this study are both angling for different benefits. Big Champagne has been around for years, and has established itself as the sort of "go to" player for the industry in monitoring file sharing. The more the industry embraces file sharing, the more business Big Champagne gets. As for the MCPS-PRS Alliance -- that represents songwriters, composers and publishers -- not necessarily the labels. MCPS-PRS is looking to establish a new set of draconian compulsory licensing system, where you could still make use of file sharing, but where it would (perhaps with Big Champagne's help) get paid for every download through some sort of system, whether sharing in the ad revenue or through subscription fees. This is the deal it's already worked out with Google's YouTube, even though it's unclear what legal basis there is for such an agreement.

So, this study is hardly the "music industry" embracing file sharing, but a very biased part of that industry trying to push the rest of the industry towards compulsory licenses and an effective "music tax" on file sharing.

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Recording Industry Now Making Up Facts To Support Having ISPs Police File Sharing

from the please-try-again dept

A whole bunch of folks have sent in the "debate" that was held on the BBC website last week, starting with regular columnist Bill Thompson trashing Virgin Media, a UK-based broadband provider, for agreeing to send out warning "notices" to folks that the entertainment industry claims are file sharing. Thompson explains that he's been known to use BitTorrent to get a copy of a TV show he missed on TV and forgot to record on his DVR, wondering why this should be a problem. He also mentions: "Evidence that heavy downloaders are also heavy music purchasers doesn't seem to have made any difference to the BPI's approach either, and instead of finding new business models they hold on to the old ways of working."

The response came from BPI's chief exec Geoff Taylor, who responds by suggesting that Thompson's column is ill-informed, and thus, supports this "education" effort by Virgin Media. He also suggests that the entertainment industry is wholeheartedly embracing new business models and its folks like Thompson who are the dinosaurs. Finally, he completely contradicts Thompson when he claims: "Independent research has shown time after time that people who download illegally generally spend less on music than people that don't, which undermines investment in new music."

Well, as the joke goes, everyone's entitled to their own opinions -- but not their own facts. And, in this case, it would appear that it's BPI's Geoff Taylor who's got his facts screwed up. The "new" business models that he talks about were hardly the result of a forward-thinking entertainment industry, but one that was dragged kicking and screaming into a new era, and has resisted every innovation at every turn -- and is still doing so. The real kicker, though, is his claim that independent studies say that those who use file sharing spend less on music. That's simply untrue. Study after study after study after study after study after study has shown the exact opposite -- noting that people who file share tend to be bigger music fans, and are more likely to spend on music.

Most of those studies were easily found doing a basic Google search. So how about a Google search in order to find all that research insisting that file sharing makes people spend less on music? The only result I could find was to BPI's own page where it claims "The overwhelming majority of reputable third party research shows that illegal file-sharing has been a key factor in the recording industry's 22% worldwide sales declines between 1999 and 2004" and then quotes the IFPI as its source (hardly an unbiased party). That page then does link to other research. Amusingly, though, it includes some of the same research mentioned above -- and either twists the results or claims that the research was "debunked," when in most cases it had not been.

In some cases, the results are positively hilarious. Take, for example, the way the BPI spins one study that says the exact opposite of what it claims: "EMR concluded that heavy music buyers are also heavy filesharers. In other words, filesharing threatens the music business' biggest customers." See how that works? When the study says that fileshares are the biggest music buyers, BPI uses it to note that file sharing "threatens the music business' biggest customers," rather than realizing that perhaps file sharers are also spending more money on music. Many of the other studies it quotes are the long-debunked stories that count every download as a "loss," which then are used to show huge "losses" in CD sales that never would have happened in the first place. The BPI is making up its own facts here. This round goes to Bill Thompson.

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Americans Getting Beyond Sound Bite Politics Thanks To The Internet?

from the good-for-them dept

While some people are trying to make the case that the internet makes people dumber, some new research from the Pew folks has suggested the opposite may be true. It looked at how Americans are using the internet during the presidential campaign and found a significant number of them are using the internet to go beyond the insipid soundbites, and trying to dig out more substance. That is, they're watching unfiltered campaign speeches and debates, and also actually reading full campaign position papers and speeches. That would seem to go against those who claim that things like Google and Twitter are getting people into the mindset of only looking at snippets and soundbites. By the way, most of the coverage of this report is found in an Associated Press article, but thanks to the Associated Press's ridiculous anti-blogger policies we won't link to the AP version of the story, preferring, instead the press release from Pew.

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Why Is The Hollywood Tail Wagging The Dog Of Academia?

from the that-seems-backwards dept

Hollywood's admission last week that its campus piracy stats were bogus raises an interesting question: why have colleges been so quick to roll over and accede to Hollywood's demands? Greg Sandoval points out that universities could have done their own studies a long time ago and had hard numbers to dispute the industry's accusations. If, as now appears to be the case, colleges are only responsible for a fairly small fraction of illegal file sharing, it makes the industry's demands that academia bend over backwards to help Hollywood in its anti-piracy fight a little unreasonable. The really screwy thing about this is that the movie industry is a relatively small part of the American economy. The industry's revenues in 2006 were just $42 billion. For comparison, Harvard alone has an endowment of $35 billion, and altogether the higher education sector has assets in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If they chose to stand up to Hollywood's bullying techniques, they would have little trouble mounting an effective legal defense. And given that Hollywood seems determined to paint students—academia's customers—in the worst possible light, it seems only appropriate that colleges be more proactive about countering unfair negative stereotypes of college campuses.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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PR Firm Says Video Games Should Be Regulated... After Video Game Lobby Picks Different Vendor

from the don't-mess-with-hill-&-knowlton dept

It's a competitive business world out there and sometimes you don't get the clients that you want. But, should you take revenge on companies that opt not to use your services? Apparently that's what PR firm Hill & Knowlton did (though the firm denies it). The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the lobbying group for the video game industry, went searching for a PR firm recently. H&K had competed for the business, and as a part of that, conducted a survey about video games to aid in its presentation. The ESA chose to go with a different firm... and H&K then released parts of the study that painted the video game industry in a negative light in what certainly looks like retribution. The firm put out a press release announcing "60% of respondents agree that the government should regulate the sale of video games," which is exactly the opposite message the ESA wants out there, of course. The actual study had some other conclusions that fit more with the ESA's message, but H&K chose to highlight the exact message that the ESA has been fighting against. In fact, the whole press release pushes the idea that the industry should be regulated, completely skipping over the other parts of the study.

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