Free online music blamed for weak sales

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Posted on	19/04/01 19:39
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Free online music blamed for weak sales

According to IFPI free online music really damaged the sales of "official" music. Although album sales are getting higher and overall music sales in Europe are rising the total picture ain't that sunny.... (for the IFPI I mean).
By going after poeple who put lots of music online for free and trying to shut down file exchange services, closing illegal mp3 sites etc they want to control the market again.

Controlling the market again is not the only thing they want to do. The second thing they'll probably want to do is getting the people who downloaded for free to get them paying for the downloads. I guess we could call it legal mp3's...

Singles are also proving to be a dying breed. Sales slumped a dramatic 46 percent in the United States in 2000, for a global fall of 14 percent, which the IFPI blamed on the availability of free online music sites.

The most popular of those sites, free file-swapping service Napster, is facing an increasingly gloomy future after being ordered by a U.S. court to filter out copyrighted songs. The Big Five record labels--BMG Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group--hope at least to partly plug the gap with their own legitimate online ventures as they seek to sustain long-term growth

I don't think they'll succeed... and I surely hope not!

Read all about it here

Source: Cnet news

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Posted by on Thursday 19 April 2001 20:32

Singles??? who buys singles anyways?

Posted by Dee-ehn on Thursday 19 April 2001 20:36

Well DJ's do.... euhh some DJ's I meant

Posted by Nila on Thursday 19 April 2001 20:38

Singles were always doomed to dye. At the end of the day, having to pay £4 for a single song is just completely overpriced. And although we are being ripped off at that price, in some way it's not the music industries fault. It costs just as much to produce, to deliver and to store a single as it does a full album. The only difference is we get only one song for our money.
Singles aren't a viable product and so as soon as something that was a more reasonable option came out it was bound to take over. Songs over the internet are exactly that.

Posted by dk_scorpion on Friday 20 April 2001 00:31

NAPSTER

Posted by on Friday 20 April 2001 12:50

Singles used to be OK (in the UK at least) until the record industry limited them to only 3 tracks in order to qualify for the charts. That means for £4 you get a radio edit, a full length version and if your lucky a crappy b-side. What a bargain

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