Re: The Eric Eldred Act

 Dan Bernitt wrote:

In response to what, Linda Gruber wrote: Hello Eric Having seen the effect of rampant copying and distribution on the music industry

Is there a quantitative or definitive description of this effect? The only things I've seen claim that every single download of a song is the actual loss of a sale. That is so ludicrous. The opposite is almost always true. I'm pretty old, I've been in the computer business for a very long time, and I've seen this claim/fear many times before. Sport team owners were convinced that televising games would surely keep people from buying tickets, interactive computing would be the end of the Computer Center, the VCR would be the end of movies and television, etc., etc. Sure, CD sales are down in the last couple of years. So is the whole danged economy! We're in a recession for heaven's sake.

Hello Dan,

A week or two ago I heard a broadcast and read an article on the same day, but my memory is foggy. (I'm pretty old too.) I can't be very specific on the facts or even remember where I heard and read them now. In the broadcast, a major CD chain store was filing bankruptcy. Reportedly, internet music swapping was the main reason for their financial situation. The article I read didn't mention that bankruptcy. It may have been written earlier. The writer believes that the music industry as we know it is dying, and soon, there will be no more CD stores.

A lot of people seem to think it's a good thing that the music moguls are being cut out of the equation, but I wonder how new artists can manage marketing and promotion without someone fronting the money. It takes a lot of expensive broadcast marketing to get a recording to go platinum. Maybe it would be different if I were a kid in high school with classmates talking up a particular new artist, but foggy, old fogey that I am, if I heard a song on the radio that I liked and wanted to buy, it's unlikely that I would remember it long enough to go looking for the artist's website. I need TV ads to get me interested.

I really don't think the recession can be blamed. I've been through a number of recessions, but I've never seen record sales suffer like this. When I was a just out of high school there was a recession. It was the late sixties. I was making $50 per week, paying $50 a month for an apartment over a music store, and driving a Honda 50 scooter. I could barely make ends meet, but I still bought a few 45's for $.99 each. Young adults still love music, and they are generally much more affluent today, but I suspect they do a lot more free downloading than buying. (I get that info directly from many young adults who have expressed the opinion that if it's on the internet, it's up for grabs.)

Linda Gruber
Novel Art
http://www.novelart.com Received on Tue Feb 04 2003 - 13:38:01 GMT