Music Piracy?
Music companies have, in recent years, been pointing all their fingers at piracy for their dwindling records sales. Day in day out, we hear blaming mp3, cd pirates, creating the notion that piracy is the sole culprit for the steady downtrend in the sales number of record albums. But is fair to put all the blame on piracy? Piracy is theft, piracy is wrong...All these I do agree. I agree that piracy did chip away some numbers off the sales, but is that the only cause? Maybe not...Are there other reasons behind that are just as devastating? I believe so... I shall only discuss it in the context of the Chinese Pop music industry, something that I'm more familar with.For a start, music piracy have been ard for a long time, especially so since the induction of cassette tapes. I remember that, as a child, I could walk into any store that sells music cassettes and see lower priced albums alongside their originals. There's even two categories of pirated albums: one is sang by the original singer, and another is same songs but sung by some unknown ppl. Making your own pirated albums isn't that tough too. There is this mini-compo, with 2 cassette decks, that offer the features of copying from the cassette in one deck to the cassette in the the other deck. You can even choose a fast option which will carry out copy process at ard 4 times the playback speed. You can even copy directly from the radio playing on the same machine. Talk about the ease and convenience of a pirate. Yet, few complaints were heard abt piracy. Album records sales are still hitting numbers in the millions for the more popular singers, a near impossible target in recent years. And bear in mind, it was a time where the China market is still not open, which effectively eliminates a billion audience and potential sales.
Yet with the opening of the HUGE china market, we see dwindling numbers, and start to hear complaints abt piracy, something that have been ard for years.
I believe 1 key area we shld look at is the spending pattern of consumers, since this directly impact the sales of albums. The age group that is listening to pop music are mostly from 10-35 yo. In the past, we only spend money on mainly movies only. As such, we are able to spend more on buying albums. But now its different. The youngsters nowadays are spending hundreds of $$ buying the latest handphones, PDAs, iPod, MP3 players etc. There's also the lure of gaming consoles like PS2 and XBox. These will already eat up a large portion of their spending power. In addtition, most of them are regulars of pubs and nightspots, spending on average up to a couple of hundreds per day. With all these extra and huge expenditure, it is small wonder that they are spending less on buying music albums.
Another difference is the amount of artistes the music records companies are churning out. In the past, there used be only a few more popular singers and whenever there's some newcomers, I would have at least heard of their name or heard one of 2 of their songs. But now, when some of them appear on variety shows, I dun even noe who they are even when thier names are called up, much lest hear of their song. Compare the amount of 偶像派 singers, in the past, at any one time you will be able to count with at most 2 of your hands, but now the number is at least 3-4 times. Not to mention the number of boys groups...With the excessive churning out of artistes, its obvious that the pie is being shared by so much more. How many singers can u support at one time? How many albums can you afford to buy in a month? Especially so when the consumers are spending a large sum of their money on other things. Is piracy the sole culprit for the dwindling number in sales, or are the record company bringing abt their own downfall?
posted by Ah Loy @ 12:53 PM
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