Music Industry Thriving In an Era of File Sharing

levicivita notes ZeroPaid coverage of a recent study by the UK music industry's own economist showing that overall UK music industry revenues were up in 2008 (study, PDF). The study is titled "Adding up the Music Industry for 2008" and it was authored by Will Page, who is the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers. From ZeroPaid: "[T]he music industry is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to hear and consume music. Sales of recorded music fell 6% for example, digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%. In terms of what consumers spent on music as a whole last year, this surprisingly grew by 3%."

Re:File-sharing has dropped in the UK

[Andy_R]

1) Correlation does not imply causality.

2) Who paid for the survey? Take a look at http://www.theleadingquestion.com/ [theleadingquestion.com] and you'll find prominent Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony and Universal logos on the front page. Do you trust them to be unbiased?

3) Even if the survey was fair, unbiased and accurate, it cannot distinguish between people who are aware of the RIAA's tactics and are no longer willing to admit to filesharing and people who have actually stopped.

Re:Where the profit goes.

[monktus]

The record company will not take it out of your concert/t-shirt money unless you've signed away all your revenue streams and/or soul to your label like Robbie Williams did with EMI. Generally when you sign a record deal, your advance will be recoupable (i.e. a loan against your cut of future earnings) and your recording costs may or may not be depending on your leverage and your lawyer.

e.g. Your first record costs £$â50k to produce and both it and your 50k advance are recoupable. Your cut of record sales for the first year is 80k, therefore you don't earn any money until the next year once the money you're due reaches 100k. Recording costs in many cases are not recoupable so in that case you'd be 30k up.

Generally record labels only own the physical recordings and right to licence them! In most cases they have no right to your earnings from mechanical royalties, sync fees (from songwriting in both cases), touring or merchandise!