“Illegal downloads, decline in concert ticket sales, illicit file sharers and iPods – the music industry would have you believe it was under fire from virtually every side… The iPod is just the latest manifestation of an explosion in the potential for illicit reproduction. When iPods were launched three years ago, the sceptics said the phrase stood for ‘idiots price our devices’ because of the apparently astronomical $400 charged. Yet this did not stop them being sold in their millions,” Matthew Bick writes for The Observer.
“But just how much illegally downloaded music is on one of these things? With 60 million songs available via Apple’s iTunes online store, there are on average only 21 songs that have been legally downloaded from iTunes per iPod. That still leaves more than 4,000 illegal downloads ripped from CDs or downloaded from other illegal sites such as Kazaa,” Bick writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ripping songs from CDs that you’ve purchased into iTunes and transferring those tracks to iPods is not illegal. We have some iPods with over 400 CDs worth of tracks on them and we paid retail for each and every one of those CDs. iPods don’t steal music. People steal music.
Apple’s iTunes Music Store offers “over 1.5 million songs,” according to Apple, not “60 million.”
“iPod” is, of course, an acronym for “Impressive Piece of Design.”
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Ballmer says ‘iPod users are thieves’ statement ‘was bad’ – October 05, 2004
Microsoft CEO Ballmer: ‘Apple iPod users are music thieves’ – October 04, 2004
Amen, brother. Guns don’t kill people, I kill people.
But iPods do NOT help people steal music.
Sure, it’s a big HD to carry files of any kind, legal or not. But big HDs are old, old news.
Blaming the iPod isn’t like opposing guns. It’s like opposing closets because closets can store guns that help kill people! But forgetting that dressers, trunks, and shelves can store guns too–and all of them are mainly used for storing books and clothes anyway. A closet doesn’t make it any easier to kill someone with a gun. An iPod doesn’t make it any easier to download/upload pirated music.
I can sum up this article in one word …. Slander!
You mean libel. Slander is spoken, libel printed.
Actually quite a good article. I would have to agree that the music industry should stop blaming illegal file sharers for “killing” CD sales. They might want to look at the specific numbers such as which are or were the most downloaded tracks specifically from the albums in question. I personally dont mind paying 24.95 to 29.95 NZ for a CD any more than that I would consider a rip off, although I would prefer to pay an average price of $19.95 to 24.95 for a NEW CD and no more than that. The music industry could also look at changeing their business model to take into account the changing times. For instance don’t pay the artists a lump sum up front, instead pay them for the CD sales as they come in. Put more music online sooner and remove the crappy international licencing and distribution restrictions. Make more alternative/”yet to be discovered groups” music available online through mainstream online music channels. I am sure that there is a lot available now that can be discovered via word of mouth. Spend less time promoting crappy artists and artists that are only there becasue of the hype generated by the PR guys and more time promoting artists who are creative in their own right like Donavan Frankenrieder, Dave Matthew’s Band etc rather than promoting Briteny Spears because she is sexy and 13 year old girls like her or used to like her.
Just my 2 cents
I think iPods get the blame for stealing music becasue the are so closely linked with downloading, carrying and and listening to music. People just tend to put them in the same basket which is not always a good thing.
Huge hard drive are very old news. I hope they know people do store other things that just music on those hard drives! Photos, movies, whatever. Even if you have a 60GB iPod, you still need to have enough hard drive space on you computer to store it all. Another thing is that if you start to encode your music in Apple Lossless or higher bitrates than 128 AAC, your music collection starts to take up significantly more space than Apple’s quote of 15000 songs on a 60GB iPod. My 7000 song collection takes over 75GB as it is and not even all of it is Apple Lossless.
The other singer song writter I was going to mention is Jack Johnson as I have his CD “In between dreams”.
Since Apple pretty much made online music purchasing happen, I would say that the iPod+iTunes is the best weapon against illegal music downloading there is.
winmacguy brings up a good point. CDs here are decent priced at less than $15 -$20. Look at the Japanese market when CDs, DVDs, and video games are really expensive. Check amazon for a Japanese import of a band like Daft Punk and it’s more than $40USD. Then you have to remember that they always pay that much for a CD in Japan. Ya, you can complain music is expensive, but most people are willing to shell out the money if they really like the band, I know I am. There are so many articles that say this is just a slump, and you can’t go pointing the finger at piracy or iPods.
Frankly the music industry wants to dictate how we get our music, what they refuse to see is the paradigm shift in the way that end users have chosen to do so. They are fighting a losing battle. The iPod is the target because it symbolizes and is in part cause of this new paradigm.
My call? Apple has sure enough channeled a massive worldwide illegal booty into it’s digital storage product. Master stroke of genius, if you ask me. And in so doing Apple has also created the successful and only viable marketplace for the legal alternative. Apple is kicking music file thieves in the teeth with their own contraband. Wait and watch. A simple flip of the switch and …. bye, bye stash? heh.
We’ll see …
Uh, I think the bigger point here is that The Observer is an avid Apple hater. They’re not to be taken seriously AT ALL!
Ooops. Nevermind. Not the news source I originally thought it was.
A M$ Windhose user can only think of malware and illnesses, they do not want to know how free and delicious you can work and play with products from Apple Macintosh.. !
If the music companies such as EMI and Sony and the rest REALLY were worried about illegal prirating of online music and such they WOULD drop the prices of CDs.
As it stands I think they would rather just charge as much as they can get away with and blame file sharing as an excuse for the drop in revenues. They are not taking into consideration that fact that people are quite happy to pay a reasonable price for good artists like Coldplay (740,000 CDs in the first week and 64,000 tracks downloaded) and good music as opposed to pumping and promoting mediocre artists such as Britney Spears who have a very small age range following and a very limited shelf life.
There was an interesting news item on TV the other week talking about the same fate happening to Movies and asking why people don’t want to pay $14.95 NZ to see an average quality movie when they can rent it for $9.95 on DVD-also taking into account how much it costs to take a family of 5 to the movies $$$. If you make a great movie and do a similtaneous world wide release for an affordable ticket price then less people would be inclined to pirate it on bit torrent and everyone around the world could see it at the same time. Afterall its not like the major movie houses are that short of cash or anything!
Did anyone else catch what was written in this article?
“But just how much illegally downloaded music is on one of these things? With 60 million songs available via Apple’s iTunes online store, there are on average only 21 songs that have been legally downloaded from iTunes per iPod. That still leaves more than 4,000 illegal downloads ripped from CDs or downloaded from other illegal sites such as Kazaa.”
First, iTMS has about 1.5-million songs available, not 60-million as the articles states. BIG difference. That means the math is wrong, too.
Over 500,000,000 songs have been downloaded. At about $1.00 for each, that’s $500-million dollars in sales. OK, There have been about 20-million iPods sold (rough estimate), so around 25 songs from iTMS per iPod.
I know MANY iPod users who do NOT use iTMS, so the average number of iTMS songs per iTMS customer (not per iPod) is a much more important figure. A figure you won’t be getting from Apple any time soon.
It gets worse.
“The iPod is just the latest manifestation of an explosion in the potential for illicit reproduction. When iPods were launched three years ago, the sceptics said the phrase stood for ‘idiots price our devices’ because of the apparently astronomical $400 charged.”
Never heard or read that phrase anywhere. The writer made it up. Obviously, the ‘idiots’ in question were the pundits who thought the price too high. The public doesn’t seem to mind.
iPods don’t steal. People steal.
Oh, articles like that leave their authors with no credibility. Just like the record companies.
Tera Patricks
Mac360
Yes I did catch the bit about the 60 million tracks, I just thought it meant that there were 1.5 million albums on iTunes but hey I was always pretty bad at maths anyhow
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Your right though Tera, there are a lot of mis truths in the article and I still have NO SYMPATHY for those greedy record companies. Although I do have a lot of sympathy for the increasing amount of talented New Zealand artists that are putting out great music that I happily pay full sticker price for.
And what of the other hard disk-based MP3 players? Are those somehow exempt from this presumption that iPods are killing the music industry? Its really sad to hear the iPod being attacked for being successful.
>The iPod is just the latest manifestation of an explosion in the potential for illicit reproduction.
it is not the latest manifestation: there are many alternatives which have appeared since the ipod launched… matthew bick is a knob
> When iPods were launched three years ago, the sceptics said the phrase stood for ‘idiots price our devices’
this appears to come from a wired news article in 2001 referencing a post on macslash…
http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,47805,00.html?tw=wn_story_related
this is journalism 2005-style. matthew bick is a knob
“With 60 million songs available via Apple’s iTunes online store”
With that small statement, this guy loses whatever small amount of credibility he started with.
Talking to a friend who used to get his music from limewire or similar who now buys it all from iTunes he said something that makes sense.
Music companies count every illegal download as a lost sale, however 99% of people who download illegal music would never buy it in the first place so its not a lost sale.
Lots of people would go for live or special recordings which the music companies never release.
But the music companies wont ever take this into account as it reduces their arguement by a huge margin and then they would lose the support of congress for their draconian measures.
iTMS has hit the nail on the head, make it cheap and easy and people will pay for their music.
Hopefully the same will be true of downloaded video
PHB
Isn’t Sony themselves trying like crazy to sell their own mp3 players? Any mp3-enabled CD player can replay illegally downloaded mp3 files.
The iPod is the only player that is part of a package that includes legal online purchase of music (well, if you discount the 200 or so Sony WM-WHATISITCALLED sold so far).
That writer is just a tool for some music industrie exec who took him to dinner.
MW “old”, as in same old excuses
He’l hoping desperately that somehow his comments will negatively effect the sale of iPods …. typical Apple hater.
Idiots price our devices … that’s the clue … the old pc argument … everything from Apple is too expensive …
The inference also being if idiots price them only idiots buy them.
You Mr. Pc guy have done more damage to this world by supporting the most monopolistic, abusive, business destroying, company ever created … MicroSlop!