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IFPI publishes depressing stats, renews three-strike calls
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 21 January 2011
The International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry published its annual Digital Music Report yesterday and reported that growth in the digital market slowed to 6% last year, that’s down from 12% the previous year and 25% in 2008.
Of course, the digital market could never have continued to grow at the rapid pace we saw five years ago, when many new digital services were starting from zero, so that’s not really any surprise, nor as depressing a stat as some have suggested.
More depressing, though, of course, was confirmation that digital growth continues to be slower than the decline of traditional record industry sales, meaning over all the recorded music market shrank by between 8-9% last year. And that, the IFPI claimed, is just the start of the bad news. Sales of debut albums are down 77% compared to 2003, revenues from the biggest 50 tours of last year were down 12%, and 17% less people are now employed as musicians in the US than ten years ago. What’s more, the global trade body said, 1.2 million jobs are in jeopardy in Europe alone if these declines
Of course, as far as the IFPI is concerned, the big problem here is piracy, and if only those ISPs and governments would get their collective asses into gear and start slapping file-sharers in the face, the record industry could get on with investing in new talent and rescuing those 1.2 million jobs. The solution, it says, is three-strike style anti-piracy systems involving net service providers, such as that launched in South Korea, the one getting under way in France and the one proposed by the Digital Economy Act here in the UK.
Says IFPI boss Frances Moore: “As we enter 2011, digital piracy, and the lack of adequate legal tools to fight it, remains the biggest threat to the future of creative industries. Great new legitimate music offerings exist all over the world, offering consumers a wide range of ways to access music. Yet they operate in a market that is rigged by piracy, and they will not survive if action is not taken to address this fundamental problem. This is the challenge and the opportunity for governments to seize in 2011″.
