Karaoke Forums

A new study published today claims that users who share and download music files online also buy four and a half times more music online than your average music listener, at least in the UK. Instead of magically costing the industry money, these users are apparently interacting with more music, and as a result, buying more music from legitimate channels. The study stems from a survey conducted by The Leading Question, a digital music research company who surveyed 600 self-styled music fans.

"There's a myth that all illegal downloaders are mercenaries hell-bent on breaking the law in pursuit of free music. In reality they are often hardcore fans who are extremely enthusiastic about adopting paid-for services as long as they are suitably compelling," said Paul Brindley, director of The Leading Question.

The study only assessed buying music online, and therefore did not factor in the relationship of this behavior to CD sales. Nevertheless, it's an interesting notion that those most familiar with P2P are also more interested in legitimate online music sales. Is it a "try before you buy" scenario, or are users afraid of being sued? One might think that fear is factoring into this, but the people buying all of that music in question were actively also downloading music illegally.

The British Phonographic Industry largely dismissed the significance of the study, however, claiming that study after study has demonstrated the harm P2P itself has done to the industry. The problem, of course, is that these losses have been blown entirely out of proportion, and sometimes the industry actually tries to cover up how well it's doing. The issue isn't profitability, it's control. That's what happens when an entity gets too much power: its "vision" for the future hopes to dictate part of that future.

Another study done just two years ago also showed the correlation between music downloads and sales, and was also summarily dismissed by the music industry.


{What say you?}

Internet music piracy is not responsible for declining CD sales, claim the researchers behind a major new statistical study.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee at Harvard Business School in Massachusetts and Koleman Strumpf at the University of North Carolina tracked millions of music files downloaded through the OpenNap file-trading network and compared them with CD sales of the same music.

The music industry frequently claims that illegal file-trading is responsible for reducing legitimate music sales. The industry says this argument is the reason for their legal campaign of suing individual file traders over the past year.

However, the researchers conclude: "At most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction of this decline."

Strongly agree.

Very interesting - good post !

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Would that translate to shoplifting actually increases grocery sales?

My thought on the decline of the CD is that once people had the ability to buy only the songs they wanted and not have them get scratched, broken or otherwise destroyed, then the CD became inconvenient. People also want instant gratification and not have to drive somewhere when they can get it at home as soon as it is released. It is a matter of one technology replacing another.

Karaoke would benefit from the same but evidently the laws would have to be changed for that to happen and it has become quite a frustration for the manufacturers.

I don't think the case could be made that stealing music hasn't hurt the karaoke manufacturers. If only 2 out of 5 hosts paid for their music and the rest got 10s of thousands of songs off of a file sharing site then passed it on how is that not a dent in the manufacturer's income?

In the real world there are DJ sites that major artists upload their releases before the cd's hit the shelves. They realize that if DJ'S are not playing them then they will not be popular. Hardly anybody here is familiar with the hard core Mirc download P2P rooms.

I do find it hard to believe karaoke is the last to offer legal downloads and yes there are rooms that provide downloads of rare and tracks that are not available to the general public. When something is highly regulated then it goes underground and I look for karaoke to go further underground with recent events.

Public karaoke will someday be just a memory for the pros are shifting to private parties.

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I think what often happens is that P2P for some people is actually an introduction to what ever it is that interests them.
I started that way.
I was looking for some backing tracks for my sister who sings and on a P2P site downloaded some karaoke tracks.
I was suitably impressed and started buying sunfly and soundchoice disks.
Not actually sure morals came into it.
I simply wanted the original disks.
I at that time had no intention of ever doing karaoke.

If I never downloaded those tracks, I don't know if I would be doing karaoke now.

My daughter once told me a long time ago that when she downloaded music, it was generally to see if she liked it. She told me that she wanted the original discs to the stuff she was keeping because the album covers were cool and the original discs look cool as well. She told me that there was a lot of stuff she wouldn't have otherwise bought because it was too "iffy" as to what she was getting if she only heard one or two songs off the album.

As an aside:
Remember the days when you would go buy an album because you liked the hit song that came off it?
Then you would get home and the rest of the album was garbage. Once in a long while you would get lucky and the rest of the album was good. But not as often as it should have been.
Those days are gone.
I know that even before mp3s hit the internet, album sales were starting to go south, even if a small amount. Speaking to many friends and acquaintances, we would all talk about how we weren't buying albums like we used to because they were mostly crap and it was a waste of money.
Most record stores no longer let you preview an album before buying it like they did in the 50's. It was literally a crap shoot unless you waited 6 months to see if it was going to go anywhere.
Mp3s changed all that. It changed how we buy an album. We get to hear it first. I think it's driven the quality of music up because the consumer has told the artists that their jig is up. "you can no longer sell us this crap because we won't buy it. We know what it is and your free ride is over".
The consumer is now demanding a quality product and I think, for the most part, the artists have begun to respond to that.
Getting back to the OP, my daughter and many of her friends (me too) want the original discs. Myself, I like to be thorough and have original stuff. It's handy too, because you don't have to deal with DRM files and being forced to re-buy it if you crash. Transferring it to different players is not an issue either.

Instant gratification. "I want my music NOW so I'm going to download to an iPOD." "I can't wait to get home to talk on the house phone so I'm going to message or talk while I'm driving."

I'm guilty of it, too - no more buying a bunch of second-rate tracks on an album or CD where the artist is forced to continually create new works and in their haste, the quality is not good. (Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, unless an artist is very good, many of their releases are just second rate and not worth the listen.)

I do download to a computer, though, and burn tracks on CDs...then upload to my DJ'ing computer. I prefer to have a hard copy just for the reasons Diafel cites.

I don't remember the last complete album I purchased by any artist. I will, however, get Adam Lambert's CD when it is released in November.

NO doubt that the people who download music often buy probably buy more music than the average JOE..But they also STEAL 10x of what the average JOE does.

The problem with STUDYs or Surveys etc ..You can make any results you want ...if you try

Do they ?
Looks like the Jury's in on this one.

Karaoke going away, to be replaced by private parties?

Not even hardly.

Karaoke is just an extension of something that people have been doing since performing was invented... Getting together in a group and entertaining each other. Something that most modern entertainment lacks because 95% of the participants are passive.

That said, the format that you see now certainly will change to encompass a greater variety of active entertainment forms, and the large number of crap shows will dwindle until only a few quality shows remain.

One singer, coming up, one after the other and singing until the end of the night is a format that I believe is going away. In its place will be singing, intermixed with dancing, and possibly some type of "Guitar Hero" type performance.

There are those that scoff at this, but that is because the program as is stands now does not lend itself for that type of application. But surely, the same could be said for karaoke on cassette tapes and lyric sheets... eh?

GH in bars is in its infancy, and it simply is not made to be used in such a way... but, all that has to happen is for someone to rewrite the format so it can be presented as such (In other words, provide some type of "hosting" option), and then who knows?

Then you will have the ability to present a true, interactive "variety show" with singing, line dancing, and "guitar hero". A very solid night of entertainment, all at your local bar while you sit, drink and socialize with your friends. While this may not sit well with the "karaoke purists", I find that those types are going away as they are replaced by a younger, hipper, crowd open to and looking for the type of entertainment I speak of.

Mp3 karaoke WILL happen. Why? Because there's money to be made... and in those cases people always find a way. Certainly, as these changes occur I plan to not only be a part of it but hopefully be an early adapter and innovator of it.

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Alternative explanation:

Nearly everybody who is actually into music is downloading. The people who aren't that into music never download and only buy something once in a blue moon as a result. The real question is, are people who are really into music buying more or less music?

Back in the day, a person could go to the store and buy an album(33RPM) or a single song(45RPM). Karaoke discs came along and if you wanted to sing one of your favorite songs, you usually had to buy 14 other "filler songs" that you had no interest in at all. Sure, there were some discs that had 15 songs by the same artist and if you were a fan of that artist, there probably weren't a lot of filler songs on that disc, BUT and that is a very BIG BUT, most Sound Choice discs were not made that way. I remember having to buy nine Sound Choice discs to get the Tom Petty songs that I wanted to sing. Almost $300 to get NINE SONGS that I wanted and 126 songs that I couldn't care less about. Sound Choice's "attitude" was that they had something the consumer wanted and they were going to package it so 15 different people would be willing to pay for a disc with only one song on it that they liked and Sound Choice would basically force you to buy 14 songs that you didn't want if you really wanted that ONE GREAT song that you just had to have. Sound Choice realizes that by going to the single song download route, their sales could conceivably drop by almost 93% for the home user. If I could have bought those 9 Tom Petty songs for two dollars apiece, I would have saved approximately $280 People felt like they were being ripped off by the karaoke companies for years so when software came out to copy karaoke CD's, a lot of people didn't feel any guilt about combining libraries with other KJs. It would be like a car salesman telling you that he would be happy to sell you a car but if you want this "special" car over here; You have to buy 14 extra sets of tires to go with it. People would look for a way to defray the cost of those extra tires by selling them off to other people that might need them....just like groups of karaoke enthusiasts got together to buy a bunch of CDGs amongst themselves and made copies for everyone in the group....not to mention the multi riggers who now only had to buy one disc for their 10 karaoke systems. Their attitude was..."If you're gonna make me buy stuff that I don't want, I'm gonna make copies of them instead of buying multiple copies of the same disc and some of these multi riggers, who owned karaoke retail stores, just made copies from an original disc, re-packaged the disc and sold it to an unsuspecting customer as a new disc. Sound Choice never seems interested in catching these folks though. I guess it's because these kinds of business owners actually help sell Sound Choice merchandise, even as they are pirating the same discs that they are selling.

In general Bruce, I would say you are correct. As far as "going after pirates", this is a loosing proposition for SC. They could bankrupt themselves filing lawsuits, and the people targeted would be but a drop in the ocean of the totality of pirate KJs. Furthermore, they would not win at least half the cases they filed, many would drag on for years, and when they did "win" they would see little return from the KJ who's assets probably aren't near the amount of the judgment, much less the cost that SC put out for court costs, and lawyers.

They have, however, filed lawsuits... which I predict will not benefit them. How does this improve their business???? How does this increase their profit??? And I'm not talking about "in the future" when the "everybody" honestly buys their disks again... I'm talking about now, when you have bills to pay... all this outlay for little or no return is a poor business decision. SC will be out of business before the first lawsuit is ever resolved.

As far as Mp3 downloads cutting into their profit, that's simply not true. First of all, the distribution model becomes infinitely more profitable as there is no need for disks, disks cases, printed materials, boxes to ship them in, no shipping costs, to retailers to deal with! Replaced with the comparably much smaller costs of bandwidth for a website.

Now, instead of sending your product to a small group of specialty retailers and reaching a limited audience, you can now send your product instantly anywhere in the world!

In addition, rather than paying licensing for 15 songs to be manufactured to disks 5000 times, you now pay licensing only for the tracks that are actually downloaded.

At $2 a piece, 10,000 downloads for a track MEANS something. Surely, those same 15 songs will still get sold, but they will reach a larger group of people who will download a variety of songs that pertain to them. Combined with the reduction in operating costs, digital downloads are infinitely more profitable and customer friendly.

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Good music, good friends, howling good times!

I would also have to agree with Bruce's analysis of the buying situation a way back when. (Now THAT'S a first! )
I remember when I first started buying discs I was CHOKED when I found out how the songs were packaged, sometimes with completely unrelated artists and song genres. I remember thinking, "It is it really worth it to pay this amount of money for ONE song?". Most of the time, back then, the answer was no.
As an example, when I got further into buying my discs, I bought SC8800 for the Bif Naked song. The rest of the disc was and still is pretty much useless to me. NOT ONE song from the rest of that disc has EVER been sung or requested at ANY of my shows. EVER. All it does is fluff out my library a little and make it look bigger. Like THAT means anything, since the songs are a waste anyway. Makes me want to look at culling my library like others have done to save on printing. The only reason I don't is just in case I get that ONE person one time..... You never know. But the point is , we were forced to buy stuff we didn't want and didn't need. Just check your library to see how many of the same Elvis and Celine Dion songs were stuffed on several different CDGs by the same manufacturer.... That says it all as far as I'm concerned.

Ditto, Diafel, on agreeing with BFFL. Still angers me - I've been buying discs for over 15 years. Imagine all the fluff there! Sometimes I feel rather like an idiot trying to maintain legality. Hey, I'm poor but I'm legal!

Did someone say FLUFF???

when i was a kid i used to sit next to the tv with my tape recorder recording the music chart show...(top of the pops it was called here in the uk.) then later i would play it back,then go out and buy the singles i liked. this practice was just as illegal as p2p...i reckon most p2p downloading is just modern society's version of what i did as a kid....

iPod holds 20,000 songs or more @.99 cents each..

You do the math.. Kids may not have the cash-ola..

So I'm thinkin', they choose carefully..