Finally, my article for The Guardian sees the light of day! W00t!! Thanks to everyone who helped me out with it, particularly Jaime, whom I owe a really big drink next time I am in London.
Right, better go out and buy up all the copies from the local newsagent then!
UPDATE: My feature is now #2 on Technorati's Current Events page, and has 20 links from 20 sources in the conversation cosmos. (Stats correct at time of going to press. Rankings may go up as well as down, depending on the popularity of the Krispy Kreme story.)
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YAY!
Go Suw! Go Suw! Good article, me dear. Congratulations.
Thanks!! 😀
Brava Suw. The industry measures sales, but has no reliable metric of awareness. Not that they really care, as long as their A list sells big. But it does seem odd that expanding the way we find out about music comes to them as a threat, instead of realizing that right now, the main chokehold on sales comes from the bottleneck of broadcast playlists, which assume no one can possibly be interested in more than 40 pieces of music in any given period.
And no sooner than you get worldwide fame than Blogware pulls a moody and falls over…
I think you should have pushed Strumpf a little harder:
“File sharing is done primarily by teenagers and college kids because they have a lot of time on their hands but they don't have a lot of money.” (i.e. “If we got rid of file sharing tomorrow, it doesn't necessarily mean these kids would be buying any more music.”)
Did you ask him what he thought would happen if downloading music became much easier? Why are some people (i.e. the not-students) not downloading music right now? It could be because they are so rich that the price of CDs is not burdensome (what Strumpf assumes), but it could also be because they don't have the time or money to figure out how to use file sharing systems. (b) would not be the case if file sharing systems because easy to use. (e.g. P2P iTunes integration.)
“A possible explanation [for the decline in CD sales] is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs.” Another possible explanation is that people weren't finding it necessary to buy CDs, because they were getting music free…
–Michael http://beebo.org
Just noticed something else:
If surveys “concluded .. that people who download more buy less,” and Strumpf agrees that there's a correlation between the two (“the fact that there's a correlation…) then what's “incorrect” about this conclusion? (As opposed to being wrong in concluding that people buy less *because* they download more. Correlation does not imply causation, but “correlation” is all you accuse these surveys of.)
–M.
http://beebo.org
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