effects of treating your customers like criminals

[waider]

Notably, however, the decline in CD sales accelerated during the period of reduced peer-to-peer file trading. On June 15, the day the RIAA launched a subpoena campaign against file traders, CD sales were down 6.1 percent year to date. In the seven weeks since launching the subpoena campaign, the decline in CD sales has accelerated 54 percent.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I have absolutely no supporting evidence for this, but I wonder: is that decline in CD sales a decline overall, or only among the Big 5 labels that are members of the RIAA? Because there's been a considerable rise in small and independent record labels over the last several years, particularly as the larger companies have consolidated and, in so doing, shed subsidiaries and artists like it's going out of style. I can't remember the last time I bought a major-label release. (That's partly because I get a lot of the ones I'm interested in for free as promotional material, but by "a lot" I'm talking about maybe five in a year.)

I may be entirely wrong about this, and it may not be a contributing factor at all, but it seems as reasonable to consider as the fact that, during a down economy, people just buy less stuff. I'm surprised that the sales decline isn't greater, in fact, when I look at the anecdotal evidence supplied by unemployed or underemployed friends who literally can't afford the $10-$20 a CD costs.

[waider.livejournal.com]

It seems like a reasonable assumption, to be honest. I mean, do indy labels in general even take part in the sort of marketing surveys that are quoted by the RIAA and so forth?

I will note that I've been surprised on occasion by the RIAA radar pointing the finger at bands or albums that I'd have thought were independant.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Useful site! Thanks.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to tweak the bookmarklet to put the data some place unobtrusive, like the sidebar or another tab or something. But alas, I'm scuppered either by security concerns (so-called cross-site scripting) or by the pigheaded refusal of Mozilla developers to implement a scriptable "open new tabs" feature on various idealistic grounds such as "the designer should't care/be able to dictate whether you open a new tab or not".