@?,*???&? wrote:
The guy a few pages back that said he buys only 'independent' reggae music or whatever fails to see he is still buying records that are distributed and are 'legitimate' releases as they are available at retail. He is not buying unmastered and burned CDs. No one is, but people are downloading that stuff and trading it. It's just common. Legitimate releases, while there are more now than there ever have been, are still uncommon by comparison.
No. Setting aside for a moment the argument of what is or is not "legitimate," my point was that in general these numbers are generated by big industry (Nielsen, the RIAA, chain stores), and do not take into account money spent at smaller retail operations on non-RIAA label material. The point was that I spend a pretty serious amount of money on music in a year and almost none of it is on product released on labels affiliated with the RIAA and almost none of it is at stores which report their sales to Nielsen.
Yes, I am buying records that are distributed and available at retail. But most of them are not counted in the sales figures that the industry is waving around. The RIAA doesn't give a damn about sales on labels that aren't paying to be a part of their group. And Nielsen isn't getting sales figures from little hole-in-the wall reggae shops that still write their receipts out by hand.
Furthermore, I then mentioned the segment of the population that the RIAA labels have been targeting the last decade or two and the other things vying for their disposable income. Has someone does a serious study into where Americans spend their disposable income, how much this income is, and how that affects spending on recorded music? The distinction on "recorded music" is deliberate. Don't forget that the average price of a concert ticket has gone up five or six times in 20 years while the price of a compact disc has less than doubled in the same time period. Until this study is done (or if it has been done, let's see some reference to it), these reports by the RIAA about how music sales are "down" is
just a trade group griping about how it's not getting a fair deal. This is what trade groups do.
It's a good discussion starter, but for you to treat the story as gospel and berate others for holding different opinions on an unproven hypothesis is ridiculous. [/b]