If you are listening to the Radio 1 any time recently, example is the rapper, who has "never been afraid of the highest heights", which is useful enough, when you've had a number one hit, has sold 1.7 m copies in the year. Contrary, perhaps with received thinking about the status of the music market, this is not a freak hit either; the digital singles market is flourishing – single sale is 10% so far in 2011 (on top of a 10% improvement in the year before), according to postal counters by company official chart.
So much for the impact of piracy – and singles is a cleaner business with lower costs than albums, which must be promoted and marketed heavily. For singles, artist and their record company can rely on radio airplay to do the job for free.
The problem with music company well apart from the Avenue event tickets and lousy summer weather, is in a sense, physically. Endless falling CD sales, worth far more than a couple of all-round 79 p songs mean by value recorded music industry were down by 8.6% last year and a similar amount this year, according to them, in the message. It could be argued that the core problem is not piracy, which would secure the dumped goods single sale on iTunes, but separation, where digital permit consumers to buy just the songs they want. For those who like to analogies, newspapers suffer from the same problem: Why pay £ 1 for your watch when you can read the three best articles and possibly this one also for free.
Anyway, all this is a good thing when you consider Vince Cable low-key, not too busy response to Hargreaves report on intellectual property, copyright is called gallant these days, last week. If ministers had in fact a strategy for combating piracy, they did a good job with cloaking, which the Government committed itself to a fearless further revision of plans to introduce a banned list of pirate Web sites (without actually grasp the nettle of principle –, ditching the scheme because it is tantamount to censorship).
You may remember also still more ancient Digital Economy Act, a piece of legislation rushed through by the last Labour Government, which contained provisions for cutting off internet connections of serial pirates. Lib Dems came out against the Act, but it was in the days when they had an independent party, although since the election have their plan to derail the idea may have been more subtle.
Alleged pirates was to receive warning letters for some time this year before would used more ruthless measures in the form of traffic bandwidth limitation, and finally large cut-off. Apart from the first wave of warning letters do not go until next year; This compares poorly with France, which have implemented similar legislation and already sent off half a million threats, or rather warnings to its citizens.
We have instead a nowhere-in-special policy which, of course, not necessary. It would have been much more coherent to the cable come clean and say to overestimate the piracy problem – and that all these attempts on the site-blocking and internet disconnection should be abandoned. Except, of course, it would not be a popular view with record industry – even if this is a company that has combined the spectacular mismanagement (believe EMI'S dispiriting overleveraged buyout by Guy hands) with moments of musical brilliance.
And if you think it is not enough, Hollywood would intensify lobbying to fight piracy, in the hope of how up now equip DVD sales (down 5.7% in the first half of this year). Politicians, after all, seem to go bovlamme to the movies, enjoying all kinds of tax breaks and other benefits denied to music, perhaps because the latter looks politically risky.
A proper industrial strategy for the creative industries, however, would offer tax break-like support on the basis of media-neutral, rather than in favour of the film over music and computer games. Be in doubt, however, the financial problems of business as music an effect on creativity. Fewer artists comes through, only 17 British acts crossed the 100,000 sales barrier for the first time in 2010, (think Tinie Tempah and – really – Diana Vickers) compared with somewhere between 24 and 29 in years 2006-2009. Fewer sales mean fewer sums available for the A and R, in which the expenditure is reduced from £ 250 m for around £ 200 m a year, according to the BPI, whose task it is to know.
What is on offer is unfortunately a semi-finished, half-hearted, slow-motion anti-piracy strategy, which in practice are unlikely to meaningfully increase music or creative industries. But we can comfort ourselves with that cable wants to make it legal to copy CDs on to your iPod, because we all felt we could not do it before. Oh well.
