It was thus said that the Great Dan Wright once stated:
>
> > WRONG! If it has value to you, then pay for it.
>
> The problem is that the "theft" argument assumes that EVERY copy = 1 lost
> sale. This argument is total bullshit. Most people who copy
> music/movies/whatever wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't copy it, so no
> (or at best, very few -- FAR fewer then the number of copies that are made)
> actual SALES are lost. (If you don't believe me, there has been a lot of
> statistical research done that shows this; about the only contradiction comes
> from the RIAA's highly dubious closed-books "research". Sorry I don't have
> any sources at hand, but it's easy to find them on the WWW.)
From my "The Lie that copying hurts sales" file:
http://www.counterpunch.org/flint0419.html
("Sell-through" refers to the percentage of copies shipped which are
actually sold, as opposed to being returned to the publisher.)
As of today, according to Baen Books-a year and a half after being
available for free online to anyone who wants it, no restrictions
and no questions asked-Mother of Demons has sold about 18,500 copies
and now has a sell-through of 65%.
I would like someone to explain to me how almost doubling the sales
and improving the sell-through by 11% has caused me, as an author,
any harm?
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle
Let's take it from my personal experience. My site
(www.janisian.com) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad
for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When Napster was
running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people
who'd downloaded _Society's Child_ or _At Seventeen_ for free, then
decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these
are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15
bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested
in 180 extra sales a year. But ... that translates into
$2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn't include
the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.
Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in
stores and libraries. As she said herself: "For the past ten years,
my three 'Arrows' books, which were published by DAW about 15 years
ago, have been generating a nice, steady royalty check per
pay-period each. A reasonable amount, for fifteen-year-old books.
However ... I just got the first half of my DAW royalties ... And
suddenly, out of nowhere, each Arrows book has paid me three times
the normal amount! ... And the _only_ change during that pay-period
was that I had Eric put the first of my books on the Free Library.
There's an increase in all of the books on that statement, actually,
and what it looks like is what I'd expect to happen if a steady line
of people who'd never read my stuff encountered it on the Free
Library-a certain percentage of them liked it, and started to work
through my backlist, beginning with the earliest books published.
The really interesting thing is, of course, that these aren't Baen
books, they're DAW-another publisher-so it's 'name loyalty' rather
than "brand loyalty." I'll tell you what, I'm sold. Free works."
I've found that to be true myself; every time we make a few songs
available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot.
And I don't know about you, but as an artist with an in-print record
catalogue that dates back to 1965, I'd be thrilled to see sales on
my old catalogue rise.
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html
Change in merchandise sales after article posting (previous sales
averaged over one year): Up 25%
Change in merchandise sales after beginning free downloads: Up 300%
Emails received: 1268 as of 07-30-02
Number of emails disagreeing with my position: 9
Number of people who reconsidered their disagreement after further
discussion: 5
-spc (Now isn't *that* interesting ... )
Received on Fri Jan 17 2003 - 14:03:00 GMT