RIAA screwed themselves?
I saw this on slashdot today. To save you from reading it, it’s an analysis of copyright registrations, and how the changes in copyright law have affected them over the last century. That part’s not very interesting, and the conclusion is that the huge copyright extensions haven’t caused any rise in the number of copyrights obtained.
The interesting part is an analysis of the music industry. There’s apparently a linear correlation between new albums released and number of albums sold. That’s not particularly surprising, at least to me. Albums will quickly reach saturation in the market, and sales will fall off to basically nothing.
What he discovered is that new releases dropped 8.7% in 2000, and the model he created predicted a decline in sales which was actually greater than the actual decline in sales. So, the RIAA actually came out ahead. This validates my previous opinion that the decline in record sales is directly related to the release of fewer (and worse) records, and has nothing to do with online trading.
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