IFPI

Digital Music Sales Grow Worldwide, but Big Music Still Frets About Pirates

Peter Kafka in Media on January 23 at 7:42 am PT

Give people a choice, and they might pay for digital music, after all. Also, it helps if they can’t steal it.

Voices

Music for Nothing and the Fans for Free

Hany Nada, Founding Partner, GGV Capital in Voices on October 28, 2011 at 5:10 pm PT

Consumers won’t pay for recorded music in the future — but fans will pay for music experiences.

Big Music's Big Decline, in Chart Form (Again)

Peter Kafka in Media on March 28, 2011 at 2:15 pm PT

Yes, CD sales are still dropping. But the digital sales boom is over too, and that’s the really scary part for the big labels.

Is The Pirate Bay Really Going Legit? Of Course Not.

Peter Kafka in Media on June 30, 2009 at 6:32 am PT

You can hear the head-scratching going on at movie studios and music labels across the world: What just happened to The Pirate Bay? Reports out of Sweden are murky at best. But supposedly, a Scandinavian software outfit is buying the world’s most notorious file-sharing site for about $8 million and will create a service that pays copyright owners when people download their work. But let’s be honest: That’s never going to happen.

It Was Hard Enough to Take You Seriously With the Word "Phonograph" in Your Name…

John Paczkowski in News on February 17, 2009 at 9:19 am PT

You’ve got to love the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry–if not for its hopelessly antediluvian moniker, then for its we’re-on-a-mission-from-God attitude toward its criminal case against torrent index The Pirate Bay. Just two days into the trial–apparently the hottest ticket in Stockholm right now–and already, half the charges against the Swedish site have been dropped because of the prosecution’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the torrent-distributed protocol.

Newsflash: No One Buys Music on the Web–Except for the People Who Spent Billions Last Year

Peter Kafka in Media on January 16, 2009 at 3:46 am PT

Web folk have a fairly justified suspicion of anything they hear from official music industry reps these days. But this stat seems about right to me: 95 percent of all songs downloaded on the Web last year were stolen, says the industry’s international trade group.