Asymmetrical Information

Trying to comment on Free Exchange, but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment, and I didn't really want to register, anyway.

I wonder how these statistics that CD sales are down are counted? I know it's probably not valid to generalize from personal experience, but... If you looked at my CD purchases, I am definitely buying more CDs now than I did 15 years ago. Back then, pretty much all of my collection was major label stuff purchased at record stores.

Today, most of my purchases are very small releases from tiny independent labels, many of them foreign, which I usually buy directly from the artist or from small one-person web stores. My guess is the record industry is not counting how many copies of the small Irish release of the Coleman Archive recordings are imported via www.celticgrooves.com.

Obviously this may be an extreme example, but I certainly know more people who buy obscure music than I know who illegally download music in quantities large enough to make a noticeable difference to the overall sales figures -- and those people wouldn't have anywhere near enough money to buy all they have stolen.

I wonder if the world moving towards the harder-to-track end of the long tail is a significant part of the real story here.

Megan-

Thanks for bring this thread to my attention. I have been perpetually stumped by the demise of this industry. I appreciate any and all coherent conversations on the matter.

Great stuff, as always!

Trouble with trackbacks again - I linked Megan's Free Exchange posts in a roundup of music economics.

Thanks much.

I think the collapse of music sales was an obvious outcome. Why? Because the product can be had cheap or free by those people (the young, the music lover) who might normally purchase the product the most.

Why would I want to buy (which in my case entails hopping a bus to the nearest store, which may or may not have what I want) when I can use emule or (lately) Limewire, and with the touch of a few keys have the song downloaded? And I am on dial up, where it takes about 5 to 10 minutes a song!

I've got friends who can snatch entire albums, 30 at a time, using a hi speed connection in the time it takes them to go make a sandwich.

So I am sitting wanting to hear, maybe, some Leonard Cohen, or some classic Christian rock (ala Phil Keaggy or Larry Norman). I type into Limewire "Talk about Suffering" to hear Keaggy's Byrds-like rendering of that hymn. I grab today's WSJ, and head off to the bathroom. Five minutes and 3 articles later, I have the song on my system.

Or, I can leave my computer on at night, an entire album in queue, knowing that in the morning it will be good to go.

So why would I pay? Or pay for a one off, like some song I happen to appreciate (like Ashley Simpson's "L.O.V.E.), when I know good in well the entire album might annoy me?

Aside from the especially disturbing feeling of illegally downloading Christian music (akin to patronizing a Christian prostitute), where is the economic rationale to do otherwise? There is NONE. There is an ethical rationale that I might be flouting, and will likely burn in hell for when Jesus returns and tells all the illegal file sharers to depart from him.

And it's a crock when the downloaders say, "Prices are too high" or "This exposes me to music I would not have normally heard or purchased, thus increasing my overall music appetite". Bottom line- it's easier to get new music at home, and when it is also cheaper, and faster, then what is the argument for purchasing?

I do tend to purchase when there are artists I particularly enjoy (like Mark Knopfler or Alison Krauss) and want to support their efforts and have a physical product (cd) to put on the shelf. But even then, those never get played due to the cd format.

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