The Real Culprit For The Decline In Music Sales? Video Games

from the it-ain't-piracy dept

Last week, I did yet another presentation at a music industry conference (hoping to get video of it), where one of the points I raised was that competition from things like video games has been one of the major competitive market elements that the recording industry never seems willing to recognize, when it talks about its declining sales -- instead, always insisting that "piracy" is to blame. Yet, Charles Arthur looked at some of the numbers in the UK and recognized that if one assumes that discretionary spending on these sorts of things remains about equal, it certainly looks like the decrease in music purchases has simply been replaced by video game purchases. In other words (once again) this is a business model issue. The recording industry hasn't give people good reasons to buy, while the video game industry has.

Related to this, by the way, is that this shows what a lie it is for the recording industry to insist that hundreds of thousands of jobs are "lost" and millions in tax revenue goes missing because of its losses. If, for some reason, people continued to spend as much on music, then it's likely that the video game industry would be smaller, and the job "losses" would be there. In other words, those job "losses" in the music industry almost certainly turned into job gains in other sectors (which somehow never make it into those reports). And the "tax revenues" likely remain about the same, as the greater taxes paid by the video game industry make up for the smaller tax bill in the recording industry.

Now, this is a rather simplistic study of things, and a much more detailed study could be done to support the shift in consumer preference. But the simple claim that all of these losses are due to "piracy," rather than other competitive forces, has increasingly come under serious doubt.

Filed Under: competition, declining sales, music, video games