Why the entertainment industry is tanking.

Conventional wisdom has it that cd and dvd sales have plummeted because of piracy.

There’s no doubt that piracy lowers sales to at least some degree but companies want to spin it like that’s the whole story. They want to make it seem like piracy is the only thing that’s making sales drop. Why? Because then it looks like it’s not their fault they’re losing profits, it looks like it’s somebody else’s fault. By yelling "PIRACY!" corporations get to blame you, the insolent non-customers, for their sales failure… instead of blaming themselves and their own out of date sales strategies.

There is a large reason for why music and movie sales have dropped that is virtually never talked about. It has to do with the decline of what I call “replacement sales". Check it:

In the music industry, the buying of replacement copies started with 8 track. 8 track let you listen to your favorite albums in the car. So a lot of the people who owned, let’s say, Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” (because everybody in the world owns that album) as a vinyl record rushed out to stores to buy the same album again except on 8 track so that now they could listen to it as they were getting into car crashes. Then cassette tapes came along. They were more durable than 8 track and if you placed a cassette tape into a Walkman you could put on your gigantic 1980’s headphones and listen to music as you were walking down the street (this was revolutionary since it let you ignore homeless people more easily). So all those albums that people bought on vinyl and 8 track, they bought them again except now on cassette. That was free money for the music industry. So the music industry decided to do it again…enter the cd. All the old albums people bought on cassette, now they buy them again on cd. More free money!

So then, historically, record labels had two major revenue streams:

1.) make money by selling brand new music on cd.
- THIS REQUIRES A MAJOR INVESTMENT and it's very easy to lose money instead of gaining it:
To sell new music the record labels need to pay to actually record the album, spend money on music videos, bribe radio stations to play the single, hire publicists to suck up to Dave Letterman enough so that Letterman lets the band play on his tv show, and handle a bunch of other expenses I can't even imagine. Luckily, record labels could also:
2.) make money by re-selling all the old music on cd. - PURE PROFIT BABY:
This was virtually free money since the cash had already been spent years earlier when the albums were first being released. All they had to do was take the vinyl version of "Thriller", print it on cd and BAM! More Thriller moneys. Then they printed onto cd every other album that was ever made.

For more than ten years the labels prospered gloriously, but eventually it had to happen. The day came when there was nothing left to re-release on cd. People had already replaced their entire vinyl and tape collections with cd’s of the same albums and so the replacement sales were over. That was like half the money the music industry got coming in, and that money vanished overnight. So they blamed piracy.

The reason I bring this up now is because journalists have been pissing me off recently. Quite a few articles have been written about the fact that the home video market has been losing sales and shrinking for the past two years. Literally EVERY journalist who I've seen write about it has come to the same conclusion:

BAD ECONOMY
+
DVD SALES DROPPING
=
DVD SALES DROPPING BECAUSE OF BAD ECONOMY!!!

No you deadshits. DVD’s have been popular since, what? 1999? For a decade already people have been replacing their vhs tapes as studios have been gradually releasing all the profitable movies onto the newer dvd format. So why are sales tanking now? Because, like with the cd, the replacement sales have all been made! Everything that was ever going to be repackaged and re-sold on dvd has already been sold. There's nothing left to re-sell! Which is why they came out with Blu-ray. There was no customer demand for Blu-ray, and there still isn’t much of it. It was simply a case of “DAMN! Attention minions: our replacement sales are drying up! Mustapha, come up with a new format so people can buy the same stupid shit all over again! WE NEED THIS!” Ultimately, the companies needed Blu-ray more than the people did.

So anyway, don’t believe everything you hear. The failing sales of home entertainment are not your fault for being pirates, mostly they’re the fault of replacement sales drying up. This was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Replacement sales have dried up on cd and dvd and both industries tried to have a replacement format but so far, no replacement format has caught on. Thus, profits have been tanking. Pretty damn simple. Nobody says it though, it's always piracy, piracy, piracy.