Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Finnish Pirate Party Study

The Finnish Pirate Party has done a small study into the sale of recorded music using the IFPI's figures. Thanks to Kaj Sotala of the Piraattipuolue, I present the English Language version.

As the source, IFPI Finland's official estimates of the overall Finnish music sales (source) have been used directly for the years 1980-2006. Those statistics do not list digital sales, so the figure including digital sales has been obtained from IFPI's separate report, listing 2006 digital sales for IFPI member companies ( http://www.ifpi.fi/tilastot/vuosimyynti/2006/DSJan-Dec2006.pdf ). "Digital sales" includes downloads and streaming, but not mobile sales.

IFPI Finland does not provide statistics for overall Finnish sales in 2007 and 2008, and as of 2007, their statistics for member company sales are given in terms of boxes sold, not units sold. As a result, the unit sales for 2007 and 2008 have been estimated by taking the 2006 box sales for member companies and calculating the percentage change in sales for 2007 and 2008. The 2006 unit sales have then been multiplied with this percentage to obtain a unit sales estimate. Digital sales have been added after that, as those are reported separately and apparently still given in units sold. (The origin of these figures is the Finnish IFPI)

File-sharing, which for music began in earnest with Napster in 1999, doesn't seem to have caused any noticable decline in sales. It is, however, true that the total reported profit from the sales has gone down.

-- Kaj Sotala, Piraattipuolue (Pirate Party of Finland)

Here are the graphs:

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