Follow the money

[unixronin]

Via davefreer and Times Labs, "the graph the record industry doesn't want you to see".

(I've reproduced it here as a GIF because ... well, what in Cthulhu's fever dreams possessed the Times to think it was necessary to use Flash to display a STATIC GRAPH?  The only thing accomplished by using Flash was to make the damned graph take two minutes to load.)

There's actually two graphs.  I've left the second alone because it loaded in only a few seconds for me.  (It still didn't need Flash to display it, though.  The Times' webmaster needs his fingers smacked with a steel ruler.  I live in hopes that HTML5's embedded video/sound features will kill Flash for all non-interactive content.)

The point of the graphs is pretty clear:  The music business as a whole is doing just fine.  The artists are making more money.  The venues are making more money.  The promoters are making more money.  The only part of the industry making less money is the record companies — and there's little, if any, evidence that file sharing is responsible. (As previously reported by the Times, music listeners in the UK who admit to sharing and downloading music via the Internet spend 75% more per year, on average, than listeners who say they don't share or download.)

Comments

[ithildae]

Just thumbnailing it, it looks like market revenue is static across the timeframe of the graph. Interesting...

[unixronin]

Isn't it interesting how the record companies scream about how they have to halt piracy to protect their artists, when their artists are making MORE, not less, money? Recording artists are realizing one by one that they don't need record companies, and the record companies are scared as hell by it, because — I suspect — in secret, THEY know it as well.

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

'webmaster needs his fingers smacked with a steel ruler' - from your lips to God's ears ;)
Almost every webpage I see these days has 5 cookies, 10 scripts (from different domains) and 3 flash items - to display what could be done by 500 bytes of text and html. Even government sites which don't need advertising revenue do it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think a major part of the problem is that there are far too many point-and-drool web designers out there who think — or whose managers think — that shinier is automatically better. To them, Flash is a really big hammer, and everything looks like a nail.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

That, and it's harder (but as you proved, not impossible) to copy a Flash file than it is to copy a .gif or .jpg file.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I suspect it is because too many web designers use a layout tool, rather than be bothered with actual code. When the tool makes it easier to embed flash than an image (or no different) flash is what goes in. Someone should really remind them that there are some people on the web that use dialup. (Or some other low to medium speed access mechanism.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"But those people probably don't have much money, so who cares?"

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

I really wish that graph had much larger color chips -- I'm having a hard time telling the difference between the two light blues.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, so did I. They should have picked more-dissimilar colors.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

It's not a flat image -- each of the dots has a popup on it that specifies its exact amount.

Though, of course, that could still have been accomplished (I think) with an image map.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Huh. They're sufficiently non-obvious that I never found them.