IFPI Greece - Repercussions of Recording Piracy

Repercussions of Recording Piracy

Piracy is not a new phenomenon in the Greek music market. In the early 1980s, cassette reproduction in-home and in-store accounted for eight out of every ten in the market, however by the early 1990s that number dwindled to two out of every ten as a result of public awareness campaigns and the prosecution of key producers.

More recently Agence France-Presse noted that "CD and DVD piracy is extremely widespread in Greece, with many Greeks preferring to purchase discs from peddlers touring cafes and restaurants rather than from licensed shops, which they see as overpriced." In its July 2006 piracy report, the IFPI found that Greece, along with Italy and Spain, had alarmingly high piracy rates compared to other EU member states. Pirated product was identified to account for 50% of all music sales in Greece and the IFPI blamed "an overlenient judicial system and ineffectual policing was hampering the fight against piracy." Furthermore, the IFPI calculates a loss of profit of about 150 million euros per year as of 2006. In 2008, Kathimerini newspaper noted that sales of bootlegs is thought to have cost Greece almost €1 billion in lost taxes over a nine-year period.

Another repercussion of the rampant piracy throughout Greece is the marked deterioration in the sales certification thresholds of IFPI Greece. At a conference held in Athens in 2005, Chairman and CEO of IFPI John Kennedy stated:

"Along with Spain, Greece is our biggest piracy problem country in Western Europe. It joins countries like Estonia, Czech Republic and Slovakia, all with piracy levels above 45%. In fact with a piracy rate of around 50%, Greece is one of the very few Western European countries where illegal music copies almost outnumber legal sales."

The sharpest decline came with the current sales levels established in September 2008 where the gold and platinum levels for Greek repertoire were reduced by 60%, from 30,000 to 12,000 units for platinum status, and from 15,000 to 6,000 units for gold status. As a result, Greece ranks amongst the lowest of EU states with regards to legal music recording sales.

More recently, following the Greek debt crisis, a trend has been established for even prominent artists to release their albums as covermounts with national Greek newspapers, usually Real News. This facilitates a guaranteed a return for the record companies and artists in the face of otherwise low legal sales. Albums distributed in this way are not eligible for certification by IFPI Greece, so most go on to release them separately to boost sales and possibly to be certified if they gain enough sales.