Pig-headedness, not Piracy, Killed Recorded Music

An extremely feeble article in the Guardian parrots the recording industry's line that piracy is killing music:

Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn (£930m) last year as digital piracy continued to take its toll on the industry, with the UK losing its mantle as the third-largest music market after "physical" sales of CDs collapsed by almost a fifth.

Sorry, I think I missed the proof that this fall was *caused* by piracy: any evidence? No, I thought not. Whereas there is growing research that unauthorised sharing actually increases sales (see the list of examples and links in this post.)

Perhaps the problem is rather that the sales being driven by this unauthorised sharing just aren't being generated fast enough to compensate for the overall decline in the recorded music industry. After all, there's nothing that says it must always grow. Maybe people are just fed up with its antics now that there are plenty of other kinds of music available (under cc licences, for example.)

In fact, there's a rather telling graph that the IFPI has kindly provided. It shows, of course, the decline in total sales of recorded music, breaking it down by "physical", "digital" and "recorded rights". The last of these is pretty much constant, while digital is growing at a modest pace.

But as is so often the case, this graph tells us something quite different from those "obvious" figures - and something rather interesting: that digital sales didn't really exist before 2004.

Thank about it: it took five years after Napster was created before the recording industry finally began to acknowledge the existence of a revolution whose inevitability was obvious to anyone who had spent a few hours online. Is it any wonder that people got fed up with the exorbitant pricing and inconvenient packaging of CDs, and despaired of ever being treated fairly with reasonably-price downloads?

In effect, it was the industry's pig-headed refusal for half a decade to sell people what they wanted that has driven users away. If some - even many - of them turned to unauthorised downloads, is it really any wonder? So before we blame the pirates, how about a word or two for the owners of those heads?

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