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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Interference Patterns

Sometimes two orchestrated press stories can combine to reveal interesting facts about what's mentioned in neither. Two such news stories just caught my eye. The first talks about how the fall in music sales is speeding up:

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) says sales fell by 10.9% in the first half of 2003, but by just 7.1% in 2002. The body blames the fall on commercial piracy and unauthorised internet music sharing.

Seems IFPI and RIAA haven't been co-ordinating their PR and the truth has been slipping out between their releases, because the second talks about how successfully the RIAA's campaign of mindless law-suits has been:

Kazaa usage has fallen 40 percent since the spring, when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing students who ran on-campus file-swapping networks. Kazaa, the most popular file-swapping service, had 17.4 million U.S. unique visitors in March, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, a consulting company that monitors Web traffic. In August, Kazaa users had dropped to 10.4 million, and the numbers are still falling

Let's just summarise for those missing the point: The recording industry blames file-sharing for its forthcoming demise and weeps over the accelerating loss of customers during a period when the use of file sharing is successfully being crushed by their soulless prosecution of 12-year-olds, grandparents and musicians for wanting more music.

So the question arises: why, if it's all because of file-sharing, did the fall in sales accelerate at a time when file-sharing was reduced? Possible answers that spring to mind include customers not getting to preview products so not buying them, customers deciding that an industry which sues its fans for liking their product needs to be avoided, or some other systemic fault in the music industry that's nothing to do with what other people are doing on the internet and everything to do with what the recording industry isn't doing on the internet.

posted at 10:43 PM (UK) | |