I’m surprised that the rest of the world hasn’t jumped on this already, so here goes…
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15059
So why wasn’t the UK included in this Europe slapping of wri[s]ts ?
The BPI has said that UK Music sales *increased* last year.
CD albums sales rise 5.6% in 2003, says BPI
New British artists and falling retail prices helped drive shipments of CD albums up by 5.6% last year, helping the UK buck the worldwide decline in recorded music sales, according to figures due to be published by the BPI later this month.
www.bpi.co.uk
Does that mean that:
a) there are no illegal music file-sharers in the UK.
b) what file-sharing is happening in the UK is not actually harming sales?
c) or, God forbid, people actually bought more CDs since the average price of an album dropped?
Just think about that for a second. World wide, the Music cartel^H^H^H^H^H^H industry sales are dropping, yet when they lower the prices in a single country sales pick up. Does that not suggest that, with the vastly increased range of entertainment in the past 15-20 years, people no longer see music as good "Value for Money" and so divert their disposable income elsewhere?
Personally, I don’t buy (pardon the pun) the line on the falling CD singles either. My 3 kids like "pop" music and I would never go out and buy a single, they’ll wait until an album comes out. As the above statistics indicate, my only real objection to buying the albums is that they are still too expensive (so I buy less), yet I still buy occasionally.
The 80’s are long gone (thankfully) when as teenagers we would be saving our UKP 1.50 for the latest vinyl single since that was just about your only entertainment
vehicle.
Times have changed and records are a diminishing empire – not through file sharing – but by pricing themselves out of the market. They are no longer competitive (to other media/entertainment) and the sooner they wake up to reality than deluding themselves over the trojan file sharer the sooner they can turn their industry around and make it strong again.