Music Piracy Statistics

I found this chart on music sales stats http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/pdf/2003yearEnd.pdf on the Recording Industry Association of America's website. Because it's the RIAA and the RIAA is trying to sue like every single person that has ever downloaded a song off of the internet, these statistics are used by the RIAA to try and prove that music piracy is a huge problem.

For a normal person, looking at this chart and seeing the numbers first steadily increase towards the year 2000 (which so far in the recent past looks like the most profitable year for the music industry) and then also steadily decline beginning in the year 2001 is enough to prove that online file sharing is taking away from the record industry sales. However, several other factors could contribute to this decline. 9/11 obviously had an impact on our economy and occured in the year when record sales began to decline. Perhaps the new artists emerging on the scene weren't as good in the past and people don't want to buy their music. Or maybe people think it's just absolutely ridiculous to shell out $20 for a CD. Along with peer-to-peer file sharing also came the technology to pay-per-download. Services such as iTunes offer consumers the ability to pay something like 99 cents per song to download, LEGALLY, right to their computers and iPods.

On a more personal level the RIAA is really starting to tick me off because instead of trying to use these facts and figures to prove a point they continually seem to complain about the fact that they are loosing money, and despite the previous examples I've used to account for their losses, peer-to-peer filing sharing and CD burning IS a major problem, but I just think they should do something about it. Offer people something that will make them want to shell out that money for a CD. Or reduce the prices of the music, which I think would greatly help record sales.