This is a good article from the UK’s Guardian about a study of illegal music downloads versus music sales. (Of course I found it because of Boing Boing. Those guys have everything.)
Previously I wrote about another study, this one done by professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago that showed the same thing. It is interesting to note that two independent studies obtained the same results. And of course in both instances they were dismissed by the RIAA as inaccurate.
This latest study brings up the point that between 1999 and 2003, the price of DVD players has dropped from nearly $1000 to “next to nothing” and that DVD discs have dropped 25% in price. And during the same time the price of CDs has risen by 10%. One of their explanations for a decrease in sales is that they’ve moved elsewhere from CDs to DVDs.
There is also this significant quote from the article:
Some even question whether the fall in sales the RIAA quotes is real, or a product of a creative redefinition of the word “sale”. Even if it is real, there is one final fly in the ointment that can’t easily be explained away: during the past nine months, CD sales in America have increased by 7%, despite continued growth in file sharing.
As Strumpf says: “If file sharing is killing record sales, why are records starting to sell better?”
As I said before, it doesn’t seem that downloading MP3s from Kazaa and other illegal services can truly explain the claims made by the RIAA.