March 4, 2004
RIAA Releases Year End Stats
According to the RIAA, the losses were higher than reported elsewhere. I had read about CDs dropping 2% with overall sales down 3.6%. The RIAA reports 7.1% and 7.2% respectively. I wonder where the discrepency is coming from – it can’t all be from the fact that digital downloads are not included. If you take the RIAA at its word, the industry’s down over 1.3 billion dollars net (assuming labels take about 54% of gross).
Filed by Derek Slater at 5:00 pm under General news
1 Comment
For years, the online community has fought the idea that file sharing is causing these decreases. There were claims that music just wasn’t as good as when we were young(!), or that people today are more interested in watching movies and playing games, or that it was the economic slowdown. There was a widely reported analysis which said that the size of the catalog was dropping, which would supposedly explain it.
Do you think that eventually, even those in the community who support file sharing will accept that this technology is cutting into CD sales? Has this finally happened, or is the consensus still that those other explanations work better?