Tuesday, April 06, 2004

File-Sharing Getting Bad Rap?

From RollingStone.com: "A controversial new study by economists at Harvard and the University of North Carolina has found that file-sharing is not the cause of declining CD sales. Researchers spent a year and a half analyzing downloads and sales figures for 680 albums -- and what they found contradicts the record industry's claim that online piracy has led to a fifteen percent decline in sales since 2000."

Interesting--I've never felt file sharing had anything at all to do with reduced CD sales, because my take's always been that in the natural order of things a middle-aged guy with a lot of disposable income is going to buy more CDs and be more profitable to record labels than a 20-year-old with essentially no disposable income.

In spite of this, the major labels seem to have a problem selling to me: I don't bother with their traditional promotional tools (like commercial radio and MTV), and they don't seem to know how to reach me. This isn't my fault.

Ford didn't have any trouble communicating to me that they sold a vehicle I might be interested in; why should Warner Bros. or Interscope be any different?

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