Record sales up, P2P sales up — RIAA's story doesn't add up

Cory Doctorow 12:50 pm Thu Mar 24, 2005

According to the RIAA, CD sales are increasing. Now, the RIAA also says that P2P destroys music sales, so it follows that if they're selling more CDs there must be less P2P, right? Uh, no — file-sharing is up, too (so CD sales should be falling right?).

So is it possible that CD sales and P2P are decoupled (as all the quantitative, independent research indicates), and that the downturn in CD sales is better laid at the feed of bad business, a bad economy, fewer albums and more things competing for entertainment dollars (cough games cough Internet cough).

The number of CDs and other music products shipped from record labels to retail merchants rose 2 percent last year, to 814 million units, the first annual increase in five years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

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