Jari Ketola
4 Aug 2003 9:32
BBC News Online has released an article investigating the reasons behind declining CD sales world-wide. Not too surprisingly they reach the same conclusion most of us have reached years ago -- the reasons are not in peer-to-peer or any other online piracy.
The top three reasons are CD piracy, declining number of releases, and new consumer markets. While RIAA claims that the CD sales are declining due to P2P swapping, they forget to mention that while CD sales dropped by 7% in 2002, the pirated CD sales rose 14%.
In 1999 38,900 individual titles were released in the US. The number of releases fell by 30% by 2001 when only 27,000 titles were released. With fewer titles on the market the number of units sold is bound to decrease as well. The number of titles released dropped mostly due to the fact that there are fewer old vinyl records being re-released on CD -- most of them have already been released and purchased by consumers looking to replace their vinyls with compact discs.
The last, but definitely not the least of reasons are the new entertainment markets. Consumers are investing a bigger portion of their "entertainment budget" to DVDs, mobile phones and other forms of entertainment.
"There is no doubt that some piracy is going on via peer-to-peer systems but maybe not to the extent the RIAA fears. Perhaps it is about time they sang a different song," BBC reporter Mark Ward closes.
Source:
BBC News