There is a very interesting article in the Guardian regarding illegal downloads and the music industries continued calling fowl of file sharing. Charles Arthur

wrote in June 2009:

The mystery of where all the money has gone isn't just puzzling economists and estate agents. It's also one that has had the music industry on edge, time after time. Thus, we saw the release last week of some ­"research" that said 7 million ­people "use" illegal downloads in the UK, "costing the economy billions of pounds and thousands of jobs" . I'm ­unhappy to say that it was repeated in this paper. Had I seen it sooner, I would have queried the assertion about the cost to the economy. The number of people doing downloads sounds near enough right, however..... more at the above linkHe also wrote an aricle on the figures involved, titled

Are downloads really killing the music industry? Or is it something else?

which can be seen here

it shows that whilst music sales as a portion of the total market may have decreased somewhat, this has only happened in the last 2 years and this is probably attributable to online distribution such as iTunes etc. Bans are putting out more DVD's and you can see that this portion of the market place is growing. It is clear that the music industry have been crying wolf for a long time and continue to stubbornly evolve their business model - they have been leaving this up to companies like Sony and Apple for some years now - come on guys - WAKE UP!!!

Tags: Music, Sales, Mp3, file sharing