Originally Posted by Amputate Your Head

Piracy is not the cause of the music industry's downfall. It's their own inability to change and adapt to consumer trends & demands as well as a complete failure to capitalize on the emerging technology facts of life and continuing to push inferior product.

The music industry enjoyed a boom in the 90s when consumers upgraded en masse from cassettes to CDs, but then dropped the ball when Napster gave them a clear signal that the CD was on its way out. Instead of wallowing in denial, suing their customers, and clinging desperately to a dead model, they should have been moving towards digital deals like currently exists with the iTunes store.

They love to blame piracy, but conveniently leave out the fact that, with online sales like iTunes, customers are now able to purchase the songs they want at per-song prices instead of paying for a full CD and getting 13 tracks of pure shit and one good song in return. This no doubt has much more to do with loss of revenue than piracy.

50,000 illegal downloads does NOT = 50,000 lost sales. The music industry thinks it does.

If they'd put a little more energy into making a better product, they'd probably see better returns.

But it's probably too late in my opinion. The bleeding may not be able to be stopped. Shutting down Napster was probably one of their greatest mistakes. Users found much more inventive ways of doing what the industry didn't want.... listening to the music they wanted without being raped.

Digital piracy is now literally unstoppable, but it is the music industry's own hard line thinking that created it.