Music Downloads Aren’t Killing Music Sales?
Ah, the New York Times (registration required) does it again. While trying to find a nuance in the RIAA’s figures, they get suckered into the same old trick…What is interesting is that this is one of the few articles that challenges the convential wisdom that file-sharing is killing music sales. “In a working paper published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they concluded that students each spent $126 on the best-selling CD’s without downloading and $101 with downloading. While conceding that their research did not cover a representative sample, they concluded that every 10 downloads of music resulted in 1 to 2 lost sales.” This is far from what the RIAA wants us to believe, but the journalists missed the boat one on important point.
By confusing “sales” and “shipments” they take the bait the RIAA has been dishing out for years, suggesting that downloading music leads to lower sales. But the figures the RIAA always gives are shipments, not sales. And the graphic in this article looks like Jayson Blair copy-edited it – it says “CD sales have shown signs of a rebound”, but the graphic shows CD shipments.
Others have pointed out the ludicrous idea of measuring CD sales by looking at CD shipments, since many retailers have lowered initial sell-in of new CDs in order to keep inventory down. Counting CD shipments is like counting book sales through the number of copies in print – this does not take into account returns, which are inevitable, and can represent very high numbers.
The article does deserve credit for trying to show that 1 download does not equal 1 lost sale, but can’t the NYT get their act together and see through the RIAA’s propaganda?
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