Urban myth: illegal downloading stealing legit album sales

Remember when people thought the Earth was flat, or that cannabis was completely harmless, that Terry Wogan did not wear a hair piece, and that Coca Cola invented Santa.

If people hear something often enough, they start to believe it. Album and single sales started to decline around the time the Internet started to grow, ergo illegal downloading took revenue from the music industry. Absolute and utter poppycock, complete bobbins, fabricated nonsense spun by lazy music executives who can't come up with new ways to make money in a rapidly changing world.

Jessie J, she of absolutely amazing talent, was heard saying on Radio 1 yesterday "fans don't realise that if they download my music illegally I won't be able to make a second album". Hmmm, let me get this straight. Firstly, and I've said this before, does she really think that every illegal download would have been a single/album sale? She's damn good, and possibly the best new talent to come out of the UK, but really?! Second, surely her "fans" are actually very likely to buy her music in a legit way, be that download or physical, as well as going to her concerts and subscribing to whatever else her mgmt company has the commercial sense to put out there.

What is definitely progress, is the fact that music you hear on the radio will now be available to download immediately. At last! It's only taken the labels a million years to realise that this is by far one of the biggest frustrations about trying to buy music to listen to as soon as you first hear it. Maybe they are finally starting to think about how people consume music, rather than thinking about the transaction - legit or not - these are two completely different things and probably increasingly unrelated.

TDK yesterday, P2P today

The first album I ever bought, on cassette, was by Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine - Let it Loose. Priceless. And there were a handful of cassette singles which I also purchased to boot. However, I confess that like most of my school-friends at the time, most of the music we listened to was on home-copied cassettes, which were shared and passed around. Was this not the forerunner to Peer 2 Peer?? The technology may have changed, but the result is the same. Minimal sales, maximum availability. OK, the magnitude of the problem may be different, but is that really down to the digital revolution??

Illegal download figures are quoted as though they are some proxy for lost revenue. Really? Sure, there is some relation between the proliferation of P2P, dodgy Russian download sites and falling single and album sales, but do we really think they are like for like substitutes. Case in point, the Pendragon example of selling 50 legit copies of their music DVD in their first week of release, whilst 3,000 were downloaded illegally in the same period. Do we really think that those 3,000 would have been purchased if they weren't available illegally? I don't think so... Do people even have time to listen to all of the content they actually download illegally? I doubt it very much. And if they haven't paid for it, they are perhaps less likely to listen to it at all, if strapped for time.

So, here's my hypothesis for debate. I like music. Now that I am a grown up, who has a job, I have chosen to spend some of my disposable income on music - subscriptions, downloads and old-fashioned actual CDs. And guess what? most other grown ups I know do the same - actually most of them don't download at all, they still just buy CDs, shopping around on the internet for well-stocked, physical, value for money libraries. Grown ups that are willing to pay for music in the past will probably always pay for music, and related content, in some form or other. Grown ups, at least the law-abiding ones I know, are unlikely to deliberately illegally download or file share, even if they may have in the past dabbled on the odd Chines or Russian download site, when they thought it was 'kosher'. Kids will mostly try to get anything for free if they can, so that they can spend their totally undeserved pocket money on something else that they can't get for free - mobile phone top-ups, new computer games, magazines, sweets and chocolate, football stuff - or is that just the spoilt, over-privileged children I know? I know I'm stereotyping but a lot of this is indeed about different generational attitudes and moral codes.

So the point, again. Fighting P2P is, perhaps, a massive detractor, which is sucking in an inordinate amount of airtime, resource and government attention. P2P merely provides insight into one of the many ways that music is now accessed, and could be leveraged for future opportunities and possibilities. The technology might be new(ish), but it's really just modern TDKs isn't it? Or have I got it all wrong...