In response to a new survey suggesting that P2P file-swapping might not be harming music sales, music’s international trade group IFPI today put out a statement. “The net effect of illegal file-sharing in the UK and elsewhere has been to reduce legitimate sales,” IFPI asserts. “This is why spending on recorded music has fallen every year since illegal file-sharing began to become widespread.”
In other words, P2P file-sharing is the main cause of the revenue decline and the (very real) job losses in the recorded music business. It’s a strong assertion, but it’s not necessarily accepted outside the music industry. And we’re not talking about the usual copyrighters, or groups like EFF, or Pirate Party backers; complaints about P2P have failed to convince even people like the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding.
Back in June 2009, Reding made a speech in which she put equal blame for the problem on Big Content, so terrified of piracy and lack of control that many companies refuse to give customers what they want.
“It is necessary to penalise those who are breaking the law,” she said, “but are there really enough attractive and consumer-friendly legal offers on the market? Does our present legal system for Intellectual Property Rights really live up to the expectations of the Internet generation? Have we considered all alternative options to repression? Have we really looked at the issue through the eyes of a 16 year old? Or only from the perspective of law professors who grew up in the Gutenberg Age? In my view, growing Internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers.”
“A vote of no-confidence in existing business models.” It’s a common criticism, and one advanced by all sorts of people who aren’t out to destroy copyright or sink major music labels.
Take the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group in the UK Parliament, which solicited mountains of comments from groups on all sides of the issue, and concluded in its final report (PDF) this fall that “much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.”
Plenty of musicians now agree. Greg Kot, a Chicago journalist and the host of NPR’s “Sound Opinions” radio show, collected a wide range of such sentiments for his recent book Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music.
Read more of “Record labels keep blaming P2P, but it’s a hard sell” by Nate Anderson
