Sunday, December 18, 2005

Is Apple holding back the music industry?

I don’t think so and most people I know don’t think so, but you may want to check out an article on BusinessWeek that quotes some people blaming Apple for a 0.44% decrease in illegal downloads; the CEO of Napster even goes so far as to kill Apple/Steve Jobs a “villain.”

Let’s see, the decline in sales probably has nothing to do with the Sony BMG/rootkit debacle or the fact that the labels are squeezing the consumer by wanting to charge more than $0.99 per track (of course they claim they only want to do this for new, popular tracks) or requiring consumers on iTunes to purchase an entire CD to get one hit single.

Apple is not the problem, the industry is the problem (it wasn’t that long ago that Napster was the villain).  It wasn’t really so long ago that there were no legal download numbers to measure, it was all illegal download numbers that were measured.  Perhaps the problem is not that consumers are downloading less legal music, perhaps the problem is that the record industry is not investing in new talent that would drive legal downloads.

Link

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