Growth of Game and DVD Sales Not File Sharing Responsible for Record Industry Losses
photo credit: balajoe27.wordpress.com
It’s well known that p2p file sharing has been labeled the main culprit over the last few years for any losses suffered by the entertainment industry. Instead of taking another “study” served up by the industry with fabulous numbers thrown in pointing at online file sharing’s blame for lost revenue, one journalist from the Guardian has taken up a study on his own and the results he came up with are telling a different story – music sales have dropped in recent years in Britain, not mainly due to file sharing on the Internet but as a consequence of a major increase in video game and DVD sales.
For many this goes simply like this – on one hand, there are two mediums that offer audio and visual entertainment, and, on the other hand, there’s music offering only audio entertainment. Which one will you choose?
As Charles Arthur, the author of the Guardian article, put it “People – even downloaders – only have a finite amount of money.” He points out the actual state of affairs – consumers can opt for: spending £40 on a full blown video game or spend £10 on an album (which could only have three songs worth listening to on it). So they choose to download those three songs and buy the video game instead.
However, if this may not be a surprising fact or discovery, when the entertainment industry is using big numbers, it does so to impress and impress judges and authorities and win their sympathy as to how badly it’s been hurt by file sharers and their practices.
In Britain, the copyright industry is putting huge pressure on the government to force ISPs into collaboration that would mean employing a system developed for the purpose of displaying pop-ups to those Internet users who go to an allegedly illegal file sharing site. It will be interesting to follow the issue and see how ISPs will comply with the demands of the copyright industry.
