I kind of have to take issue with this, because there is some research to contradict this. Of course, it is true that every copy downloaded illegally is still stealing, no matter how you look at it. But it does not necessarily mean that the person downloading the illegal copy was going to buy a copy in the first place. They only lose money if the person was going to buy the disc in the first place and then didn’t.

I say this because there is research that has found that people that do the most illegal downloading also purchase the most legal music. They are actually downloading the music they would have never bought to see if they like it. Which I am not saying is legal, but it is what they are doing. And they end up liking an album they weren’t going to buy, and they go buy it.

You see, there are also artists that have intentionally leaked albums early, and then found that sales actually increased after that.

The problem is that “anything outside the ultra-commercial norm gets put to the side” has always been the case, before mp3s, before CDs even. I remember all of the “home taping is killing the music industry” stickers that used to be out there.

The problem is, Bono and others are right that this is stealing, but the research and numbers out there aren’t necessarily pointing at illegal file sharing being the culprit for why sales are going down.

For one, no one has taken is to account the fact that eBay and Amazon and CD Warehouse all rose to prominence at the same time new CD sales were going down. Why buy a new CD, when i can get it use on Amazon for $3 in a few weeks? That also hurts lesser known artists – less copies are availalble, meaning the price for used copies stays higher.

And what about MySpace? It also exploded at the same time CD sales shrunk. What if people (like me) are just listening to songs posted there and deciding they don’t really like what they are hearing beyond the one buzz song?

No one is taking all of these factors into consideration. I am convinced that we can find a way to shut down illegal file sharing tomorrow, and CD sales will still not re-bound. It is just oo multi-faceted.

For one thing, record companies are naive enough to count every 10 downloads as 1 “album sale.” Sorry, many people are actually just buying the one song they like off the album that they like, which legal mp3s allow now. It is more like 1 download = 1 whole album sale lost. Companies have banked on people buying a whole album just to get one song for so long, they don’t know what to so with singles anymore. And they won’t change their business model to match the new reality.