What Would the Music Industry Look Like if Napster Never Existed?
I call bullshit? Discuss!
xoxo, michaela
You call correctly, I think. What we see here is an industry bumping flatly along until the invention of the CD - said format change then producing a boom and a boost, peaking in 94 then plateauing again. Best case scenario is they’d have introduced a new format which might prompt another boost (but what? Not digital - sharing is a feature of digital media, not a Napster-shaped bug. Slashing prices might have done it, since we’re looking at unit sales here). Middle-case is that the plateau would have stretched on and the projected curve would have been flat. Worst-case is a decline, probably slower than what we actually got.
Also, there have been TWO MAJOR GLOBAL RECESSIONS since Napster. There is no market, not even finance, that has enjoyed continuous, unbroken growth in the last ten years. (Arms manufacture, maybe.)
Why not use this as an opportunity to link to this paper from the London School of Economics saying the downturn in sales was mostly not the result of file sharing?
“The music industry is performing better than is being claimed and declining sales can be explained by other factors in addition to illegal filesharing,” say Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng of LSE’s Department of Media Studies. “The negative framing of the debate about file-sharing and copyright protection threatens to stifle the very same creative industry the Act aims to stimulate.”
