TeledyN

"Why does the music industry persist in saying that every download is a lost sale? If you even think about it, it can't be true. People - even downloaders - only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs?

I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else.

What else, I mused, might they be buying? Hmm... young.. like the entertainment industry... ah, how about computer games and DVDs? Thus began a hunt for the figures for UK sales of games and of DVDs and of music to see if there was any consistent relationship between them."

While there are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics and in this chart no distinction is made between new-release (which may dominate the technology-driven game sales) and back-catalog (which may dominate DVD and music sales) the figure I would most like to see charted is the relationship between the post-Napster rise of file trading and the sales in the long tail of the back-catalog, the older releases and especially the older, really obscure and forgotten releases such as Martin Denny or Pentangle.

However that might pan out, what is really salient in the Guardian story is the simple observation that downloads logically cannot equate to "lost sales" -- as the absurd fines levied out clearly prove -- those charged downloaders are each exceeding their personal budgets by many orders of magnitude, several times over!  When you consider how the $40,000 required to fill an average iPod is simply not in the reach of any but the most exclusive club of elite teenagers, isn't it inescapable to reject equating their collections to a $40,000 corporate profit loss?