Copyright 2004 Telegraph Group Limited  
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
April 10, 2004, Saturday
SECTION: City; Wallstreet Life: Pg. 29

LENGTH: 271 words

HEADLINE: CD side of life

BYLINE: By Simon English

BODY:
SPEAKING of lawsuits, you will have heard that the music industry is so mad about people stealing songs from the internet it has vowed to sue everyone in sight until we stop. (Remember the rule: if a company files a lawsuit, it is never, ever frivolous. If an individual does, it probably is).

The industry thinks falling sales are due to thieves rather than its own failings, so it was good to see a study arguing the opposite. Joint research by the Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina suggests downloads have an effect on sales that is "statistically indistinguishable from zero".

In the worst-case scenario illegal file sharing causes a drop in sales of 2m CDs a year, whereas the industry claims it lost 139m in sales between 2000 and 2002.

Most music fans I know have CD collections large enough to pay mortgages. However, the industry doesn't know how to give such insatiable consumers what they want. They download in order to test-drive music they can't hear elsewhere.

When they've found the new material they were after, they discover that it isn't stocked at the local, awful, mega store, so they end up stuck with the bootleg, despite actually wanting to support the artist in question.

Meanwhile, they are replacing old CDs and buying the things that filter through the stifling corporate machine at a rate that ought to keep them out of the courts.

Suing such people for testing your own products before they buy even more of them is an odd way to treat your best customers, but then the music industry is rather like those people who fall of ladders and blame someone else.

LOAD-DATE: April 10, 2004