In The Music Piracy Myth , publisher Tim O’Reilly shares an email he received George Ziemann, who has done exhaustive analysis of the sales figures which the RIAA uses to claim that music downloading has adversely affected their sales. The truth is that one reason sales are down is that the labels are releasing less music.
So think about this. As the original research I conducted indicates (and
has been verified by SoundScan via BusinessWeek.com), the record labels
began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When
they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary
Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer.Because it was engineered.
And directly from Ziemann’s site:
So the record industry cut their inventory (and artist investment) by 25 percent and sales only dropped 4.1 percent, even though the economy is at rock bottom. There were almost 12,000 fewer new releases for the consumer to choose from in 2001 than 1999. The record companies are making more money per release than ever.