Not Another Word From You About Filesharing Killing the Music Industry, RIAA

Nielsen Soundscan has gone a step further in proving we were probably all wrong. Guess what, everyone?

U.S. album sales rose 2 percent in 2004 even while file sharing continued to grow exponentially. According to the report, "U.S. album sales for the 52-week period ended Jan. 2, 2005, totaled 666.7 million units, up 1.6 percent from 656.2 million the year before, Nielsen SoundScan said. Sales of the CD format alone, accounting for 98 percent of the total, rose 2.3 percent compared to 2003."

The music industry will probably counter the Nielsen Soundscan by saying something typical like "Imagine how much album sales would be up if people would stop pirating." This argument might be valid if it were not for the fact that ticket sales from artists touring went into the toilet in 2004.

Even more interesting is the fact that purchased music downloading (from iTunes, eMusic, and others) accounted for 140 Million sales last year. Paid-for downloads of entire albums were at 5.5 million, a reasonable showing in a time when downloading of music is still a very touchy subject at the top.

The industry is full of excuses as to what created this mess, they are the best finger pointers in the world. Did it ever occur to you folks at the major labels that the reason album sales are down is because so much of your product sucks? Maybe all those Harvard M.B.A.'s the industry has been hiring to do their dirty work for the past few years are the real culprits behind overall sales in music dropping. Maybe if you had some people who like music running your record labels instead of people who can read charts, we wouldn't need another lip-synching Ashlee Simpson buttering down the minds of our perpetually hormonal youth culture.

When Mott The Hoople wrote the song "All The Young Dudes" all those years ago, the lyrics stated what most everyone should know by now about popular culture (no offense meant to the ladies, the lyrics could easily be revised to include you). They said it right there where we can all hear it: "All the young dudes/Carry the news" -- translation: the kids know what's up. The kids who will be voting in the next election, the kids whose older brothers and sisters are being sent in droves to Iraq, the kids who are restless for somewhere to go besides the mall.

Is our culture so defined by these institutions of shopping that we should all be sending our children running, credit card glued to our hand, to the local one-stop shop to define their cultural identity? I think it fair to say that those kids have discovered their voices online. They are the ones downloading, they are the ones listening and connecting, and then they are the ones who are going out and buying.

MTV will want to pat itself on the back, I'm sure. So will marketing teams from all the "hott" acts -- Usher, Hoobastank, Norah Jones, Eminem -- but the real losers are still, frequently, the artists.

Contractual obligations create income caps for artists at all levels of the industry, but the industry fails to assert that the real losers in all of this filesharing is not the big label -- it's the independent and mid-level artists and labels.

It's almost advantageous to the big dogs for illegal filesharing to exist because it gives a bit more muscle to those still getting the biggest slices of the pie; meanwhile, up-and-coming artists have to struggle when their albums are leaked to the internet. You should go check out The Decemberists fan forums to see what happens when an indie band who are growing rapidly in popularity have an album leaked on the internet. It creates chaos, fear, concern, and quite real concern at that.

So sit tight and watch how the numbers get crunched. I know a lot of my friends in the music industry have lost their jobs due to financial constraints and reorganizations, but there has to be something else going on besides illegal filesharing to kill the whole circus if album sales are going up instead of down.

What do you think?