i learned two things recently: one, my hosting provider can take the combined effects of a Slashdotting, a Winerizing, a Good Morning from Silicon Valley, and a Boinging in good stride and, two, blogging makes me smarter because the people who read what i write are smarter than i am.

first, Jenny the Shifted Librarian picked up my story on the major labels' price-fixing shennanigans. this, in turn, drew Glenn Fleishmann's critical eye -- i hadn't adjusted my figures to account for inflation over the period. that, it seems, pushed Dr Bonzo over the edge, into a fit of statistical analysis designed to settle some of these issues. his conclusion:

Compared to the 1996-97 decline in CD sales, which appears to be strongly correlated with the end of a steady real-dollar decline in CD prices (both effects appearing also to be associated in time with the labels' alleged price-fixing), the relatively small decline in sales in the 2000-01 period, far from presenting dramatic evidence of the costs of "file sharing," appears to us to be a combination of a leveling-off in the number of family/individual "consumer units" and ongoing stability (read: lack of natural decline) in CD prices.

interesting: a smaller total market will buy less of a product it doesn't want at a price that doesn't appear to decline over time (ie, gets unnaturally more expensive). by totally screwing up their pricing and product mix at the same time as the number of people buying shrank and the economy contracted, the members of the RIAA managed to become their own worst enemies.

so, now we have several ways of slicing and dicing this data, and somehow none of it seems to point to the internet as the root of Big Content's current situation.