The Australian minions of the record industry are no more honest than their American counterparts when it comes to the real impact of file-sharing on sales of their products. It turns out that all this public buccaneering of their booty has delivered their best year ever.
ARIA's [the Australian RIAA] press release was slugged with a bizarre headline: "Music DVD continues its rise whilst CD singles slide further". A mixed year, you might think. Not so. It took a canny finance reporter, SBS's Peter Martin, to decode the spin. He had access to ARIA sales figures going back to the early 1980s. He worked out what ARIA knew but decided not to share: when sales cracked 50 million albums for the year it was the first time this had happened. And combined sales of all formats for last year climbed to more than 65 million for the first time. According to Stephen Peach, CEO of ARIA, "The free ride simply can't continue indefinitely at the expense of the owners and creators of music." If we ignore the rhetoric of record companies caring about artists for a moment, let's think about this. Maybe it's the record industry that's getting a free ride from file-sharing - a massive marketing system that allows music lovers to get exposed to all kinds of music without the record industry having to pay a cent.Good on you, mate. Sorry the posting's been so erratic. In the past few months it's been hard to keep any momentum, as I had my first child and lost my job (in that order).
