Finally, a mainstream media outlet has managed to put two and two together and come up with 3.75, as close to 4 as it's likely to get.

There's a huge disparity between what's happening in the real world of online music and the wholly fictitious corporate world as reported by the world press, relying on data self-generated by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel.

To all intents and purposes, there's only one corporate player. Apple. And stacked against what happens every minute of every day of every month on the p2p networks and independent download sites, Apple's claimed sales, unsubstantiated and unaudited as they are, don't amount to a hill of beans.

p2pnet has been pointing this out for literally years, often using statistics from premier p2p research company BigChampagne to drive the message home.

According to Fox News, "Despite success in suing people who download music illegally and in reaching deals with personal networking sites like YouTube, the music industry is still bleeding millions of dollars in sales to online piracy".

It would be more accurate to say it's hemorrhaging money because of bad management, bad business decisions and bad product as it tries to sue its own customers into toeing the corporate-drawn bottom line.

"It is a major issue for an industry that is desperately trying to boost revenue from legal downloads to make up for falling sales of compact discs, which declined 23 percent globally between 2000 to 2006," says Fox, going on:

"To get an idea of the size of the problem, Eric Garland of Web consultants Big Champagne estimates that more than 1 billion digital tracks are illegally traded for free each month.

"By comparison, Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, which has more than 70 percent of legal digital music sales in the United States, has sold only a bit more than 2 billion songs since its launch in 2003."

P2P, "remains an unacceptable problem," the story has RIAA (Recording Industry Association of Americ) boss Mitch Bainwol, saying.

And in direct contradiction to a statement he made last year, when he claimed file sharing had been "contained" and "file-trading is flat," according to Fox, he now says "folks" engaged in file sharing, "are doing more of it".
Meanwhile, "the industry's strategy is to slow down P2P sharing and hope that legal digital music sales will eventually make up the shortfall," says the story, which has Larry Kenswil, Universal Music's "top digital executive" admitting something the p2p community has known since Day One, namely, "P2P is not going to go away".

However, he also says, "the relative problem will drop for us."

It will, eventually. But not until the Big 4 stop trying to sue their customers into buying low quality, grossly over-priced 'product' and admit that business models from the 1970s don't, and won't, work in the digital 21st century.
ACiD Reviewed by ACiD on . P2p file sharing is here to stay Finally, a mainstream media outlet has managed to put two and two together and come up with 3.75, as close to 4 as it's likely to get. There's a huge disparity between what's happening in the real world of online music and the wholly fictitious corporate world as reported by the world press, relying on data self-generated by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel. To all intents and purposes, there's only one corporate player. Rating: 5