perfidy

To follow up on my recent post arguing that downloading isn't what's killing the music business, I point you to this CNN article which notes that 2003 was the worst year for recorded music sales since the advent of the compact disc.

As usual, there's a stunningly ill-informed piece of disinformation in there that calls the entire thing into question.

Total sales of singles, including cassettes and vinyl, which have dipped significantly since the Internet file-sharing and CD-burning craze began in the late 1990s, fell 18.7 percent in value terms between 2002 and 2003.

What? This line, which was undoubtedly fed to some stringer by an industry flack, seems to suggest that the decline in the singles market was the result of cannibalization of single sales by downloading. Well, guess what? Labels have been phasing out the single for years, and sales are down for two reasons: there's few singles out there to buy; and consumers are out of the habit of buying singles because-- ungh!-- there's few singles out there to buy. Downloading doesn't enter into it! Now, if singles had taken a dive after 2001, when Napster broke big, there'd be something to this. But when I went into the industry in early 2000, singles were less than an afterthought already. And trust me, the labels have many better things to bitch about then limp singles sales.

If CNN can't even get its facts straight about simple matters of causality and chronology, then they're no better than Drudge, who scoops the hell out of them daily anyway.

[wik] If I have time in the next day or two, I have a couple brilliant ideas as to why the music industry is in a tailspin, and it's probably not what you think.