The recording industry blames the rapid decline of album sales on a new technology that allows people to easily copy and transport music. It's expected to cripple the major record labels.RIAA is simply lying with statistics. Music sales are a very complex economic system -- explaining short term or long term trends with single factors is specious. Music sales went up when Napster was big, but are going down now, yet both were "symptoms" of «illegal file trading». The rise of video games and the decline of Disco were more to blame than the introduction of the Walkman on declining music purchases in the 1980s.The year was 1979. Audio cassettes and the Sony Walkman were the feared technologies. Twenty-two years later, the industry is making similar claims, but today's culprits are MP3 files and file-trading services
From where I sit, MP3s have been nothing but good for music sales. I'm buying more music now that computers are capable enough and portable enough to serve as personal jukeboxes. The biggest cause I see for declining music sales is corporate-run broadcast radio.
