The Recording Industry Ass. of America has acknowledged that P2P file-sharing is less of a threat to music sales than bootleg CDs.
The RIAA’s chief executive, Mitch Bainwol, last week said music fans acquire almost twice as many songs from illegally duplicated CDs as from unauthorised downloads, Associated Press reports.
According to Bainwol, in turn citing figures from market watcher NPD, 29 per cent of the recorded music obtained by listeners last year came from content copied onto recordable media. Only 16 per cent came from illegal downloads.
Legal downloads accounted for four per cent of music acquisitions, while official CDs accounted for almost 50 per cent of the total.
The RIAA’s favoured solution appears to be copy-protected CDs, which are gradually spreading throughout the music CD market. This approach "is an answer to the problem that clearly the marketplace is going to see more of," Bainwol told the news agency.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen a growing number of stories published by the mainstream media that highlight the growing number of copy-protected CDs in the market and, in particular, those that have become big sellers. If we didn’t know better, we’d suggest this was all part of a scheme to attempt to ease consumers’ concerns that the music industry is out to make it a darn sight harder to listen to music on a computer. But they wouldn’t do that, would they? Ahem.
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