Right from the beginning, when Napster made sharing music easy, the music industry claimed that it hurt the sales, and robbed the artists from their money. For just as long, those who downloaded music for free said they bought more music, since they discovered new (for them) artists this way. After all, why not try something new when it doesn’t cost you anything?
Alan Wexelblat writes in his article The revenge of Sapir-Whorf that all studies have shown no negative effect on the music sales due to P2P-sharing, and studies that have shown an effect, have shown that it has been a positive effect. Not quite what the music industry want you to hear, eh?
So – what is the problem then? Well – from the consumers’ side it is that we haven’t been able to buy what we’re willing to pay for, simply because record companies wouldn’t sell it to us. Instead, they want to sell us what we don’t want instead: Music we can’t use as we want and play where we want on the equipment we want. Music with lots of restrictions. What’s the reason for this? Is it just the fear of not getting money for everything, or is it more? Do they want complete control over how we can listen to our music, making us pay several times for the same music if we want to play it several places?
Well – if the music sales finally go down, it may just as likely (or more) be because people stop buying music due to such restrictions, which just makes it cumbersome for us.