Music industry makes more each year

Anytime I see this kinds of numbers, the first thing I think about is - What about inflation?<p>Sadly, without proper information about what these numbers represent, and without accounting for inflation, there is no easy way to compare them.

The important point (for me) is not how much money is being lost due to piracy, but whether the internet as it stands is destroying the music industry. Clearly it is not. The music industry, on the other hand, is currently bent on destroying the internet.

The clear implication being that there is really no loss from piracy. While this point could be argued, these numbers show nothing. First off, we don't know how much money would have been made had there been no piracy - that is, the music industry might have made even more money every year. The other issue is that while the music industry's worldwide revenues have increased, recorded music revenues have actually decreased, with North American revenues falling from $13 billion in 2007 to $12.6 billion in 2010, and worldwide revenues falling from $35.4 billion in 2009 to $35.1 billion in 2010. Of course, by that same note it can't simply be claimed that the loss is because of piracy. It may be that people are simply buying less music.

to me the numbers show that album sales are down because of an unbelievable change in the way that people buy music today as compared to 15 years ago. Buying a single song has replaced buying an album. The RIAA is claiming that album sales are down like 90 percent. DUH... but that's not due to piracy, it's due to itunes raking in 9 billion dollars for the music industry. If the itunes downloads were the 10 dollars or more that an album costs..... well you can do the math. So downloading may be killing the record labels, but it's the LEGITIMATE downloading of songs.<p>If you think about it, apple takes HALF of the price of a download, so that's 18 BILLION downloads last year alone.

I wonder if WP7 is going to help Microsoft in regards to this..<p>"US MP3 Player Retail Sales, by Brand, February 2007 (% market share)<p>Apple (73.7%), San Disk (9%), Creative (3.3%), Microsoft (2.3%), Samsung (2.2%), Other (9.5%)"