Impact of Illegal File Sharing on Music Industry

Jared Wade's article "The music industry's war on piracy" takes a look at the impact of the illegal file sharing started by Napster on the music industry today. Wade states that according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry, "unit shipments of recorded music have fallen 31 percent and revenues are down by 22 percent from $6.2 billion in 2000 to $4.8 billion in 2003" (10). He elucidates further by stating that 60 million units of the ten top-selling albums in 2000 were sold, compared with 34 million of the top ten in 2002, a mere two years later (Wade 10). This is a significant dive in the recording industry as a result of file sharing.

To fight against the public's perception that file sharing is relatively innocent, the music industry started a campaign to educate the public about the problem and publicize the damage it is doing to the music industry (Wade 11). He also touches on the somewhat unrelated problem of peer-to-peer networks eating up universities' bandwidth. He admits, however, that the public's sympathy for wealthy rock stars' leaner pocketbooks is minimal and that efforts to stop people from downloading free music have largely failed. He points to Steve Jobs' iTunes enterprise as one of the most promising new ideas for legitimizing music downloading by making songs affordable and encouraging consumers to pay for them.