Article Summary/Critique: Music Industry
Jared WadeÆs article ôThe music industryÆs war on piracyö 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, ôunit 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 2003ö (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 publicÆs 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 universitiesÆ bandwidth. He admits, however, that the publicÆs sympathy for wealthy rock starsÆ leaner pocketbooks is minimal and that efforts to stop people from downloading free music have largely failed. He points to Steve JobsÆ 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.
Kieren McCarthyÆs article ôSharing lightens the download: the entertainment industry demonised Napster and its clones for the technology they used. But could file-sharing revolutionise the way we get our entertainment?ö brings out the opposite perspective on peer-to-peer file sharing. In the U.K., the BBC developed a pilot project to test a file-sharing system that distributes its TV programs to viewers over the Internet (McCarthy 26). The new Inter...