Recording Industry Believes What It Wants To Believe

from the if-you-say-it-enough,-maybe-it'll-come-true dept

We've pointed out plenty of times in the past that the recording industry has this blindspot where they absolutely refuse to believe any evidence that suggests unauthorized file sharing either is neutral or even helps the recording industry in other ways. They only will accept reports (often sponsored by themselves) saying that it harms the industry. This is a bit odd, because, if that other research is true, they could save an awful lot of money by not sending lawyers after people, not putting useless copy protection on CDs and not running annoying "educational" campaigns that brand all their best customers as thieves. So, it would seem like, if they were smart, they'd be looking at the evidence pretty carefully to see what really helped them. But, given that blind spot, it's really no surprise to see they have a blind spot to other issues as well. In a new report about how legal music download stores are doing quite well, a recording industry exec says that people are "put off" by file sharing systems and are turning away from them to these download stores. Except, as Broadband Reports points out, that's not true at all. While interest in download stores has increased... so has the use of file sharing systems, once again suggesting that perhaps the correlation the recording industry so wants to believe isn't actually there.