Free online music blamed for weak sales

According to IFPI free online music really damaged the sales of "official" music. Although album sales are getting higher and overall music sales in Europe are rising the total picture ain't that sunny.... (for the IFPI I mean).

By going after poeple who put lots of music online for free and trying to shut down file exchange services, closing illegal mp3 sites etc they want to control the market again.

Controlling the market again is not the only thing they want to do. The second thing they'll probably want to do is getting the people who downloaded for free to get them paying for the downloads. I guess we could call it legal mp3's...

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Singles are also proving to be a dying breed. Sales slumped a dramatic 46 percent in the United States in 2000, for a global fall of 14 percent, which the IFPI blamed on the availability of free online music sites.

The most popular of those sites, free file-swapping service Napster, is facing an increasingly gloomy future after being ordered by a U.S. court to filter out copyrighted songs. The Big Five record labels--BMG Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group--hope at least to partly plug the gap with their own legitimate online ventures as they seek to sustain long-term growth

I don't think they'll succeed... and I surely hope not!

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Source: Cnet news

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