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These stats don't start until 2006, which after the Napster revolution killed the CD store. I don't think these stats are useful for making any argument about

• talmand 15y ago
  Exactly, piracy is the boogeyman they use to excuse any hit in their revenues. Since a downloaded song does not automatically equate to a lost sale there's no way to know how much of an impact it had. Plus the industry often ignores the long tail potential of a downloaded song, i.e., the person downloading the song likes the band they just found and goes to a show or buys merchandise. Of course, in that scenario the artist directly benefits and not the corporate members of the RIAA. I would like to equate a dip in revenue to the bad PR the industry has gotten over the years by suing grandmothers for downloading songs, requiring purchasing songs multiple times because of multiple devices, making it difficult/illegal to copy purchased songs from one media to another, bribing politicians to create laws to their advantage over the consumer, so on so on. But I have no way to prove much like there's no way to prove piracy is killing their industry. I'm willing to bet a dip in revenues could be attributed to the fact that we can legally stream music all we want either free or a small subscription fee through services such as Pandora or Spotify. I for one haven't felt the need to purchase music in years and I don't obtain music illegally. Based on these kinds of reports though, the industry just seems to be doing fine to me. A dip in revenues from 13 billion to 12.6 billion is not a disaster. It's a statistical blip.