Tuesday, February 17, 2009
It Was Hard Enough to Take You Seriously With the Word “Phonograph” in Your Name…
You’ve got to love the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry–if not for its hopelessly antediluvian moniker, then for its we’re-on-a-mission-from-God attitude toward its criminal case against torrent index The Pirate Bay. Just two days into the trial–apparently the hottest ticket in Stockholm right now–and already, half the charges against the Swedish site have been dropped because of the prosecution’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the torrent-distributed protocol.
Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?
