On the Decline of the Music Industry

In a response to a newsreport on slashdot about the attempts by the Aussie music cartel/lobby group ARIA there is this interesting comment about the drop in music sales in general and to teenagers in particular. The newsreport is about some thuggish practices of getting ISP to deny service to users of bittorrent. A favorite sigquote that I have seen is: "More people surport the KKK than the RIAA".

The portrayal of women in music videos
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Scrameustache (459504) on Saturday April 14, @01:51PM (#18733025)

I think that the decline of music sales coincides with the rise in internet usage not because of the terrible pirates of music, but because of porn. Bear with me, it makes sense if you think about it:

I used to watch videos for very mediocre music, because the chicks were hot, scantily dressed, and fed this former teenager's fantasies. But today's kids don't need to buy a CD to have fap-fudder, they can get free porn with ease.

I theorize that the so-called decline of the music industry isn't because of music pirates, as they claim, or because their music suddenly sucks (the monkeys sucked, sucking isn't new), but because they were NOT in the music of selling music, but in the business of selling sexually suggestive material.

A yagu commented that the music is selling less because the retail stores/channel are offering smaller selection of music.

I'm not buying the "pirates decrease sales" spiel. My cause and effect for buying fewer cds is strictly the continued unavailability of cds on display. It used to be a smörgåsbord, now the stores look like the cutout bins of years past. This (the RIAA, and others) is an industry that rather than weather a business model storm and changing business dynamics to adapt continues to insist on taking their ball home with them (hey, it isn't even their ball!) so we can't play. And somehow, they still want to demand we pay them. Please, please, please!, just let them become irrelevant quickly so we can get on with our music!