Metal Reviews

I hope no ones already mentioned this, i just couldn't be arsed reading all 5 pages.

Downloading affecting album sales is only a problem in the US. In the UK downloading is actually stimulating an increase in album sales. The reason i know this is because this week a download only song will go Number one in the UK so C4 news did a segment on downloading music. Heres the report, link at the bottom for the Vid

http://www.channel4.com/news/special-re ... sp?id=2086

From my own experience d/l has encouraged me to find bands that i otherwise would have missed, i always buys the tracks i d/l and then buy the CDs if i like the songs. Its essentialy a moral issuse about stealing

i read somewhere that the sale of albums has been about the same, but the sales of singles has about halved since 2000... too lazy to find it though

but then they pretty much covered their loss by selling overpriced ringtones for mobile phone :roll:

and at worst, dloading will be killing the music industry (aka greedy pigs making money on the musicians' talent), not the music 8)

NP
Archie Shepp "Ballad for Trane"

Yes, The sale of singles is down hugly! In the Uk you only need to sell 30-60 thousand copes to get to number one, this compaired to 130,000 on average pre 2000.

However, the reason for singles is to show the buyer what the album has to offer, this can still be done through d/ls. An average 1M singles are sold per week compared to double that in album sales.

Here's a link about the UK record industry showing that it increased by 1.4% in 2005. http://www.bpi.co.uk/index.asp?Page=new ... _966.shtml

Even where the 'problem' is at its worst in the US the sales of music is down 1.9% while legal d/ls has trippled to 6% of the total market. If legal d/l keep growing at this rate, soon (sorry my maths isn't good enough to give a estimate!) it will compensate for the loss in actuall record sales.

This is why i think people who say the music industry is on its arse are just scare mongering. It may have taken the 'big five' a while to react to d/l's in a way other them to sue them, but with sites like Itunes the industy is finally getting to grips with how to make the most out of a less then ideal situation.

( i just want to point out that there are so many different stats for this that its difficult to know which are bias and which are independent so my figures could well be wrong!!)