No Rock And Roll Fun

RISE: After last week's headlines about how illegal music downloading was falling (based on a survey of three people dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, or something), another survey suggests actually, the number of households downloading has increased in the last couple of months. This survey is based on a slightly larger sample, although we're not sure about the claims that 11 Million people told the investigators that they'd got music off the net - it would take an awful lot of old ladies, with an awful lot of clipboards, on an awful lot of highstreets, to stop enough people to get figures like that, so we're guessing they asked a few and multiplied it all up.

Whatever, having spent the last week singing happy songs about how their plans to crush the family finances of anyone and everyone who so much as hums Eye of The Tiger without handing a small sum for the record companies to top-slice before passing the residue onto the composers, all of a sudden the RIAA are faced with a contradictory report to react to. The bumbling, ridiculous response will be familiar to anyone who saw The Alan Clark Diaries last night - the aptly-named Jonathan Lamy - blustered that it doesn't matter at all:

"For us, the ultimate measurement of success has been, and continues to be, creating an environment where legal online music services can flourish," Lamy said in a statement. "All indicators point in the right direction - sales of CDs, legal downloads and awareness that file sharing copyrighted music is illegal - have all increased."

So, hang about a moment - are the RIAA now saying closing down filesharing isn't their aiml that they don't mind a spot of filesharing providing sales are on the up? We'd not realised that "File Sharing Is A Crime" only applied when the market was in decline, but against a boisterous sales curve the Major Labels fling open their cupboards and say "Help yourself." So long as people know its illegal, it's okay? Or are they merely saying that the incredibly expensive and divisive process of prosecuting 12 year old girls, grandmothers and anyone else with a computer wasn't about stopping filesharing, but merely about boosting CD sales? Couldn't they have run an advertising campaign instead?