Follow the money

Via davefreer and Times Labs, "the graph the record industry doesn't want you to see".

(I've reproduced it here as a GIF because ... well, what in Cthulhu's fever dreams possessed the Times to think it was necessary to use Flash to display a STATIC GRAPH?  The only thing accomplished by using Flash was to make the damned graph take two minutes to load.)

There's actually two graphs.  I've left the second alone because it loaded in only a few seconds for me.  (It still didn't need Flash to display it, though.  The Times' webmaster needs his fingers smacked with a steel ruler.  I live in hopes that HTML5's embedded video/sound features will kill Flash for all non-interactive content.)

The point of the graphs is pretty clear:  The music business as a whole is doing just fine.  The artists are making more money.  The venues are making more money.  The promoters are making more money.  The only part of the industry making less money is the record companies — and there's little, if any, evidence that file sharing is responsible. (As previously reported by the Times, music listeners in the UK who admit to sharing and downloading music via the Internet spend 75% more per year, on average, than listeners who say they don't share or download.)