RIAA VS The Economy

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# Introduction

The news these days is plastered with stories of the untold billions of dollars the recording industry is losing to digital piracy. On a recent plane flight from coast-to-coast, after the main movie the airline showed a series of short films, including one about how digital pircay was wrecking the music industry. Hillary Rosen, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lobbyist frequently talks of the billions of dollars each year the industry is losing in the wake of the "plague" of digital piracy.

Yet at the same time, this country is in one of the worst economic situations in decades. The states are facing budget deficits not seen since the end of World War II. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has dropped over twenty percent in the last two-and-a-half years; the NASDAQ has lost over seventy percent of its value, from a peak of around 5,000 to its current level in the neighborhood of 1,500. Is it even remotely possible that this could account for some percentage of the sales decline the RIAA members see?

This page presents a brief examination of market trends and sales figures of the economy at large versus the sales figures of RIAA members. This is by no means a complete economic or statistical analysis -- I have a minimal background in those fields -- but rather an attempt to gauge trends in the economy at large and RIAA sales figures.
get the facts and figures and the rest of the story here