Crying Wolf

From the start I never believed the music industry execs and its Washington watchdog, RIAA, crying foul when Napster and sites like it advocated swapping music files for free.

Since the music industries conception allegations of lack of royalties, no residuals for a records success, denial of ownership to an artists own master copy and many other practices have denied artists their true profit for years. Look no further for proof than R&B artists TLC, Toni Braxton and His Purple Badness himself, Prince.

When Napster grew in popularity the music industry quickly pointed out that free music swapping would only hurt the artist and many artist agreed. But from the start I figured it was really the labels fear that they'd be directly denied, not necessarily the artists.

I'm not advocating denying payment for an artists hard work, but I never believed for a minute that record sales were hurting due to the Internet's proliferation into the music space.

Now finally a little proof to back up my theory. The recent article from Eric Hellweg, Executive Editor of Business 2.0.com, "Show Me The (Missing) Money" points out that record sales were up 13.6% from '99 sales, with more than 45.4 million albums sold as of December 24, 2000. And get this, the biggest increase was generated from traditional chain record stores.

To date, no numbers are showing a loss at all. So what do we have to say to big, corporate music execs?

Shaddup!!!! Shut it Up!!! Si-lence!

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