OPINION: Web numbers

The 2008 Digital Music Report released this week by the IFPI, the global music industry association, is a truly remarkable document.

It’s prefaced with what can only be described as a Jeremiad from IFPI chairman/CEO John Kennedy aimed at Internet service providers, whom Kennedy blames for most of what ails the recorded music business worldwide, including the 10% decline in global music sales in 2007.

The report then goes on to give the industry credit for adopting “innovative” strategies that might have been helpful a decade ago but today are probably too little, too late to recapture the ground the industry has already lost in the digital free-for-all.

Kennedy accuses ISPs of allowing “copyright theft” to “run rampant” on their networks.

“ISPs have largely stood by, allowing massive devaluation of copyrighted music,” Kennedy wrote. “This in turn—and despite all the positives about our digital growth—has prompted a crisis in recorded music that has wide implications for the whole digital marketplace.”

He goes on to praise French president Nicolas Sarkozy for promoting legislation to curb illegal file trading and demand that other European governments take similar measures.

There’s nothing in Kennedy’s screed that industry officials haven’t said before, of course. What’s striking is that they’re still saying it so vehemently.

Even after all this time, the industry still can’t seem to let go of the idea that its problems are somebody else’s fault and need to be solved by someone else.

It’s almost a neurosis, a kind of self-pitying projection subconsciously intended to shield victims from the anxiety they would feel if forced to examine their own ineffectualness in improving their condition.

Like most neurotic thought patterns, there is an element of truth in the industry’s complaint. A lot of file-sharing goes on outside any sort of commercial structure from which copyright owners could derive value.

But also like neurotic ideations, it’s ultimately counter-productive and self-defeating. Waiting for someone else to solve your problems rarely works.

The need to identify culprits for their own problems often leads neurotics to invest emotionally in false paradigms, as was also evident this week in the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s embarrassing admission that it had been overstating the amount of “piracy” attributable to college students by a factor of three.

The MPAA had been claiming in public statements and in Congressional testimony that students on college and university campuses were responsible for 44% of their total losses from piracy annually.

The figure came from a study conducted in 2005 by LEK Consulting, based on consumer surveys.

What the study actually said, however (albeit without providing supporting data), is that college kids are responsible for 44% of Internet piracy in the U.S.

Elsewhere, the same study noted that Internet piracy represented only about one-third of total losses from piracy.

Thus, the real share of all piracy attributable to college students, according to the LEK data, is 44% of one-third, or roughly15% of the total—the figure the MPAA accepts.

It was a simple, if blatant, error in the arithmetic. The fact that it took them more than two years to notice it suggests just how invested the MPAA was in the higher figure.

When you’re creating monsters, you rarely create small ones.

Or, as we say in the newspaper business, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Get more of Paul Sweeting's analysis here.