OPINION
'Big Music' Touts Sales Surge Amid Rise in File Sharing

"Speed of Sound" from Coldplay's X&Y album is currently Number 7 in the Modern Rock section of p2pnet's unique Top Ten Music Download chart. And Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." is at Number 8.

Cool.

And meanwhile, at EMI Music, "New album releases from Coldplay and Gorillaz have both enjoyed considerable global success," said company chairman Eric Nicoli at the EMI Group 2005 annual general meeting.

He continued, "Coldplay's album, X&Y, achieved the number one chart position in 32 countries including the UK, U.S., Japan, France, Germany, Canada and Australia and in every iTunes chart around the world."

"The album has now shipped close to 6 million units and should continue to sell well in the months ahead. Gorillaz's album, 'Demon Days,' hit the number one spot in the UK and France and number six in the U.S. charts following its release in late May. The album continues to have good chart positions around the world and has now shipped almost 2 million units."

Making Sense

But how could that possibly be? If the bands are so popular on the P2P networks, as the p2pnet charts clearly demonstrate, surely that means sales must have been plummeting -- not doubling.

After all, EMI is one of the founding members of the Big Four record label cartel, the others being WMG (U.S.), Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG (Japan, Germany) and UMG (France). And they're using their various faux-cop organizations such as the RIAA, CRIA, ARIA, JRIA, etc., etc., to sue their customers, claiming P2P file sharing is "devastating" them, causing terrible hardship for their support workers and wrecking sales .

The idea is, the customers (or former customers, we should say) will be terrorized into abandoning the networks and instead start buying formulaic, grossly over-priced cartel product.

Needless to say, that isn't happening -- in fact, P2P file sharing is rising dramatically.

The Real Deal

"The Group has delivered a solid performance during the first few months of our financial year, with total revenues and operating profits for the year to date running ahead of last year's levels in both our recorded music division, EMI Music, and EMI Music Publishing," Nicoli told shareholders.

"The Group has delivered a solid performance during the first few months of our financial year, with total revenues and operating profits for the year to date running ahead of last year's levels in both our recorded music division, EMI Music, and EMI Music Publishing," Nicoli told shareholders.

He added, "We continue to see very rapid growth in digital revenues in both our business divisions. In the first quarter, group digital revenues were more than double those in the same period last year and represented 4.8 percent of total revenues, up from 3.5 percent in the fourth quarter of the prior financial year. We expect consumer uptake of legitimate digital music to be the key industry growth driver in the coming years."

The numbers seem to speak for themselves.