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Ask a Music Producer/Publicist About Filesharing and the RIAA
Bill Evans is one of those people in the music business who doesn't get a lot of public exposure, but keeps the wheels cranking behind the scenes. He's not just a musician and techie, but a publicist whose clients include Numavox Records artists Kerry Livgren and Michael Gleason as well as progressive rocker Neal Morse; he's produced (among many others) songs for the Burning Annie soundtrack and the Kansas Tribute Project. Naturally, since he makes his living in the music business, Bill is not 100% in favor of unrestricted filesharing. But what might work? And what might not? Let's find out what this music biz insider thinks -- one question per post, of course. Answers to the "Top 10" questions will be published soon after he gets them back to us.
And back when using KaZaA was still considered safe, CD sales were down. Clearly, the problem is that CD sales require file sharing services to have a cute logo.
Seriously though, correlation is not equal to causation. At the same time that Napster was affecting CD sales (both positively through wider exposure and negatively through providing the customer with what they would have bought -- the actual net effect is anyone's guess), you also had a really strong economy (or at least the illusion of one, since we were on the dot-com bubble). A strong economy means extra spending money, and extra spending money means more purchases of luxury goods, and more purchases of luxury goods means more CD sales.
So yes, you're correct in that the fact you provide is beyond dispute. What is up for dispute, however, is the significance of that fact and whether or not the relation is as simple as you make it out to be.