95% Music Downloads Illegal, Industry Grows Nevertheless

"music companies embrace new revenue models, offering consumers more choice"

BS, they've continued to object to change, cling onto dying business models and litigate to maintain that position whilst standing in the way of progress (and civil rights) because they are afraid that it may in some way be used to impact on their profit margins.

They continue to bully ISP's into doing their bidding even though that it is a logistical nightmare and perhaps not even possible to monitor piracy without a large margin of error. And continue to support their campaign with figures that are at best pulled from their nether regions, when will people understand the simple concept that:

PIRATES WILL NOT PAY

whether the torrent is available or not they will not give you their money, your figures of 'lost revenue' are meaningless as you never would have seen it in the first place.

I'm not defending piracy, I know it's wrong, but to fight it with heavy handed measures that do nothing to curb piracy and everything to annoy the legitimate customers is worse then what any pirate has ever done.

According to Wikipedia, iTunes has sold 6 billion songs (assuming in the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store). Taking that with a grain of salt, but, using the figure for sake of argument, that means that approximately 120 billion songs were downloaded in total. Which using an approximate population for the planet of 7 billion means that in 6 years, the music industry thinks every human being on the planet has downloaded an average of 17 songs?

Really?

I'm sorry, 95% very much seems to be a finger in the air amount. Back in the old days, when I were a yoof, and Napster were all the rage, yes I would download hundreds and hundreds of tracks. How many would i listen to? 10%? Probably.
So while the act of downloading is technically the criminal act, the actual numbers of tracks that would have been bought as a CD or legitimate download is likely to be much much much lower.
You have to also consider the demographics of who downloads as has been said, kids do not have money to spend on CD's, so therefore opportunity cost is low. Foreign countries of the 2nd / 3rd world variety would not have access (nor disposable income) to CD's, so again opportunity cost is low.
I really hate it when companies like this put out a generic statement that can be torn apart with litle effort, but where (most) of jo public ends up believing the headline: 'we're in the middle of a crisis'.

I think everyone are looking at these statistics wrongly. It is 95% of all music downloaded is downloaded illegaly, not that 95% of people are downloading their music illegally. It is simply due to the fact that if you are paying iTunes per track or per album you are far more unlikely to consume your music in the way that people who use torrents or rapidshare do.
if someone hears one song playing on BBC 6 for instance, that person can fire up google and have the album on their hard drive within about three minutes, so basically in the time it takes for one song to play they have the whole album. now imagine they can do this for every track played in a three hour radio show whereas the consumer who is actually paying per track would probably only get maybe a single or an album if they have the money. so there's a 10:1 ratio right there so 60bn:6bn in terms of what iTunes has sold.
I know the Trusted Reviews staff have been banging on about this for years but it just shows how a flat-fee based business model would suit everyone. If you didn't have to trawl through blogs or aggregators or torrent sites, run the risk of infecting your computer with a virus everytime you unpack a rar or zip file of the latest Jefferson Starship release and could just fire up iTunes and download whatever you watned whenever you wanted without having to worry about credits, debits and tiered pricing everyone would be a lot happier and the pirates would have no chance.
You can see the idea kind of hiding behind such things as Nokia's Comes With Music, but it is still not at a stage that the affordability:convenience factor has been ironed