(c) March 1, 2002
wiaflw

If you watched the 44th Annual Grammy Awards this past Wednesday, then you heard the speech National Academy for Recording Arts and Sciences (N.A.R.A.S) President Michael Greene gave regarding "music piracy on the net" and how it was destroying the industry (read: profits) "one download at a time." He illustrated this by hiring "three college-age students to spend two days with us, and download as many music files as possible from easily accessible Web sites." But there was one problem.

According to Greene, the three students downloaded, in a couple of days, nearly 6,000 songs. And if we were to "multiply that by millions of students and other computer users" the problem would come into sharp focus. Only problem is, there's a flaw in his reasoning.

Let's take the "nearly 6,000 songs" that were downloaded and divide them between the three students. From this, we deduce that each student would have had to have downloaded nearly 2,000 songs. It is highly doubtful that they [the students] were downloading the songs continuously for 48 hours (2 days) straight. If they were, this would calculate roughly to 41.667 downloads per hour per student.

Let's be more realistic and assume that they [N.A.R.A.S.] had them work for 10 hours per day on each of the two days. In order for each student to come up with nearly 2,000 songs, they would each have to download approximately 100 songs per hour (2,000 songs per student divided by 20 hours (10 hours per day for two days)). 100 songs per hour! I have a broadband connection and it can't even pull close to that many bits and bytes within an hour. And considering that most users still have 56Kbps or slower connections, grabbing that many songs in an hour would be impossible.

So how was Mr. Greene and his team of students able to come up with the "nearly 6,000 songs" then? We may never know.

Also, there was one thing which Greene failed to acknowledge, and that's that when people download songs (free samples) and like what they hear, they eventually go out and purchase the entire CD (including myself).

This was evident in 2000 when Napster was in full swing. According to an SF Gate story, "with Napster in full swing, record sales were up 8 percent from the previous year." But when Napster closed in early 2001, "sales of new albums -- not including established catalog titles -- are down 8 percent." Earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) even reported that music shipments in 2001 fell 10.3 percent. (See their numbers).