Mp3s are ruining music sales. Mp3s are evil. Piracy is making artists destitute. The whole music industry is going to collapse. P2P networks are ruining everything! Soon, there will be no more music, ever.
So might sing the song of the major music labels and their attack dog, the RIAA. After all, its because of the great evils of Kazaa and the like that it is necessary for us to sue students for P2P file sharing, to make criminals of them, to ruin their futures. Because music labels are so poor, and artists are starving... that's why we need to take people to court for sticking some Mp3s on an IRC channel. When you think about it, its all really quite justified.
Why then, are music sales rising? Why are CD sales up 10 percent from last year? Why is revenue up 4 percent?
"The upshot of this is that consumers are meant to ignore higher sales of cheap CDs, a sour overall economy for the last three years, lawsuits against consumers, a price-fixing scandal, a Harvard study that shows no line between file-trading and lower sales and believe that piracy is driving a slowdown in overall music sales. Makes perfect sense. No wonder the RIAA is agonizing over increased recent revenue." - The register.
Read more about just how "bad" things are for the music labels here.