[astrodust]

The RIAA has a talent for taking a good thing, billions of dollars in on-line digital music sales, and making it sound like a disaster.

You could always tape your records, but you couldn't CD your tapes, meaning a lot of re-sales of the same content. Now you can rip your CDs.

Of course, the RIAA probably expects people to re-re-repurchase content for every type of device they're using. How they charge $2 for a ringtone based on a single that sells for $0.99 is beyond me.

[microtherion]

Eyeballing the chart, it looks like revenue from physical media dropped by about $15B since 1999, while digital revenue increased to about $3B in that time (and if the chart represents nominal, rather than inflation adjusted, dollar amounts, as is likely, the situation is even worse).

Not hard to see why the RIAA is less than jubilant about the situation. Of course $5B of that revenue disappeared before iTunes even got under way, so I don’t think PAID digital downloads are that much to blame for the decline.