News written by Jari Ketola (September, 2001)

According to the interim report released by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) today, the global recorded music sales dropped by five percent during the first half of 2001 from what they were in 2000.

World CD sales fell 4.6 percent while the ever-declining casette sales went down 16.3 percent. Also singles were 14.4 percent lower than the previous year. The decline was steady all over the world except for the United Kingdom (10% growth) and France (8% growth).

The decline is, according to IFPI, the result of slowing economics, illegal CD-burning, and, of course, the availability of pirated music on-line. Consumers also have more and more entertainment products to spend their money on, such as DVDs, video games, mobile phones, and pay-TV, so obviously they have less money to spend on music.

Napster has settled a pending lawsuit with American songwriters and music publishers. With the settlement Napster has agreed to pay songwriters $26 million plus a portion of its future revenues.

U.S. District court Judge Marilyn Patel, the plaintiffs and the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) Board of Directors still have approve the agreement, but according to Napster and NMPA representatives, the process should be a mere formality.

Even though Napster still hasn't settled the recording industry's ligitation, Napster CEO Konrad Hilber is confident the service will be back by the end of the year. He also believes that even though there are free music download services available Napster would still succeed as a subscribtion service -- not least because of it's well-known brand name.

Both the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have asked ISPs to remove web pages offering copyrighted material, and the ISPs have, of course, complied. But the views on how to stop people from sharing infringing material on file-swapping servies are quite a bit different.

MPAA has persistantly requested ISPs to disconnect users sharing copyrighted files, but the ISPs view that they can't be held responsible for the content stored on the personal computers of the subscribers. RIAA, on the other hand, has decided to leave ISPs alone and instead wait for other means of disabling peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Then again, hampering the operation of peer-to-peer networks is just as illegal as copyright infringement.