File Sharing Does not Hurt Media Sales

Many people erroneously believe that file sharing hurts media sales. However, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary:

  1. Legal Music Downloads Increase in 2005

  2. Slashdot Article about CD-R's and MP3s not hurting record sales in Australia

  3. CD Sales in Israel went up by 15% in 2004.

  4. Success of the single "No Meaning No" by Chuck D and the Fine Arts Militia that was released under a liberal Creative Commons license, that allows free distribution.

  5. The U.S. band Wilco released their album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" as mp3's online after their record label demanded they remix their songs. After a different record label decided to distribute their songs instead, and distributed the album, it became their best-selling album, selling over 500,000 copies.

  6. Some new artists that published albums and singles in recent years, have proven to be very successful commercially, despite the fact that their songs are commonly available for download on the Internet, via Peer-to-Peer networks or otherwise.