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June 16th, 2005

When Stupid Math Wins

You know, I’ve written before about iPod and buying music from iTunes. I like it. It works for me. But the original reason I got an iPod wasn’t for the store – which didn’t exist at the time. It was to load up all of my CDs onto a little music player the size of a deck of cards.

Downhill Battle, a loose organization that feels the music industry is the devil (essentially), has come up with a number of anti-iTunes campaigns. Some are effective, like suggesting that Apple display how much money each artist gets from a downloaded song. But others? Not so much. This “iTunes per iPod” thing has been making the rounds again and I’m not quite sure why, given that it’s from April of 2004.

Their argument is that because a very small percentage of music on iPods is from the iTunes Music Store, the rest is probably downloaded illegally and that’s great because file sharing networks aren’t going away.

Uhm, yeah. I know the reasons why a formal survey on this haven’t been done but it seems like it’d be interesting to really find out how much music on portable music players that hasn’t been bought online, is pirated. Until then, Downhill Battle seems to just be jumping to conclusions based on threadbare statistics cobbled together with some 6th-grade math. On one hand, I like what they’re doing by promoting non-big label music. On the other hand, I sometimes think their usage of speculation detracts from their message.

Posted in Consumer Commentary

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