I’m going to beat this drum as long as I can, because the two music cultures I’m involved in (my work life and my personal life) wildly contradict on this point. My experience with music is almost purely digital (except for my snobby vinyl collection), so this is something I’m pretty keen on rubbing in the old guard’s face.

We have a five person national promotions (radio) team who is constantly pushing our music to radio stations across the country. Everything they do is all about getting the music out there onto the radios of consumers all day, every day. For free.

The simple fact is, people who listen to the radio frequently don’t buy music. The New York Times says, “[a recent] study, written by Stan Liebowitz, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, compared record sales and music radio listening in some 100 American cities from 1998 to 2003. It found that, very roughly, an hour’s worth of radio listening per person per day, over the course of a year, corresponded with a 0.75 drop in the number of albums purchased per capita in a given city. Professor Liebowitz has proposed that people use radio listening as a substitute for buying music.”

0.75 may not seem like much, but that’s almost one album per person across the entire US - that’s millions and millions of unsold albums.

Conversely, there are numerous studies out there that have shown peer-to-peer illegal downloading has actually caused an increase in the sale of music over the last five years (check BoingBoing, P2PNet, NY Times, etc).

I’d go so far as to say that peer-to-peer downloading is providing the same service that our radio team strives so hard for every day; free promotion for our music. The only difference is that peer-to-peer showcases the whole album, not just the key single. So, if it’s good, the fan will buy it. If not, eh, no thanks. It’s cliché to say it, but if our music was better, we’d sell more of it. It’s just a fact.

We as a music industry need to realize that radio is feeding free music to what are often core consumers: middle America who use a desktop radio at work and their car radio to get access to music for free any time they want it. If we’re so concerned about record sales, we need to plug that hole immediately.

That’s a bigger problem than P2P, and since record labels tend to have no control over merch, publishing, and live revenue, the hemorrhaging labels have got to get people back into buying albums.