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This is what Jeremy Hunt, Conservative MP, had to say regarding why the Conservatives did not vote against the debill being rushed through (as taken verbatim from the letter I was sent referenced in my last blog post):

Blocking these measures in their entirety would have risked hundreds of thousands of jobs in the TV, film, music and sports industries and therefore not something we are willing to do.

Hearing this man, and his party's concerns, one might have been fooled at the time the bill was being passed into believing that the content industry was in dire straights. Imminently set to explode due to an overwhelming and relentless tide of ubiquitous pirating. He certainly seemed concerned. But what is the truth of the matter? How is the content industry really doing?

To address this question, let us take the information directly from the horses mouth and take a look at BPI's (British Phonographic Industry's) own figures on record sales for the past 10 years.

Note that BPI obtain these figures themselves from The Official Charts Company. These figures have a lot more impact when you see the graph, check this out:

So for the album sales, considering the variance shown, and the relatively small difference between the 2009 sales when compared to 2001. I wouldn't like to make a prediction about long term trends. Perhaps album sales are on the decline, but the argument is pretty irrelevant when you consider the singles sales

For singles sales, the trend is clear: over the past 5 years singles sales have seen a huge growth. What is all this nonsense about the music industry teetering on the edge of destruction? This could not be farther from the truth.

But where has this growth in singles sales come from? BPI can tell us that too. Here are the figures of physical and digital singles sales for the past 8 years, taken from a BPI press release concerning 2009 being a record year for singles sales:

This was published before the year end, so the 2009 totals are cut short. Ignoring the fact that these figures don't match up with the other ones... I'll just plot the first 7 years of data, and nominally assume values of zero for the digital sales in the years 2002 and 2003:

How very curious. It seems that about 5 years ago, digital music sales exploded. And so it would seem that the very medium they strangled was responsible for the huge growth seen in their sector.

How can anyone, seeing this kind of growth, come to the conclusion that the music industry is being pirated out of business? Even if these figures are grossly incorrect, these are the figures promoted by the BPI! The very people so vehemently lobbying for the bill to pass? So why wasn't this mentioned in the house of commons during the debate? Why did Jeremy Hunt want me to believe that the situation was so dire, so critical, that debate and democracy had to be steamrolled? Why indeed I ask, why indeed.

One last thing. I plotted these graphs in Octave a free and open-source Matlab clone (they probably won't like me saying it's a Matlab clone, but what's free speech for afterall). Here is the code to reproduce the graphs: