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For more than a decade the music industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. However, looking at the sales data of the music industry itself shows that the disappointing income might be better explained by a third factor that is systematically ignored.

After music cassettes were introduced in the mid-70s the number of sales saw a gradual increase, until the late 80s when the CD took over in popularity. Cassettes were eventually phased out as CD sales continued to skyrocket. In music industry vocabulary one could argue that CDs killed cassettes.

Interestingly enough, this format shift was nothing new for the music industry. The exact same pattern also applied to the LP/cassette battle, with cassettes eventually taking over

Is Sweden, the only country to have sent a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament, finally giving up its swashbuckling ways?
When Sweden's IPRED anti-piracy law went into effect earlier this year, Internet traffic across the country plummeted overnight—a sign that P2P users, fearing exposure at last, were abandoning their existing copyright infringement tools. The Pirate Bay defendants were found guilty by a Swedish court earlier this year, and the site's ISP are now under assault by the music and movie industries.