I followed the thread below about the Pirate Bay site founders with interest, particularly the debate sparked by Tommy D.

Just thought I'd throw this into the loop as a way of demonstrating the devastating effect the combination of the internet and the current crunch has had on the traditional method of getting your message to the general public. Obviously the music industry has been turned upside down by the net and I agree with Tommy that I miss browsing for CDs. I don't even agree with the classification of different albums in my local HMV anymore.

But how about this for fairly astonishing statistic? I worked for my local newspaper as a hard news journo from 94-99. When I joined in 1994, the paper's circulation was 100,000 a day. Its now down to about 65,000 so has dropped by more than a third. That's perhaps largely down to people getting their news elsewhere and is replicated pretty well across the board in local papers everywhere (if anything the sales of the paper I am talking about are holding up better than most).

But this statistic is even worse. The paper's income from advertising revenue during the first two weeks of 2008 was in the region of 635,000 pounds sterling. First two weeks of 2009 it was just 87,000 pounds sterling. That's a hell of a drop in the space of a year.

As someone said, you can't put the genie back in the bottle but the net has made the world change so fast, its difficult to keep pace with it. It must be incredibly difficult to think ahead of both the economic situation and changing technology from a commercial standpoint and its not surprising the print media and music industry are both suffering, both financially and in terms of the product they are able to release.



"With eyes that are swollen and tearful, we all take a bow
It passes the time for a moment but what happens now?"