Since HMV declared a decline in Christmas sales and a six month loss of £36.4m coming hot on the heels of a profit warning from EMI I have come to anticipate the “downloading” question from anyone discussing sales performance with me. News of our supposedly counter-intuitive increase in CD sales have led to the media seeking an explanation for this “anomalous” result.

These interviews have sometimes resulted in incredulous comments suggesting the imminent death of the CD industry. The reality is considerably different to the story belied by results from niche music outlets such as HMV and troubled labels such as EMI.

“Niche?” you may ask in relation to HMV. “How can a major High St. music chain be perceived as a niche player?”. The answer is obvious to anyone over the age of 30 who has ventured into one of these “Yoof” haunts. The ambience is decidedly angled towards the 15-30 year old male, from the lighting to the music played. And here the reason for the traditional music store's decline in sales becomes obvious, for this is the profile of the typical music downloader – time rich, cash poor and interested in the downloading technology and experience.

And that leaves the rest of us, time poor but cash rich compared to the young student or career starter. We want the new Gwen Stefani album and we don't want to spend the time downloading it from the internet and then uploading it to the iPod and, to be safe, copying it to our hard Drive too. Buy the original CD and what do you get? A 100% pure copy of the music as it was recorded, not compressed down to a mere 128 kbit/s to squeeze through the Internet but in all it's 1,411 kbit/s glory.

“What does this mean to me, the listener”? I hear you ask. The answer is a number of things. Firstly pristine music exactly as it sounded shortly after it passed Gwen's pretty tonsils. Secondly a perfect backup for when your iPod gives up the ghost or is stolen. And there's more; for your CD is the perfect unrestricted source to create as many copies of mp3, iTunes, WMV, ATRAC (or whatever the compressed music format of the day is) as you need without worrying about the dreaded DRM that seeks to turn you into a criminal should you copy the music more times than the publisher deems “necessary”. Move your music one too many times as you update your PC and suddenly “your” music is yours no longer! For more bad news about “your” downloaded music collection see “The Customer is Always Wrong”.

Does this mean that we at Global Journey are against music downloading, Luddites who will watch the modern world pass us by? “No” is the answer but as with much that happens in life we view downloading as just another example of history repeating itself. I recall the heady days of the mid 70's and spending many an hour downloading all my favourite music and transferring it to my mobile music player. Sure it may have run on steam compared to current music players but the trusty Walkman cassette player was the iPod of it's day. And the source for my music as you will have guessed by now was Sunday night's Top 40 Radio Chart Show. No difference really; instead of surfing the internet I was surfing the airwaves and I clearly recall the world at that time fretting that the death of the music industry was nigh with cheap blank music cassettes allowing limitless free music downloads. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Yesterday I had a call from Rus Withers, one of our US sales exec's who told me that he had a conversation with someone who had asked him “Why should I buy your music when I can download it free?”. My response was that “of course you can download it for free, you can also go into a High Street store and take it from the shelves for free. The question is 'Do you want to steal the music or would you prefer to buy it'?”

Legitimate downloading is a a good way to buy individual tracks for your mobile music player and this market is fast approaching maturity. (I will talk more on this in a future blog). But for now; convenience, quality, security and lack of usage restrictions make the humble CD the optimum way to buy music.

Next Blog: Adapt or Die: How Music Companies need to change