The record industry blames piracy and downloading for sagging sales — here's the whole story.

Turn on the radio and chances are you’ll hear a top-selling song from a rock, country, or hip-hop artist. But stroll through the offices of almost any major record label and you’ll hear an entirely different kind of music: the blues. After nearly a decade of unfettered growth, music sales are down for the second year in a row. And if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is to be believed, downloads and piracy are the verse and the chorus of the music industry’s current sad song.

... While few dispute the numbers, some, such as George Ziemann, are challenging the RIAA’s inferences from them. Ziemann, an Arizona-based musician and owner of MacWizards, a music production company, was propelled into the debate when he wasn’t able to sell his band’s CDs via online auctions on sites such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo because they were burned on recordable CD-Rs. Ziemann says he was told that because CD-Rs are often used to record pirated material, they’re banned on many auction sites as a result of the RIAA’s antipiracy efforts (eBay allows CD-R sales if the seller stipulates he owns the copyright).

As a result of that experience, Ziemann researched the RIAA’s figures and came to very different conclusions, released in a much-circulated article, “The RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add Up To Piracy,” posted on his Website. He makes two key assertions: 1) that the labels raised CD prices during a down economy, and 2) that they slashed the number of new releases by almost 25% during the past three years. He says that these factors, and not downloading, are responsible for sluggish CD sales...Read more