Bad Week for Entertainment Corporations

All three of these articles come from the defenders of our digital rights at Slashdot:

• Two university researchers found that file-sharing has no significant impact on CD sales. “Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina’s Koleman Strumpf, also said that their ‘most pessimistic’ statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002. I’ve also written about this here, with part 2 coming out on April 1.
• The Australian music industry has just had its best year ever, and they don’t want you to know about it.
• 18 to 34 year-old men are watching less television (New York Times registration goodness required). That’s certainly true of me–I spend all day in front of this silly computer thing. It’s not directly discussed in the article, but I suspect the popularity of reality TV shows have had a minor impact as well. Most of the popular ones–American Idol, The Apprentice, Top Model, the sundry ones related to marriage and romance (not to mention Queer Eye, etc)–definitely skew toward a female audience. I know lots of men watch them, but I suspect that demographics-wise, a majority of viewers are female.