whereiswaldo's Journal: Number of CDR's sold vs. Music Piracy

Through the course of time, I've talked to a lot of people about how they do backups of their personal computer files. Two answers come out way on top, over backup tape and zip disks: backed up onto another hard drive or computer, and backed up onto CDR media.

I know I've personally backed up a 150+ CDs worth of documents and applications downloaded from the Internet. Sometimes I burn a CD and date it (My Documents November 2002) and it gets burned the next month as well, and so on.

This brings me to my point that the music industry's complaints that CDR sales are skyrocketing and so must be music piracy. To me, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The the sizes of hard drives skyrocketing, too, and large media files being created (eg. home videos, digital camera pictures), there is an enormous amount of data which needs to be backed up. Equating music piracy with CDR sales is a very unsturdy assumption which has probably only been made because it helps them further their argument.
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