SamAdams posted
Personally, I think the music industry benefits by the trading of MP3s as more people are exposed to the music, many of which will eventually purchase the CD . . .
Mister Magoo posted
A recent Business Week article stated that over 60% of teenagers under the age of 18 get all or most of their music from file swapping. I have friends that haven't bought CDs in over 5 years.
You just can't argue with logic like this when people on the same side argue both sides of the street. So I won't.
Though I think it's a bit unfair to lump together completely different arguments from two different people, they are not mutually exclusive and do work together, to a point.
First of all, adults do still buy CDs, lots of them. And those who aren't either ancient (like 70+ years old) or utter technophobes do indeed tend to use P2P services to discover new music, which they then go out and buy. They were raised to have things matter to them like cover art and liner notes. And, of course, most adults tend to have actual disposable income that allows them to blow $17 per CD.
On the other side, teenagers (speaking broadly of course) tend to not be wealthy. Most couldn't care less about album covers or liner notes or "deep catalogs." They just want what they hear on the radio and see on MuchMusic (nobody watches MTV for videos any more) and want those song and those songs only. They also tend to be relatively amoral on issues that aren't starkly black or white and don't have a direct personal effect on them ... such as file swapping.
However, these kids will mature, both in terms of music taste and moral clarity; they will get jobs and money; they will start to see the pleasures of a well-crafted physical album (assuming the rock world ever gets around to making them again, but I have faith); etc. And they'll start to care more about sound quality too, which will make them much more likely to start seriously considering CDs, or at least desire near-CD-quality downloads (such as Apple's new AACs, which are nearly indistinguishable from CDs, and smaller than the sonically-far-inferior MP3s) ... and slowly turn into paying consumers of some form or another.