In a move that will make it a little harder for groups like the BPI to cry poverty, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has announced that the music industry's revenue grew by 0.3 per cent throughout 2011, totalling nearly £11 billion.

The reasoning behind the trend is thought to be that digital music sales have finally begun to offset the decline in CD sales, which has been happening for well over a decade – it's just taken this long for official music sale sources to become proliferant enough. Early reports suggest that in 2012, those same legal downloads and streams grew another nine per cent.

However in other good news for copyright lobbyists, the NPD Group is reporting that file sharing of music in 2012 declined significantly, with music traded on peer to peer technology dropping by as much as 26 per cent throughout the year.

“At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that digital was killing music,” Edgar Berger, chief executive of the international arm of Sony Music Entertainment said. “The reality is that digital is saving music.”

KitGuru Says: If this isn't an indication that the music industry is finally offering a comparable and in some cases, perhaps better, service than the illegal ones, I don't know what is. Over a decade on from Napster, they've finally learned that combating piracy in the courts does nothing, it's offering something just as simple and immediate as them, that draws people back into paying for music.

[Thanks Wired]

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