Critique on "Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales"

I chose to critique this article because I download a good amount of music myself, and never really realized the effects it had on today’s economy. Ty did a very good job at introducing the subject by presenting the broad topic of technology. Then he goes on to write that technology usually leads to greater productivity, in which he transitions into his main topic of how in the case of the music industry, it may be an exception. I found Ty’s second paragraph interesting because I, like many people, assumed that the increase in internet downloading led to less people buying cds, which in turn has lead to the decrease in record sales. The way he explained the actual reasoning for the decrease in record sales was a little confusing, and needed to be reread a couple of times. But when I understood it, it all came together. In Ty’s third paragraph, he nicely incorporated the notion of fixed cost and how that usually helped the industry of music to make money. He also did a good job of explaining that because you could download songs individually on iTunes, the revenue earned from albums has decreased. File sharing has made it so easy to break up albums, which would usually bring in large amounts of revenue as a whole. This was one thing that I found interesting about this article, I never really thought of how the money lost would add up to a significant amount of loss, revenue-wise. Ty ends his entry by presenting an alternative solution which could help bring revenues up by offering to put sales on a bundle of songs if you were to buy a good amount of the hit songs. He is trying to say that people want incentive to buy the whole cd. He makes a good example of how artists give away new releases to promote concerts. Ty writes that in order to help out sale records, industries need to find compliments for their record sales instead of substitutes. I feel like here he could have elaborated more on an economic level then he did. He could have also provided the reader with the compliment he wished to see happen and maybe an example of a substitute, as to show why the substitute was not a good alternative. All in all is was a very good article to choose because it was very relatable, and because this it did relate back to a current economic issue.