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Record companies are quick to squeal about their alleged billion dollar losses due to Internet file sharing, so wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect to see the effect on their bottom line? Apparently not when it comes to members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA). The latest financial results released by ARIA show that record companies just had their best year ever, though you wouldn’t know about it from reading their press releases.

ARIA’s press release was slugged with a bizarre headline: “Music DVD continues its rise whilst CD singles slide further”. A mixed year, you might think. Not so. It took a canny finance reporter, SBS’s Peter Martin, to decode the spin. He had access to ARIA sales figures going back to the early 1980s. He worked out what ARIA knew but decided not to share: when sales cracked 50 million albums for the year it was the first time this had happened. And combined sales of all formats for last year climbed to more than 65 million for the first time.

But that’s just one year, I hear the record companies say. OK, let’s go back to 1998. The year before an 18-year-old college dropout named Shawn Fanning wrote a file-sharing program called Napster, the software that kick-started the downloading boom. In that year Australian record companies sold 39.6 million CD albums. Five years later the figure had gone up to 50.5 million. That makes it hard to argue that downloading and CD copying has been killing sales.

But what about the sales of singles, I hear the record companies cry. Singles sales did fall last year by a significant amount. While album sales increased by 7.85 per cent, singles sales went down by 16.5 per cent. But what would you rather? We know which format makes the most money. ARIA wants to stress the drop in singles sales because it suits its argument

More at The Sydney Morning Herald.