TSL Analysis Shows Unbundling to be Irrelevant

I was referred to this item from Bruce over at hypebot.

The Register reports that some consultants did a study for a British music industry trade group, which concluded that:

Capgemini calculates that of £480m lost to the industry since 2004, £368m was the result of format changes: principally the unbundling of the CD into an "a la carte" selection of digital songs. Of the remainder, 18 per cent was lost to piracy.

Since I see everything in the recorded music business through the lens of TSL, the attribution of revenue losses to unbundling doesn't make sense to me. Please follow my logic and if I get something wrong, let me know.

One constant in music is that 15 four-minute tracks are played in a hour; listen longer and more are played; listen less and fewer are played. Even the revolution in digital music can't change this.

We know that people are spending more time listening to recorded music. Let's assume that average track length and the average number of times a track is listened to haven't changed. Let's also assume- just for a moment - that the average price of a track hasn't changed and that the listener pays for every track in their library.

Under these conditions consumers would have had to purchase more music to fill their increased listening time. They would have had to engage in many more transactions to acquire all this unbundled music, but their spending on recorded music would have gone up, not down.

Since this didn't happen, unbundling cannot explain the drop in recorded music revenue. The culprits, of course, are piracy and price erosion.

But we already knew this.

What most interests me is the value of TSL as an explanatory factor in the current recorded music market. I have said this before, but only after the recorded music industry begins to focus on TSL will real solutions to their crisis emerge.