The government’s new Digital Economy Act will do little to prevent file sharing – the music industry must continue to innovate online if it is to survive

Nearly as old as the internet, the peer-to-peer file sharing of music online has been a constant bugbear for the music industry, with claims of billions in lost revenues over the past decade. Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng have found that despite these assertions, incomes from innovative online products such as LastFM and Spotify are complementing a resurgence of interest in live music and are driving up industry revenues.