The Guardian's Charles Arthur points to a blog post by Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan that questions the value the BPI puts on file sharing's impact on the UK music industry.

The BPI puts the value at 1.1 billion pounds over three years. Mulligan puts the loss at 0.14 billion pounds. Why the big difference? The BPI's numbers, he writes, confuses consumer survey data with national market data, and it overlooks the other reasons sales have declined.

"If, (and this is a highly hypothetical IF) these 3.3 million file sharers are really responsible for 1.1 billion in lost spending, that means that they had to not spend 110 pounds each per year, which puts them above average spending for UK music buyers. If that really is how much they would have otherwise spent, then the music industry has got a bigger problem than it could have imagined – that would mean that all the music aficionados have switched over to file sharing. But of course they haven’t, because that spending simply wasn’t there before file sharing."

The same could be said of the PR trotted out by the RIAA. It has consistently refused to recognize other factors such as competing forms of entertainment and an unhealthy retail climate.