Examples of causation are pretty damn important. Just because something intuitively appears to make sense does not mean that's the actual way things are.

Really, even the industry cartels can't prove it. (And their attempts are laughably bad and transparent)

Can you?

But lack of sales, okay. The music industry reports record profits year over year, so those artists you speak of don't represent the larger trend in any case.

Let's pretend that it did for a moment - is that drop in sales due to:

    * A minority of consumers downloading, rather than buying
    * More choice in the marketplace (more stuff for people to buy meaning the existing players get a smaller slice of the pie)
    * Less quality in the marketplace (pandering to the lowest common denominator resulting in flagging sales due to a percieved less quality product)
    * The economic downturn meaning less got spent on entertainment anyways
    * or something else?