This article in the Guardian argues that since every person has a finite amount of spending money and since Games and DVD sales have gone upe dramatically – game sales more than tripled and movie sales and rentals nearly doubled – there was simply less money left to buy music.

But, one could also say that it is easier to obtain and download free music than it is to obtain free games and movies – the gaming and movie industries use much more serious DRM than the music biz, which has actually dropped DRM in most cases.

Are downloads really killing the music industry? Or is it something else? | Technology | guardian.co.uk
The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed “a record year”. In fact if you look at the graph above, you’ll see that games spend has risen dramatically – from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008.

Meanwhile music spending (allowing for that * of adjustment in 2004 onwards) has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn.

DVD sales and rentals, meanwhile, have nearly doubled, from a total of £1.286bn in 1999 to £2.56bn in 2008.