So my LAUNCHcast radio station has begun to pick up some of my edited preferences, giving me a lot of different groups than I usually get. This is mostly a good thing, but after a run of modern rock, the LAUNCHcast gods decide to play a funny on me and spit out "Come Clean" by Hillary Duff. I was stunned into inactivity for a couple of seconds, and then took care of Ms. Duff. That won't be happening again. I then got an Enya song, which was OK in a palate-cleansing way for a couple of minutes. OK, now we've got "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon. That's better.

In barely related musical news, I was reading earlier that Usher's new album sold over a million copies this past week, supposedly heralding in a new era of CD sales now that the RIAA has crushed file swapping.

Or has it? The jury's still out on the effect of piracy on CD sales, with the RIAA touting a variety of studies showing it has a major impact, and with other sources (including a recent study by eggheads at Harvard Business School and UNC) saying it's not that big a deal.

The Yahoo! article on the Usher thing makes the bald assumption that piracy is to blame, and gives this album and Norah Jones' new one as proof that piracy was driving lower CD sales. I will say that in the latter case, I think it helps that her first album sold so widely, thanks in large part to the folks at Blue Note setting a lower than average price for the debut disc.

There's also that price thing to consider. It strikes me that CDs are less expensive now than a few years back (assisted, no doubt by that price-fixing lawsuit that resulted in so many people getting checks for $13.82 or whatever the total per person was), which has to help the sales figures. And there was that period where people were finding it hard to find jobs and not have their pensions wiped out by CEOs buying a third house in the Bahamas, where the choice between a new CD and not having the utilities shut off wasn't always a theoretical exercise.