Napster blamed for CD singles slump

Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Hank Barry

CD single sales plummeted last year in the US and record industry officials say the figures prove that Napster, the Internet music-sharing service, has harmed their business.

Sales of compact discs singles fell by 39% last year according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

"Napster hurt record sales," said RIAA president Hilary Rosen.

In order to argue we've done irreparable harm, it would be great if there were some irreparable harm to show

Hank Barry, Napster

Napster is the massively popular California website that lets users pass music files easily over the web.

Credible

The site was told to stop trading in copyright material by a California court earlier in the month.

Napster offered to settle the copyright infringement lawsuit by paying record companies $1bn (£687m), but this was greeted without much enthusiasm.

Now Napster chief executive Hank Barry says the record industry is manipulating the data to say what it wants it to say.

"In order to argue we've done irreparable harm, it would be great if there were some irreparable harm to show," he said.

"We haven't seen a credible survey yet that suggests Napster is hurting CD sales."

Napster has been hugely popular with consumers

Some experts say the drop of CD singles as being part of an industry-wide slump, due to economic factors and a weak year musically.

Culprit

"To be honest, it wasn't a great music year," said Andreas Schmidt, chief of the e-commerce group at Bertelsmann, which has a stake in Napster.

"There were some isolated events, but we didn't put that much good stuff out."

Roy Lott, president of EMI Group's Capitol label, admitted that singles used to be a mainstay of the industry in the 50s and 60s and they have now fallen out of favour as a tool to inflate sales figures and influence radio programming.

But he added even so that Napster was a "prime culprit" for the drop in sales.