Oo, another graph! Yikes!

Considering I'm a non-mathsy person, I really do love graphs a surprising amount. I love how they visually represent things that are complicated to understand - it's ace. Why is there no "I love graphs" Facebook page? (Actually there probably is - I haven't looked).

A week or so back, I told you exactly how much I love one particular proponent of graphs, Information is Beautiful, and now I've been introduced to another. The Times Online has a Times Labs blog that does a similar thing, and recently featured a graph showing that, surprisingly, music artists are earning more money since the advent of illegal file-sharing, not less.

Personally, I think stuff like this needs to be taken with a larger pinch of salt than the Information is Beautiful blog. Why? I'll tell you why.

1. The Times website has an agenda. Obviously. It's attached to a national newspaper - it's trying to dig up statistics that are newsworthy and controversial, so it's not surprising that the results of this research are newsworthy and controversial.

2. This particular graph is notable for the absence of a lot of detail. For instance, the graph only shows how much money artists get from tours and the sale of music - there's more to it than that. And how much would they be earning if it weren't for illegal file-sharing? How do all these figures compare with rates of inflation?

3. Unlike Information is Beautiful, the Times blog does attempt to analyse the figures afterwards. Of course it does - it's an editorial piece really, not an attempt to give the true, unbiased story.

4. The issue of illegal file-sharing isn't quite as black and white as this. Personally, I don't care how much my favourite artists are earning compared with last year - I care how much they earn compared to how much work they put in. If they've released an album and toured in the past 12 months, but 90% of their fans are downloading their music illegally, they might be earning more than last year but it's still not fair.

5. "Evidence" like this justifies something that's morally wrong on the flimsy grounds that popstars earn more money than you do, and it's rising, so they can afford to lose some of it. I'm afraid that's not the point. If someone has created a song that somehow improves your life, you should be prepared to thank them by paying 79p for it.

Having said all that, I do understand that the illegal downloading of music isn't a massive crime, it's easy to do and it's easy to justify - especially when the record companies seem to earn so much compared to the artists involved.

One of the problems I have with illegal downloads is that they create such a discrepancy between music that's enjoyed by people who pay for it and music that's enjoyed by people who'd prefer to grab it free from the internet. But mainly, I just think it's a shame that, of all the jobs we do, the people who work hard to write music are the least likely to be paid by the people who benefit from what they do. There is something horribly wrong about that.

As the lovely Russell Howard once said, "Music's the best thing we do as humans, isn't it? Music can make you flail your limbs, make you move in a way you don't understand; Or it can make you weep like a sailor's wife staring at a storm." And if that's not worth 79p, I don't know what is.