These studies suggest that filesharing actually benefits most
artists, and the ones that are badly hit (explaining the
declining CD sales) are the ones who are already the most
popular, and thus hurt by it the least. Another major factor in
the drop of CD sales is the fact that their sales were
artificially inflated in the beginning of the nineties as people
began converting their cassette and LP collections into CD
format, buying the music they already owned for a second time.
Once this was done, the sales would have collapsed even without
file sharing, as they returned to normal.