Global music sales drop but the UK CD market beats global slump. Why?

I also caught this on the news this morning, the reporter reasoned that us people in the UK (and France) still want the social kudos that goes with ‘owning’ the latest album. This is backed by figures which show the sales of singles dropping, whilst downloads of digital copies rise. £3.99 for a CD single or a couple of minutes to download the MP3?

However I think they missed something, and I’m not sure if anyone else has followed this line of thought further (ok, someone will have but bear with). If you are an average downloader of MP3’s you will, by now, have a fairly large collection of illegal tracks. If you add ripped music to the equation, then you are quickly into double figures of Gigabytes worth of music.

If you are an average PC user, how many times have you lost everything when a PC died, presuming you’ve used computers for, say 4-5 years.

And that’s why I buy CDs. Security.