Arstechnica has a good article about the overstatement of P2P as a threat to the music industry. In short, other issues such as simple borrowed, ripped, and burned CDs may eat into profits even more. That phenomenon is difficult to curtail though it is one that the music industry faced before with audio cassettes. In addition, as the article notes, Professor Geist has shown that claims about lost profits are often “wildly variable and downright fictional” so whether the burn, rip, copy sector has the impact as stated remains to be seen.