"The copying of a record is still illegal, Joan - and on tape or CD-R it can just as easily become a limitless commodity - if you pass it on to someone, who passes it on to two other people, and each of those etc. etc. - which is just as likely as blogged albums affecting the sales of Official Product. This is, after all, a matter of principle."

This is, after all, disingenuous in the extreme. It doesn't take a genius to work out the difference between the impact of the one-to-one "mix tape" culture and the potentially huge damage to sales that comes from making a recent release freely available to anyone and everyone on the internet.