Music Industry and Online Piracy

http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/record-industry-sees-slight-growth-for-first-time-since-napster/ 
This article outlines the fact that since the start of the piracy craze, which started when the software 'Napster' was created in 1999, music sales have been very low and artists have not made as much money as they used to prior to this. As of last years sales in music, the record industry has seen a slight growth in sales (0.3% higher than 2011). This may not seem like a large amount but if this continues, this whole piracy situation for the music industry may possibly become eradicated.
Some reasons for this sudden change in sales could be due to the more digital way of distributing content to the audience. Digital distribution is without doubt the near future of most purchases so therefore giving people the option to get a virtual copy of the product legally, and most of the time cheaper through micro-transactions, can sway some of the people who acquire the content illegally.
Saying this people nowadays don't always have to buy the music, there has been recent programs such as 'Spotify' which enable the user to simply pay for the right to listen to a large database of songs. This is a much preferred option for some people as they pay a monthly subscription to listen to as much music as they want, completely legal.
Another way in which the music industry has seen profit would be through the advert service on websites such as 'YouTube'. On this website there are channels such as 'Vevo' which host musical content, but by placing advertisements before these music videos they acquire money which would be a similar concept to the act of someone buying the bands music.

http://theweek.com/article/index/240718/the-anti-piracy-copyright-alert-system-is-the-napster-era-finally-dead
In this article it talks about the new idea of the 'Six Strikes Copyright Alert System' and how it may be a solution to this new era of pirating content. In my opinion there can be as much punishment for online piracy as the government wants but if the content is there it will not stop people getting through the blocks in which the law have put in place. For example when internet providers banned their customers from accessing 'ThePirateBay' the creators of the website simply changed their website name and added proxies to make it harder for the law to track what people were doing. In my opinion the only way to make piracy undesirable would be to offer the product with more advantages for acquiring it legally. I do not think that punishing people for wanting free things at the comfort of their own home is fair at all, and if the problem for the companies producing the content is that their product is not making enough money, then they have not attracted the audience to want to 'own' it properly, and they would need to come up with new marketing techniques.