David Cameron's advice to the British film industry is at odds with the nature of creativity

One reason is that they already are recapturing much of that revenue through “complementary” purchases. As Oberholzer-Gee observes, recording industry numbers show large increases in concert revenues corresponding to the drop in recorded music sales. That suggests that, as people discover new artists by sampling downloaded albums online, they’re shifting consumption within the sector to live performances. In other words, people have a roughly constant “music budget,” and what they don’t spend on the albums they’ve downloaded gets spent on seeing that new band they discovered. For the firms that specifically make their money from the sale of recordings, that may seem like cold comfort, but if we’re concerned with the music industry as a whole, it’s a wash. Something similar might occur with respect to purchases of merchandise based on licensed film properties.