wraggster
September 17th, 2012, 18:58
Music industry's crackdown having zero effect on illegal downloads.
Market analyst Musicmetric recorded 405m torrent downloads in the six month period. It found 78 per cent were albums and 22 per cent singles, which explains the 3bn song stat.
It calculates that, assuming an album contains 10 tracks, more than 775m songs were downloaded in the USA alone, and 347m in the UK.
Depressing stuff if you see every one of these downloads as a lost sale, which is the official music industry view.
And the scale of the illegality suggests that all those court victories over Pirate Bay et al are merely pyrrhic.
But on a brighter note, the report found that lower volumes of torrent downloads relative to GDP occurred where Spotify and iTunes are well-established.
Also, there is evidence that for some artists file sharing can be marshalled for long term gain. The report says Billy Van, the American dubstep artist, saw his career fly after enabling legal sponsored downloads through BitTorrent.
This made him the second most tormented artist after Rihanna, whose Talk that Talk was the most downloaded release globally at 1.2m.
Musicmetric concludes that fighting file sharing is ultimately doomed to defeat and that the industry needs to find ways to harness it.
Gregory Mead, chief executive of Musicmetric, said: “For the first time, we have evidence that blocking Pirate Bay had little effect on BitTorrent downloading. It is also clear however, that availability of streaming services like Spotify does reduce this activity as people have greater access to music they want via legitimate means.
“The challenge for copyright holders is to find ways to monetise music files torrented online. The potential for converting revenue lost through file trading is not entirely a fairy tale, however it will differ with different genres and life stages of artist."
Matt Mason, executive director at BitTorrent, added: "It's short-sighted to think that we can simply tell people to stop and they will.
"Consumers have used the BitTorrent protocol for over decade because it's the best way to move large files. That's true for musicians too. The challenge is building the right business models on top of the technology, which is something we're very committed to here."
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/3bn-songs-were-bit-torrented-from-january-to-june-2012/019380
Market analyst Musicmetric recorded 405m torrent downloads in the six month period. It found 78 per cent were albums and 22 per cent singles, which explains the 3bn song stat.
It calculates that, assuming an album contains 10 tracks, more than 775m songs were downloaded in the USA alone, and 347m in the UK.
Depressing stuff if you see every one of these downloads as a lost sale, which is the official music industry view.
And the scale of the illegality suggests that all those court victories over Pirate Bay et al are merely pyrrhic.
But on a brighter note, the report found that lower volumes of torrent downloads relative to GDP occurred where Spotify and iTunes are well-established.
Also, there is evidence that for some artists file sharing can be marshalled for long term gain. The report says Billy Van, the American dubstep artist, saw his career fly after enabling legal sponsored downloads through BitTorrent.
This made him the second most tormented artist after Rihanna, whose Talk that Talk was the most downloaded release globally at 1.2m.
Musicmetric concludes that fighting file sharing is ultimately doomed to defeat and that the industry needs to find ways to harness it.
Gregory Mead, chief executive of Musicmetric, said: “For the first time, we have evidence that blocking Pirate Bay had little effect on BitTorrent downloading. It is also clear however, that availability of streaming services like Spotify does reduce this activity as people have greater access to music they want via legitimate means.
“The challenge for copyright holders is to find ways to monetise music files torrented online. The potential for converting revenue lost through file trading is not entirely a fairy tale, however it will differ with different genres and life stages of artist."
Matt Mason, executive director at BitTorrent, added: "It's short-sighted to think that we can simply tell people to stop and they will.
"Consumers have used the BitTorrent protocol for over decade because it's the best way to move large files. That's true for musicians too. The challenge is building the right business models on top of the technology, which is something we're very committed to here."
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/3bn-songs-were-bit-torrented-from-january-to-june-2012/019380