UK Music Industry: unlicensed music consumption evolves beyond p2p

A study commissioned by the BPI, representing the music industry in Britain, revealed that p2p use is stable and other infringing file-sharing technologies are on the rise.

The survey, with over 3400 respondents, revealed that 29% of the sample acquires music from unlicensed Internet sources. The use of torrent sites remains stable compared to half a year ago. Other types of unauthorised downloading are gaining in popularity. Especially downloading via newsgroups is growing, reporting an increase of 47%. So-called ‘cyberlockers’ like Rapidshare and Megaupload, online storage services access to which is provided through specific links posted on blogs or forums are also on the rise.

A third type of unauthorised online source for music is overseas paysites. While these sites maintain to be legal in their home country, they are not licensed to sell music to residents of other countries. Especially Russia boasts a lot of these companies, where music can be acquired for as little as 1 Euro an album. This could be seen as an indication that there is a willingness to pay for music, but that current prices are deemed too high (usenet is not free either, but there, one pays for amounts of downloaded data rather than for specific content. Usenet providers do not remunerate artists for their efforts).

BPI’s CEO Geoff Taylor is disappointed by the results. “There are now more than thirty-five legal digital music services in the UK, offering music fans a great choice of ways to get music legally.  It’s disappointing that levels of illegal P2P use remain high despite this and the publicity surrounding imminent measures to address the problem.  It’s vital that those measures come into force as quickly as possible.”

19-12-2009