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Obviously no one is going to be able to get this type of information on unauthorized/illegal music downloads.

Once the levy was in place, it wouldn't be illegal, though. And Big Champagne already does a pretty good job of tracking it.

PS: BigChampagne, the people who made the study, is a company that analyzes which music is popular on P2P networks. They've got like a P2P equivalent of the Billboard charts.

"What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand), or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?"

That's a fine tangental discussion, but not really relevant. Look at the top list of most any tracker, or the list published by BigChampagne, which aggregates this info. It matches closely with the stuff that's popular at the moment.

The BitTorrent protocol can also be used to share Linux distros, and other authorized stuff. But neither these, nor the "no longer in print" content, are the primary traffic on Demonoid.

It's fine to acknowledge that many people use piracy as a substitute for buying. There's nothing wrong with this -- opting to get something off of a tracker vs. purchasing it leaves you with more money in your pocket. Having more money is the same motivation that drives most musicians, artists and filmmakers, so it's nothing to be ashamed of. When you choose to torrent something rather than buying it, you're simply acknowledging that you'd rather have that money in your pocket than in the pocket of some actor, musician, or writer whom you don't know, and whom you'll probably never meet. This is perfectly understandable and requires no rationalization.

Make it opt-in.

I would happily pay $5/month if it guaranteed I wouldn't get sued for sharing music.

Distribute it according to http://www.bigchampagne.com/

"So I really want to know where these $19 CDs are and why I can't find them -- do they really exist or are Slashbotters just making that number up to cement their idea that RIAA sponsored music is horrid (like we didn't know already)?"

I think you may have meant to reply to the GP, not my post (I, too, corrected the GP on his assertation that CDs are $18.99).

Disproving it is easy -- just browse the Amazon Top 100 or take a look at prices at a major retailer. I think that "CDs are $20" is just one of those curious Slashdot memes. It could be that CDs were probably around $20 when P2P exploded, so that's the price that many Slashdotters remember from that point when they stopped buying CDs and started using P2P to acquire their music. But, sadly, I think that there's some willful ignorance here in an effort to feed the "CDs are overpriced" zeitgeist. Acknowledging that we pirated when they were $20, we're still pirating when they're $10, and we'll keep pirating even when they're $5 just doesn't have that same whiff of righteousness and sanctity.

Sure, some CDs still sell for $18 - $20 -- audiophile-grade classical CDs, CDs bundled with concert DVDs, and the like -- but they're not the mainstream. The stuff that's pirated the most is the same pop crap that can be had for $8.99 at Amazon or Wal-Mart.

"CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap."

Most music released has always been crap. 90% of what's released today is crap, but most of the stuff released in the 90's was crap, too. As was the stuff in the 80's, and the 70's, and so on.

It's easy to remember decades past as having better music than what's being released today; this is due to our propensity to remember the good and discard the bad. There's even a common word for this phenomenon: "nostalgia."

Ask many people and they'll swear up and down that there was a magical time in history when the crap level dropped below 90%. For instance, a 50-year-old living in 1926 might have told you that the era of good music ended in the 1890s. Everybody's right, but everybody's also wrong.

At any rate, while I agree with you that most music is crap, pirates love it just the same. The top music traded this week has remarkable parity with the top-selling music. This is why "music is crap" is a great rationalization for piracy, but not the cause of piracy. Piracy is caused by people's natural desire for music, and the natural desire to save money.

"This measure has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with outdated business models being destroyed by new technologies, and companies unwilling to adapt. They loved the monopoly."

There's widespread confusion over what the word "monopoly" means. There are literally thousands of indie music labels whose products are readily available at plenty of retailers, both online and off, and there's absolutely nothing preventing anybody from starting their own label, or even selling their music without working with a label. Sure, going the indie route is hard. So's starting your own independent ice cream shop in this market dominated by the Ben and Jerry's and Baskin-Robbins of the world. You won't have their brand recognition or their marketing budget. But no Slashdotter in their right mind would call the ice cream business a monopoly. So why the disconnect when it comes to the music biz? I suspect that many Slashdotters incorrectly throw around the term "monopoly" not because of a genuine misunderstanding, but because, like the "we pirate music because it's crappy" argument, because it shifts the moral burden off of us, and onto somebody else.

"The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again."

Oh, I agree 100%. I think copyright terms are at least twice as long as they should be.

However, this is largely not relevant to the discussion at hand. See all the posts about how piracy is booming at their school? It's largely new stuff. These are teenagers we're talking about -- they're not building their collections of Elvis Presley music or Bing Crosby movies, nor are they trading old Apple ][ warez. Big Champagne tracks the traffic on the P2P networks; notice how this week's top pirated songs match up so closely with the top legal downloads. Sure, some older stuff that perhaps should fall into the public domain is being tracked, but it's not a significant part of the P2P volume.

A century or so ago, copyright term was 14 years. Even if we had that 14 year term today, the vast majority of the stuff that college students are trading would still fall under copyright protection.

Actually, a lot of their points seem to be direct responses to many of the Slashdot/digg memes.

"Important to understand this. Among poor people who don't own computers or cd players, there was a surpisingly low amount of file sharing or purchasing of pirate CDs. Go figure."

Believe it or not, this is lost on lots of people. Just a few weeks ago when an article about software piracy in India came accross Slashdot, a common retort was that the average income in India is something like $2,000 a year, and thus they simply can't afford that software. As you've no doubt figured out, the average income includes the millions of dirt farmers who have no computer, let alone running water, and the pirated software is being used by that segment of the Indian population that can afford mobile phones, computers, designer clothes, et al. just fine. Yet it's a good enough statistic for us to justify piracy.

"If unpopular music were traded most frequently would it still be unpopular? or would it then be popular? I've just gone cross-eyed."

This is another direct salvo against the rationale that you hear all the time around here: "the real reason that music sales are off is because today's music sucks!". Yet the list of top pirated songs matches up with the top ten tracks sold. 90% of popular music sucks in any given year; this is something that people learn as they get older; thus the common perception that it's only today's popular music that's awful; nostalgia helps us forget that the top music in, say, 1993 was pretty crappy, too. The music-listening public has just as much appreciation for today's sucky pop music as we always have; we're simply pirating it a lot more than we used to.

There are companies that do market research stats on p2p downloads, similar to Nielsen Soundscan for CD sales. BigChampagne is one of them. Pop music jumped the shark years ago, but if listeners are really getting bored and tuning out, that's one way to find out.

Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales.

According to the article, this information is provided by BigChampagne LLC. According to their website blurb at http://www.bigchampagne.com/thedata.html ;

"Like it or not, the vast majority of online entertainment media is now acquired for free on P2P file sharing networks, and BigChampagne is there."

Cue lots of rubbish about network operation centres and live feed monitoring. Anyone want to throw out ideas about how they really monitor this stuff? Is there a way of downloading torrents with a client and finding out exact data transfers automatically?

"I had no idea the Brits were so forward-thinking in this area. Of course, the RIAA would never agree to legitimizing downloads like that...at least not until several more management changes happen and they get someone in their leadership who's actually owned an iPod."

Huh? Billboard in the USA has been publishing the top digital albums/tracks for months now, if not years. Not to devalue what they're doing in the UK now... but they're late to the party.

The RIAA-member labels have also been tracking illegal downloads (for marketing purposes, I mean, not just to figure out whom to sue) for years now; BigChampagne is the leader here.

At any rate, even if you weren't aware of this, I'm not sure why you don't think RIAA-affiliated labels would be interested in tracking online sales. My guess is that the labels make the same or better margin on downloaded tracks than on CD sales.

"Said it before, say it again. It's not the Internet, it's the product. Music today sucks compared to years ago."

This is a constant. People approaching middle age in the 1950s claimed that modern music sucked compared to music of previous decades. As did people in the 1920s and 1870s.

People who believe in the quality of music of past generations vs. today's music are often quite certain that they are correct in an objective sense, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, this phenomenon is so common that there is a word to describe it: nostalgia.

I'm aware that this provides a quandary for P2P fans: if "today's music sucks" is a constant over T, then it's not a significant contributor to declining music sales. Another sticky issue is that the top pirated tracks match up with the top sold tracks pretty closely. "Today's music sucks" is not driving P2P fans to download old stuff in lieu of new stuff. The demand for the new stuff is strong; P2P simply provides another channel.

"I don't know about that."

BigChampagne tracks music pirated on the various P2P networks. Their home page has a list of the top tracks pirated this week. It matches up pretty closely with the top tracks downloaded via the iTMS.

Your experience is probably different because, like most Slashdotters, you're smarter than average and your musical tastes are more refined. But the bulk of pirates are just pulling down the stuff that's hot on the radio and in the clubs now.

"Just like any form of civil disobediance. Like not getting up from a bus seat even though the law says you should."

Although you later disclaimed that you are not equating the two, at some point you should take the time to talk to somebody who was involved in the civil rights clashes of the 1960s, or some other form of real civil disobedience. Explain to them that you believe that teens sitting on their ass in their basement P2Ping Gnarls Barkley is "just like any form of civil disobedience." Then watch their reaction.

Remember, kids: music piracy is civil disobedience you can dance to and put on your iPod!

"I was just wondering how much of the reported 'pirated' is older then a certian period. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the amounts by release date of the products."

I can't help you there, but you can go to bigchampagne.com and look at the top pirated music this week. Note that it's almost identical to the top ten purchased tracks as listed on the iTMS.

"None of this matters, because the market force regarding copyright is building. People in grade school today will expect music to be distributed digitally and cheaply."

It already is. Check out emusic, Magnatunes and the iTMS. The digital market is still growing exponentially, and prices are all over the board. Many people are even giving their music away for free. This has nothing to do with copyright. Digital distribution != piracy, and if you decide to become a musician, you can sell your tracks for a buck or a quarter or even give it away for free if you like. But if you do opt to try to make a living making music, and you find that giving your stuff away for free just doesn't make it worth all the hours you've put into it, God help you if people call you "greedy" and opt to pirate your stuff, using their perception of your greed as their moral impetus.

"The music corporation is nothing more then a middleman who isn't needed anymore."

Good -- then perhaps you can help me out. I'm reasonably cute; I have a good voice, I can play the guitar and I have some sheets of paper with lyrics on them. Here is what I would like to do:

1. Get into a studio. I mean a real studio; recording this stuff at home sounds like crap. I'm a musician, not a producer or an engineer.
2. Get my stuff produced, mixed, engineered and mastered. I'll need some backup musicians, as well.
3. Get it out to radio stations all over the country, and get it played.
4. Get me on TV (MTV, etc.) so that people actually know about me.
5. Get some work done on my look. I'll need wardrobe, photos, a stylist, the works.
6. Get me booked into clubs and venues.

Now, I could try for a recording contract; they'll get me a manager, an agent, and cover the costs for the production, distribution and marketing of my music. My record might not break even, which means that I may not see much, but at least I'll have a chance.

However, you point out that all these people aren't needed any more. Can you help me become a success? Note that I couldn't pay you; then you'd be in the music industry yourself and just as bad as these people that you decry. What do you say -- want to team up to make me a star, or is your "they aren't needed any more" just all talk, no action?

"But if they're making lots of money, that kind of implies not as many people are copying it, at least to a certain degree."

Maybe in Spain, but in the USA, the P2P download statistics indicate that people are pirating music in roughly the same proportion to legitimate sales. According to BigChamgagne, eight of the top ten downloaded P2P tracks this week are also on the iTMS top 100.

"Say two bands have each 1,000,000 albums in circulation, band A makes a new album and only sells one copy and the other 999,999 are copied and put onto blank CDs, they would only get the royalty for the one CD, now take band B, who makes a new album and all 1,000,000 out there are originals, now they get all the royalties for each album sold and have sales 1,000,000 times greater, and they're the ones who get the money from this new tax?"

Yes -- if that highly unlikely scenario occurs. And if the sun explodes prematurely, nobody will get the tax. Coming up with highly unlikely scenarios sure is fun. At any rate, as the GP pointed out, it's not perfect, but it's the best way that people have come up with.

"Of course we all know the record companies and RIAA equivelants are the only ones who will see any of this money."

Really? That's too bad. That's not how the USA and Canada blank media levies work. In the US I believe 12% of the levy money goes toward record companies (this is actually written out in copyright law -- the vast majority goes to artists, composers, songwriters, session musicians and singers and the like) and in Canada it's an equally tiny amount. In both the USA and Canada the record companies are on the list to receive money; they're not the distributors. If it works differently in Spain, that's unfortunate. If such a law has to exist, I prefer the US/Canada method, in which the record companies wait their turn to get paid, and get the smallest slice of the pie.

The funny thing is, the music industry, despite its disgust at P2P file sharing, has in some instances, leveraged P2P to assist in the distribution of music. See Big Champagne. They monitor P2P networks to see who's hot. In fact, I remember a Slashdot story on them a while back (too lazy to search for it).

Indeed. This topic has been covered on slashdot before, too! One such company who provides these statistics is BigChampagne.

Most of the collected data nowadays (and again I don't only mean Kazaa) is plain useless for anything even resembling an aggregate statistic.

Until the number of legal downloads FAR surpasses illegal ones, I will get my info from that list

Already exists. Check it out:

http://www.bigchampagne.com/

You don't have to go as far out of the mainstream music industry as Magnatune to find those businesses.

Big Champagne tracks P2P downloads for the marketing departments of the major record labels. This allows them to tweak their marketing programs in practically real time, unlike Arbitron ratings that take weeks to turn around.

The record labels know that in effect, P2P means music lover distributing broadcast-quality copies of their musicians' music substantially identical to what they pay to get played on the radio (Google on payola) on their own bandwidth dimes. This distribution leads to sales of the actual product, assuming it's worth buying to begin with. If an album is shit, admittedly advance P2P distribution means a record will be DOA when it hits the record stores. This recently happened to Madonna, and she's been publically whining about P2P. If an album is worth buying, record sales are boosted by P2P. Enimen's latest CD was unofficially pre-released over P2P a month before it hit the record stores. It immediately hit #1.

What the hell kind of theft results in the "victim" getting richer as a result?

Perhaps there's something other than what you and the RIAA define as theft going on here.

There are several companies providing this new service which they refer to as 'online media measurement'. One is BigChampagne . According to DMusic ,the labels pay upwards of $40,000 a month for these services!

The hypocracy of the RIAA to condemn P2P as an illegal activity and then actually use it towards its own gains just further confirms its selfish motives.

I'm not an expert in US law by any means, but can't this be useful in court against the RIAA somehow?

Oh the irony of it all!

BigChampagne?
"Because the current active audience numbers in the tens of millions, and is made up of highly motivated "early adopters," we have been able to observe close correlations between online interest and offline sales. "

or the RIAA?
"Says an RIAA spokesman: "In our view, piracy is the primary reason for the decline in sales."

I know who I'd tend to believe on that. How about you?