Pew Study Says RIAA Tactics Are Working

Furd writes "The Pew Internet & American Life Project has posted a new data study that purports to show that the RIAA lawsuit strategy has successfully reduced P2P filesharing. While the presentation of the data is weak (poor graphics and weak statistics), the report does suggest that there has been a change in the usage of P2P tools."

Comments

Correlation does not equal causation

[Taboo]

1. 2003 has seen the biggest emergence of legitimate pay-per-song services to date.
2. The 4 p2p application listed in Pew's report (KaZaa, WinMX, BearShare and Grokster) will naturally lose marketshare due to the availablity of newer, more sophisticated applications.

Re:Correlation does not equal causation

[epiphani]

Just out of curiousity, short bittorrent - which requires a web-based torrent, what other 'more sophisticated' applications are you speaking of?

I'd also like to add number three to that list:

3. December is also a very busy time for just about everyone. Expecting people to be downloading mp3s just as much during the holiday season is just .. stupid.

Sidenote: as a Canadian, I dont plan on buying a single CD or paying for a single song from the major labels while I'm paying a music industry tax on my blank media.

Re:Correlation does not equal causation

[TPFH]

why such a story is posted when this is self-evident than someone is going to refute the very content of the story ?

Common sense isn't all that common, and understanding of statistics even less so. Sure, we know the statistics of the mainstream media, let alone the RIAA puppets, is a joke, but what about "regular people."

Then again, even if the "regular people" believe this statistic, what good would it do the RIAA? Well, it might put more of the fear of lawsuits into them. My girlfriend worries that I might get sued, even though it is about the same odds as winning the lottery and I don't share RIAA music. Maybe the RIAA is hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It seems futile to refute RIAA propaganda, but as they say, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Or is it just meant to allow us to put some more sarcasms to the RIAA ? I still wonder.

Sarcasm of the RIAA can be entertaining.
Articles about the RIAA attract readers.

Is this new?

Re:Correlation does not equal causation

[Ryosen]

I must have missed the memo...when did purchasing music become compulsory? If he doesn't want to buy a product, that is his decision as a consumer. But you raise an interesting point, one that I think underlines the basic problem with the music industry today. It seems that you, as a representative of the music industry, feel a sense of entitlement. It is apparent that you are under the impression that it is our civic responsibility to purchase your product without regard to whether we want your product or not. This is an unfortunate position but just goes to illustrate a fundamental and continuing flaw with the recording industry: not listening to and addressing the needs of its customers.

You accuse the parent of "sticking it to" and "shafting it to" "the rest of the world" as if he is some sick, depraved individual whose actions exist with the sole intent of causing harm to everyone else. "How dare you not purchase my product!" you seem to say. You even go so far as to admit that you are in favor of legistlation mandating the subsidizing of the music industry by leveling a tax on people.

Until you modify your attitude of entitlement and lose your contempt for your target market, your product will continue to become less relevant and desired.

bad statistics

[cyberwave]

People who are stupid enough to respond to those surveys are also stupid enough to respond to the RIAA lawsuits.

Changing p2p habits:

[CptChipJew]

I'm sure there are fewer users of Kazaa nowadays due to all the press that this campaign has had towards it.

But there are still plenty of strong networks out there. I'm sure some of those Kazaa users have migrated over to them.

What really matters

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

From a smart business point of view (which is not necessarily that of the RIAA) it is not if there has been a reduction in freeloading downloads, but rather if there has been an increase in people paying money for music (physical CDs or paid downloads). Since those numbers are not being hyped all over the news, I'm willing to bet that the actual dollar numbers are still declining or at the very least not increasing in anywhere near the proportion of the decreased freeloading downloads.

My opinion...

[SB5]

I know that Kazaa has been flooded with tons of bad song files. The popular ones at least. Record companies have found out that for a hash on a song it does the first 300kb or something and then uses it exponentially.

I don't know of any other fairly popular file sharing program that you can find anything with, also it seems to be that there have been success with online music purchasing, specifically iTunes with 25 million songs downloaded.

Not really big news, everyone knew if the companies offered a dollar per song, and this is years ago, napster-era stuff, that people would buy it, but the record companies wanted to buck the consumer and squeeze that last few pennies out by not changing the industry despite what the people actually wanted.

People are weak.

[DroopyStonx]

It's truly sad to see so many people buckle under the pressure of the RIAA. It just makes the RIAA think they're getting what they want and makes them that much more delusional.

Oh well, just a matter of time before highly encrypted and anonymous P2P hits the masses. Then we can all lean back and smile as they scurry about trying to stop it.

Bad Statistics!

[cyberwave]

People who are stupid enough to respond to those surveys are also stupid enough to respond to the RIAA lawsuits and pay for music. Furthermore, this year has seen the rise of many legitimate music download services! You can't measure something and then point the finger to whatever cause is convienient!

pew falls into the RIAA beancounting trap

[MoFoQ]

Just like how the RIAA blame poor sales on piracy instead of the economy and crappy music, the reason why p2p sharing is going down can also be because of crappy music and the economy (ppl not being able to afford broadband anymore or the storage space or spend their time working menial jobs to survive, etc.)

Just because it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, doesn't ALWAYS mean that it is...it can be a penguin in a duck suit. (lil' linux joke, btw).

kazaalite

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely the action to cut off kazaalite (by the owners of Kazaa) has had more effect then legal action against consumers by the RIAA.

There is no way in hell I will install that spyware invested crap called Kazaa Media Desktop.

And Gnutella is way too slow over a modem, which is still the predominant form of Internet access. (Well it was when I last tried it)

The real question is...

[narratorDan]

Which tactic is working? Suing the crap out of d/l'rs or the rise in legitimate sources of online music?

Or it could be the other reason, I've got all the songs I want.

NarratorDan

Biased

[CelticWhisper]

Call me paranoid, but is it really that far-fetched a notion that the RIAA may have had considerable direct influence over what was written in that report? The more people write that the RIAA's tactics are working, the more other people will begin to believe that it's true, and it could potentially mean more people being scared away from using P2P to acquire music.

Of course, this says nothing for uncopyrighted, public-domain, or non-RIAA music, but given that the RIAA has had a history of using sledgehammers to swat flies, I daresay they'd be happier just stomping out P2P altogether than they would be with just getting their own music off of it.

Inevitable?

[Kobayashi Maru]

I hate to admit it, but I do think that the RIAA will ultimately win this battle. Much as consumers accepted a higher price with the arrival of casette tapes, then CDs, some form of DRM will probably win out.

I've heard the argument that consumers will not accept paying for an intangible (that is, no physical object). But the iTunes model allows the consumer, in a limited way, control over the physical. From their purchase, they burn their physical dividend. One could argue that the consumer gains *more* through DRM/license-ware, as some plans allow the consumer to burn multiple CDs.

Most of the people I know (by that, I mean average, largely non-technical) still buy the occasional CD. They hate the RIAA in the abstract for Napster, but it does not stop them from buying. More and more have given up on P2P. Whether it's fear of a lawsuit or general hastle of finding Top-40, it just isn't worth their time anymore.

The RIAA doesn't need to destroy P2P, that would be impossible. All it needs to do is break it sufficiently to make their "alternative" more attractive. I personally believe thing will reach an equilibrium, eventually. P2P will always be around, in some form, for the dedicated. The RIAA will be sure to quash anything before it reaches critical mass. While on the other hand, DRM-ware will evolve into something more accomodating.

What about non-centralized networks?

[GrandCow]

I still download music without paying for it. I probably download more now than ever. The funny thing is I still buy the music that I think is good enough to hear more than once or twice.

Do I use Kazaa? hell no! I have to download 10 versions of a song just to get the "real" version of it... the one without some weird sound effects or just being the first 10 seconds repeated for the 4 minutes that the song should really be.

Welcome to bittorrent land. I'll not post the URL from the server I use regularly for obvious reasons, but rest assured I can get more there than I could with Kazaa anyday. Now I download whole albums at a time instead of just 1 or 2 songs in order to determine if a record is worth buying.

The great thing about bittorrent is that if people find that a song or album is fake they just stop sharing it. All of a sudden that album that should have 2000 people sharing it because it's so good only has 2 people sharing it (and they'll stop as soon as they unzip it and listen). That tells me to pass and find the real version.

I hope the RIAA realizes that instead of ending the problem they just made it burrow deeper. This time there is no centralized network that they can shut down in order to maximize profits from the unsuspecting consumer. If they kill one, 5 more will show up in it's place. I hope they are happy with what they have caused to be created.

Right now, the networks are small. Remember how small Napster or Kazaa began as? What happened a few months to a year later? Exactly... Expect 2004 or 2005 to be the year of bittorrent (or another decentralized network)

Re:What about non-centralized networks?

[GrodinTierce]

While 2004 or 2005 may be the "Year of BitTorrent", you seem to be mistaking BT for a decentralized network. While it may be more difficult for the RIAA to locate the servers that host the trackers, and new ones will inevitably pop up, the hassle of keeping up to date with BT servers is really all the RIAA needs; I doubt they've ever seriously imagined stopping all filesharing, but simply making it too much of a hassle/complicated for Joe Sixpack.

Also, I think that there is a common misunderstanding, particularly in the (big, scary) world outside of /., that America's youth (in general) are simply guaranteed to grow up computer-literate. While they may be more comfortable with computers than their parents, they're rarely much more knowledgable.

Although BT itself is pretty transparent, just click the link and download, actually finding usable torrents for content can be surprisingly difficult. With Kazaa, it's just open it up, search, and get many, many results (which used to be generally good, in terms of quality and authenticity, but the probability of success is decreasing), and then click. The fact that Kazaa (and Napster before it) was so transparent and simple was part of the reason so many college-students left it on, without even bothering to limit their upload.

However, to be fair, I think you're right about the trend towards decentralized networks, and I must admit, I'm not very familiar with eMule/eDonkey, but it does sound promising.

I wonder...

[SharpFang]

...if they took shut down off Kazaa Lite into account.

a matter of time

[Captain Entendre]

Oh well, just a matter of time before highly encrypted and anonymous P2P hits the masses.

Without a doubt.

I'd wager that the plaintext-and-public P2P networks are declining in direct proportion to an increase in the popularity of encrypted-and-(somewhat-)private networks. Stopping people who want to swap files will be every bit as difficult as stopping spammers. The infrastructure is just too well suited to the application.

RIAA tactics are like antibiotics

[IshanCaspian]

They have the effect of imposing natural selection on our P2P networks. Those that have vulnerable infrastructure will fall, and ones that do not will prosper. Sure, they are accomplishing their goal in the shortest of short terms, but they're creating the motivation and inspiration for unstoppable, anonymous pirate networks. It may look like the music industry is getting healthier, but they're just encouraging the creation of a bigger, badder bug.

Re:Yeah.... Shhh!

[Erik Hollensbe]

You just opened up a can of worms. :)

Regardless, most of the *good* news connections are pay-for anyways, which leaves most of the college kiddies with virus-laden P2P tools.

Two flaws in the research model

[the-banker]

Though it doesn't completely discredit the research, there are flaws (one large, one not so large) that are immediately evident.

1. It was a telephone survey, which by law excludes the sampling of minors. All anecdotal research I have seen is that minors make up a significant population of online file traders. It is my opinion that this segment of the population could have a serious impact on the results.

2. The fact that the research is conducted during a time when the RIAA is efectively criminalizing file sharing will motivate people to answer dishonestly for fear of being "tagged" a copyright violator. When a survey relies on an honest answer to be an admission of criminal activity, people will not be as forthright with their answers.

I don't think that this would change the overall answer, that copyrighted file trading is down, but I think it would sigificantly impact the degree of its decrease. I think the Pew Internet research is most likely overstating the impact of the lawsuits.

Which actually raises another issue - how much of the decline can be attributed to other factors, such as:

1. Poor music released in 4th qtr 2003

2. Increased self-regulation of file sharing in the University/College segment

3. Filesharing becoming "old news" - basically the idea that everyone gets a TON of music when they first discover file sharing, then taper off as the previous 3 months of new music is no where near the volume of multiple decades of music people were grabbing at the outset.

4. The proliferation of licensed online music distribution, such as iTunes, Napster 2.0, etc

All in all I would conclude that the research has limited usefulness in measuring the effects of RIAA subpoena activity.

Re:It worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

In this context, "Lossy" and "lossless" refer to the compression algorhythms, NOT as you seem to impute, the original encoding of the material. A mp3 (lossy compression) ripped from a 44.1 pcm stream will sound worse than a flac, shn, or ape (lossless compression) taken from the same stream.

That quibble aside, yes I agree with you. Taken to its logical conclusion, the best way to listen to great music is hearing great musicians play it live. So get out there and support them, dammit!

Surveys also find....

[91degrees]

That instances of jaywalking are lower in a police state.

I don't doubt the statistics, but are threats of disproportionate punishment really the way a civilised society should behave?

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

...blackmail works - what's new?

Mike

Cloudburst Bar

Re:In Boolean Algebra, Logic Tests You!

[Spock the Baptist]

---Methodology---

The Pew study was based on a poll.

I believe that one might be forgiven if they were skeptical that the change in the data is due to 'lip service' rather than representing an actual change in downloading habits. It may be that RIAAs lawsuit strategy has not altered downloading behavior so much as it's influenced the respondents forthrightness in answering questions about downloading.

Good

[Junior J. Junior III]

Now when CD sales continue to slump, the RIAA will have to find something else to blame.

Re:I'm sorry, but that's total bull crap

[Rich0]

While they can carry more information, they don't carry additional audible information.

Most people don't have hearing which exceeds a 90dB dynamic range - a few extra bits are lost on them. He simply pointed out that going beyond 20 bits is completely silly since you can't even mechanically reproduce the sound using any known technology - even if you could you probably wouldn't hear the difference.

The higher sampling rate does not contain any additional audible information - your hearing doesn't exceed 22KHz - which is perfectly reproduced on a standard CD. However, if cheap equipment is used, then noise in the 18-22KHz range, while not directly audible, can get reproduced in lower, audible, frequency ranges. If proper recording and playback equipment is used, the 44KHz sampling rate reproduces accurately every sound ANY human ear can hear. By increasing the sampling rate to 96KHz you can start using cheaper recording and playback equipment without impacting the audible sound (it will still produce noise - but noise which is now too high to hear).

It all depends on how you define information. Most people listen to music with their ears. If you prefer to attach a spectrum analyzer directly to the headphone jack of your stereo and watch the music on the screen instead, then you will certainly find that arbitrarily increasing the sampling rate of your media will yield improvements (though probably not much once you get past 24 bit and a few GHz - since little in the way of electronics can handle these ranges). Most people actually prefer to listen to their music instead of watching it, however, so reproducing with 100% fidelity every sound the human ear is capable of hearing is good enough. The CD already accomplishes this - and as indicated by the parent a few improvements may make it cheaper to make good-sounding CD players.

Re:Yeah.... Shhh!

[Anonymous Coward]

When most people see whats available on IRC, and the general high(er) quality rips, they get excited but when the see the "effort" required to get it they almost all loose interest!

Because it's like going back to the bad-old days of having to upload warez before you can download any. It's a catch-22 situation in which you must supply some good warez that they don't have before you can download any. How do you seed your collection? I'd stick with good old P2P networks and let the 31337 dudez use IRC and Usenet.

Great..Encourage them

[nurb432]

Just what we all need. Helping them "prove" what the are doing is just and effective.

Anything can be 'proven' if you extrapolate out of context, even when the ultimate conclusion is false.

Re:New Tactics

[turnstyle]

"Yup, new tactics are being employed. For example, I built a nice private, encrypted peer-to-peer network."

fwiw, the RIAA would consider that a victory. Your community of a dozen or so users is far less of a threat than a community of millions.

And if you personally set it all up, you may be personally liable...

Re:New Tactics

[mse61]

WASTE is a wonderful technology, but as a practical alternative to a P2P program like KaZaA it is not. After it first came out there was a test done to see how many simultaneous clients could survive on the network and still have it work as anticipated. Due to the mesh topology of the network it was only able to support about 120 simultaneous users before it became very unstable. I'm sure with some optimizations you could get that over 200, but I highly doubt you'll ever come close to the 2 million plus connected to KaZaA at any given time.

The next question to ask is . . .

[srchestnut]

How many CD's have they sold as a result? I don't think anyone who had thousands of mp3's is willing to go out and buy 50 or 100 cds because they quit filesharing. More likely, Mr. RIAA, people just aren't listening to your music anymore.

Re:The U.S. did it 12 years ago.

[clifyt]

What the fuck is a levy or tarrif if not a specialized tax? Its not a royalty in any means.

This only happens on blank 'Music CDs'. It doesn't really help out any artists. The canadian system actually ends up to the artists, where this goes 99% to the RIAA who don't redistribute anything.

As for digital audio recorders -- easy to get around these requirements -- disable true bitwise copying. Hell, several consumer level sound card manufacturers actually degrade the out bits (giving you a quality anywhere between 12 and 24 bits at any given sample), where as the professional level (the 'prosumer' as they are called these days) aren't given this requirement because they are actually aimed at the folks that this fund would go to (quite a few 'pro' audio interfaces are being sold as consumer these days).

In the end, very few are ever penalized for this as its only the machines that are solely designed to duplicate consumer's audio from prerecorded cds that really end up paying for this (these are the ones that generally require the music cd blanks to work -- and I *DO* support this as a levy because there are no other reason to copy audio cds from a consumer end than to get around paying for it...my Primera 150 Disc duplicator doesn't give a damn about what kind of burnables I use, while the Panasonic CD-Duper a friend has does).

As for Happy birthday, thats a little fucked up. The words are copyrighted (yeah ANYTHING can get a copyright as long as its original), while the music is from an earlier period (Good Morning to You was the first words...you can figure out the rest). By pairing the music with the title, you have thus announced you are associating it with the copyrighted pair of Music / Words as opposed to the earlier versions (pre-copyright).

In the same sense, and you might be too young to remember this, in the 70s there was a really bad disco version of The Fifth of Bethovin (I can't spell today)...if you were to record the original and title it as Disco's Fifth of Beothvin Stripped, the guy that did the original could sue you. Two years ago, an artist was sued because he attributed John Cage to a 'silent' piece on his album in reference to 4'33. If he had not attributed it, even jokingly, he would not have been sued. As he implicitly was using the trademarked name and doing the same sort of thing, ligitious family members sued. Bullshit in some senses, common sense in others...

This issue isn't really too deep, but unless you have a constant hand in all of these issues (and have to deal with lawyers ready to bend ya over at a moments notice), it is confusing. Then again, in my other employments as a computer programmer, I also don't expect the average person to understand C++ (nor any other programmer other than the original scripter to understand a perl app :-).

clif
Sonikmatter, LLC

The obvious conclusion

[Thedalek]

A new nationwide phone survey of 1,358 Internet users from November 18-December 14 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that the percentage of music file downloaders had fallen to 14% (about 18 million users) from 29% (about 35 million)...

Over the next 6 months, expect the RIAA to officially request the names of each and every person who participated in the poll, so that they too can be sued/threatened.

Re:I'm sorry, but that's total bull crap

[jwdb]

There may be no information loss, but that does not neccessarily mean that the reproduction is perfect. All CD players, especially low-end ones, are sensitive to jitter (especially prevalent above 14kHz where you only have two sample points per period, thus the so-called 14kHz limit for CDs), one of the more noticable forms of distortion, and have issues with odd-order harmonics, a characteristic of solid-state amplifiers. Your 96dB range is also only theory on anything but top of the line studio gear - you go that low on anything else and you'lle end up with a whole mess of quantization errors and external noise. So although in theory you have no information loss, you're always going to have a degree of distortion, and the trick is to try and reduce it to an acceptable level for the listener.

If you want good music, go to a live show.

Jw

Re:Not that coincidental

[Greg W.]

the anti-capitalist P2Pers

Newspeak! Double-plus un-good!

I've been hearing quite a lot of this lately, from liberal and independent media sources. I don't think anyone is using the word capitalism correctly any more. Your particular use may have been sarcastic (it's hard to tell), but I'm reacting in a more general sense to all of the "anti-capitalist forces" out there who have been perverting a perfectly good word and turning it into a label for "the status quo", which they dislike. I can rant on this for a while, but I'll try to keep this one focused.

Let's start with the definition:

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

capitalism
n : an economic system based on private ownership of capital
[syn: {capitalist economy}] [ant: {socialism}]

This also relies on the definition of capital which is basically wealth used to produce more wealth -- in other words investment.

So, what does peer-to-peer file sharing have to do with capitalism? As far as I can see, no such relationship exists. However, if there were any such relationship -- excuse me for a moment as I voyage out into the hypothetical -- it would be just the opposite of what your phrase implies.

What is copyright? Copyright is the right to copy something. That sounds really simple, doesn't it? In fact, that's too simplistic. What good is the right to copy? Isn't that just like the right to breathe?

See, what copyright really is, is the right to prevent other people from copying something. Now, that's something worth talking about! Your government (I assume that the Gentle Reader is from a nation which has a copyright statute of some sort) has decided that it would be a grand idea to let one person say to another: "You may not copy this, for I hold the power of copyright over it. I alone may copy it."

How does one go about enforcing such a thing? Back in the days when such laws were first created, it was a simple matter, because copying the items in question (books) required substantial resources -- a printing press, for one. So you could just keep an eye on everyone with a printing press and make sure they didn't produce copies of books that are copyrighted by someone else.

This was feasible because there weren't very many printing presses. A printing press is an investment, used to produce wealth (printed books, which have more value than their constituent ink and paper). So, a printing press is capital by the economic definition. The use of a (privately owned) printing press to make copies of a work is a capitalist activity.

How does copyright interact with this? Copyright says that, for a given work (book, phonorecord, etc.), a ban on copying shall exist until a specific amount of time has passed. That is, a governmentally enforced monopoly is granted, to one person or group of people, for the production and distribution of this work.

This is anti-capitalist. In a pure capitalist marketplace, everyone would be allowed to produce copies of the work, and distribute them in a competitive fashion. Because of copyright, a capitalist market for this work is not allowed to flourish. Let met say it again for those of you who are just skimming: Copyright is anti-capitalist.

So, what does that make peer-to-peer software? Let's take a specific work as an example: say, a copy of the studio recording of Yesterday by The Beatles. Despite the fact that half the band is deceased, this recording is still covered by copyright in most countries, and will continue to be so covered for another few generations. But how many copies of this recording can you find? There's one on a plastic disc in your local record store -- that's a government-approved one. iTunes probably has one in encumbered AAC format -- and that's also government-approved, at least if you don't do anything with it. There's probably one -- or a thousand -- in MP

Re:In Boolean Algebra, Logic Tests You!

[soft_guy]

Ever since the RIAA started suing little girls, when a stranger calls me on the phone to ask if I download music from the internet I now say "no - and what's more I never have" instead of "yes, in fact I'm doing it right now."

Of course it's working - but it doesn't matter.

[Funksaw]

RIAA's tactics, of course, has changed whether or not people will file-share.

Hell, I quit myself and I told my friends and family to quit until the whole thing blows over (which, after the court case knocking out RIAA vs. Verizon) it seems close to doing.

However, everytime I told people this, I also told them about the false arrests, and the fact that they're suing 12 year olds from the projects, and said "If you want them to stop, stop buying CDs."

Then I point them at CDBaby.

I've bought more albums in the past 8 months since they've started this crap than I have in my entire life - and NONE of them have been from RIAA member labels.

Oh, also...

That doesn't mean that stopping P2P stops downloading. Newsgroups and IRC are still going strong, and are only bolstered by this.

The RIAA's strategy just doesn't work on a fundimental level. The only people who are going to be informed enough of the strategy to be frightened are going to be frightened enough to be pissed at the labels and not buy their stuff.

-- Funksaw

I'm done sharing

[PetoskeyGuy]

Seriously I think I have every song I could ever want. I haven't had to load up eMule for a weeks. Christmas songs, books on tape, science lectures... it's all there. I suppose I'm getting old, but nothing I've heard on the radio in the past month sounds any good at all.

My last batch of downloads I can recall was trying to find something new. Polynesian and asian music, some french stuff I can't understand, but it sounds good. I wonder how many other people have sort of had their fill and are taking a break.

There is NO "staircase nature" in digital signal

[melted]

That's why they have that steep sinc(x) filter after DAC. The signal is reproduced EXACTLY as it was recorded - nice'n'smooth, accurate in amplitude and phase. See Shannon-Kotelnikov's theorem for proof. It's hard to grasp the concept of restoring high-frequency components of the signal by just a few measurements per sine cycle, but all this stuff is well known and mathematically proven.

One COULDN'T pay until recently....

[gatkinso]

...come to think of it.

Now that you can legally buy music online, people are (or atleast seem to be).

Why did it take the misuc industry meatheads so long to offer a legal alternative for something people clearly wanted (and were willing to pay for)?