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Video and Software Downloads Overtaking Music
Trigun writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that movie and software downloads have outpaced music downloads. Music accounted for 48.6 percent of files shared online, compared with 62.5 percent in 2002, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The article says that 1 in 4 internet users have downloaded at least one movie, and attributes the proliferation to access to broadband. Maybe we've just downloaded all the good music already?"
Are they counting by size of file? Or maybe they are including all the .r00, .r01, .r02 files as SEPERATE files, but I don't see this as completely right.
A separate global study published Thursday by the Motion Pictures Association found that about one in four Internet users had already downloaded a movie. Most said they would pirate more if they took less time to download.
The problem is right there.
I honestly wonder how they calculate this? I daresay that the majority of people using P2P networks share their music shares which probably are around 1000 files or more. I just have a hard time seeing that most are sharing that many movies and pieces of software. i.e. those sharing movies almost certainly are also sharing songs.
What I suspect they did is just scanned for not music files. They then end up with all these small files - sometimes the content of you system directory - that dumbnits share or people trying to get a certain GB shared limit share. Yet if they count each .ini file and other such thing as a different software file, of course the number of files will outnumber music. But is that a real accurate count of movies and software shared?
i.e. shouldn't they count software packages and movies shared rather than *files* shared?
Perhaps they aren't making this mistake. But given their statistics something just smells fishy. I'd like to see their methadology.