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Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal

Posted by Soulskill on from the seems-low dept.

Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"

25 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Inflation... by alain94040 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the report:

    Music companiesâ(TM) digital revenues internationally grew by an estimated 25 per cent in 2008

    I can think of a long list of other industries that would love to have that kind of growth given the current economy.

    Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.

    --
    FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss

    1. Re:Inflation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      so did the artists themselves see at 25% increase as well, or are they being screwed on all sides now?

    2. Re:Inflation... by pestilence669 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Using an inflammatory and inflated claim that "95% of all downloads are pirated" is just showing how greedy the music industry is. But we all knew that already.

      It may not be inflated. Remember what the music industry considers piracy: Copying your library to an MP3 player, burning a CD for your car, putting your library on a laptop, etc. The industry doesn't like the fair use provisions in copyright law, so they frequently pretend like they don't exist.

      It's not like the old days, where you buy an 8-track tape for the car and LP for the house... eventually replacing them with cassette tape and compact disc... sometimes more than once. Who's ever lost or broken an album?

      Now that people can make their own copies and backups, there's a lot less opportunity to sell the exact same product repeatedly with ever increasing costs. Digital downloads tend to result in only one sale. You can't "break" an MP3 like a scratched CD. Bummer. Time to bring back Vinyl.

    3. Re:Inflation... by seanadams.com · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Their digital revenue may be up, but their overall sales are way down once again, because almost nobody buys CDs anymore, and that was their main gravy train.

      Of course, who wants CDs when they could have something digital instead?

    4. Re:Inflation... by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The fact that the digital downloads grew from 25% and went from 20% of all sales to 25% of all sales says that overall sales remained the same (ie the digital downloads were direct cannibalization of physical purchases). The numbers themselves give that for a fact.

      Couple that with the economy right now and you could say that, since the rest of the economy has gone to shit, avoiding a decline was as good as they could have hoped for. In addition, you could say that since digital downloads make a la carte purchasing possible where physical sales require you to buy a whole cd, the popular songs are getting even more popular with digital downloads. I think that 4x the number of people downloading certain songs would be good overall for the music industry since concert sales are a big draw and everything else (generally) would remain even.

      That doesn't take into account the cost to produce a cd or the comparitive profit margins between the two. I don't know what those comparisons are and I'm not even going to guess at them since the rest of my post is based on things that are true and relatively simple extrapolations from that point, but I will say that I personally believe that the shift from physical to digital media isn't hurting their business, although it is definitely changing it. Let's call it a horizontal shift with opportunities to capitalize on the change.

    5. Re:Inflation... by gbarules2999 · · Score: 4, Informative

      "You can't "break" an MP3 like a scratched CD." Unless you're running an unpatched Windows 7 beta. http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/05/warning-windows-7-beta-could-corrupt-your-mp3s

    6. Re:Inflation... by againjj · · Score: 4, Informative

      Remember that the digital revenue increase is matched with a non-digital revenue decrease. That is, increased downloads come in part from people who used to buy CDs. So, total revenues are not up 25%.

    7. Re:Inflation... by nofx_3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How about these maths:
       
      Assume that instead the 40 billion downloads were legal downloads, and not even count the other 5%. Lets also assume that a download is worth 99 cents. Of that, the RI takes a huge chunk, I couldn't find exact numbers but lets say for the sake of argument the RI gets 50 cents (a low estimate in my opinion as the artist gets less than 10 cents in royalties, and apple claims most of the 99 cents goes to the recording industry). So at 50 cents per track this would mean additional revenues for the record industry of 2 TRILLION cents, or about 20 billion dollars. There is no way they were making their current cd sales + legal downloads + extra 20 billion prior to digital downloading.
       
      So what does this tell us? Most downloads are not lost sales. The fact is that people consume many times more music because of music downloads, than if they had to pay.
       
      I'll use myself as an example, prior to MP3's I bought about 12 albums a year or 1 per month. I'd say today I still buy about 12 albums per year, but I also download 3-4 additional albums per month that I never would have bought (i.e. worth a listen or two but not worth my money). Basically I am adding to the download statistics, but the statistics are misleading because the RI has lost no sales in my case. I think the numbers are extremely inflated because of this.

      --
      Visualize Whirled Peas
    8. Re:Inflation... by mikechant · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hey, what do you use to rip 'em?
      What format do you output to?

      I'm actually in the middle of ripping my entire 300+ CD collection which starts with CDs from about 20 years ago. And yes, some of them do 'rust', but this doesn't necessarily mean you can't get a good rip from them. The central factor is (command line tool) cdparanoia. I use two gui interfaces which use cdparanoia. Mostly, I use rubyripper. This uses cdparanoia with no error correction etc. - but it rips in chuncks two or more times and compares the results, and rerips (only the) bad chunks repeatedly. For 'good quality' CDs it rips much faster than any other reliable method. For about 1 cd in 50 with bad scratches or corrosion I use Grip, which by default uses cdparanoia in 'maximum paranoia mode'. This can be *a lot* slower than using rubyripper but it will rip any but the most damaged discs.

      Woo! While typing this comment I've discovered my missing (genuine shop bought) copy of Marillion's "Script for a Jester's Tear" in the wrong CD case.

      Anyhow, I've ripped about 200/300 now with complete sucess using the above.

      You also asked what format to rip to. With current disc space prices, the *only* answer is lossless. FLAC is probably best, you can easily convert this to wav or any other format and it doesn't take much more space than good quality compressed. If you've got plenty of disc space, like I have, you might as well use uncompressed wav format - makes life simpler. My whole music collection uncompressed will fit in about 200Gb

  2. Sales are up so who cares by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Advice to the RIAA: forget the piracy exists. You simply are not going to ever get money from those people - get over it. On the other hand, you're making more money than every from downloads and you should work to keep growing those figures. That's the only thing you can do, frankly. Fighting piracy is like punching marshmallows.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    1. Re:Sales are up so who cares by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Funny

      You talkin' marshmallows or record company executives?

      Yep.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  3. I call bullsh*t! by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How can they be sure 95% of them are illegal? Isn't this the same group that's for years been trying to track down who is downloading what and suing them? I mean, studies like this go to the honesty of the other person. And if people will lie about something as trivial as how many sexual partners they've had, what are the odds of people telling the truth here? Besides, if 95% of music downloads were illegal, that's a pretty strong argument that downloading music should be legalized, especially considering how pervasive it is and how ineffective enforcement has been to date.

    There are three kinds of lies...

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:I call bullsh*t! by CrackedButter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The thing is, I can download illegal music and then purchase legal music, does this mean they counted the illegal music as a lost sale even though I also bought legitimate music? How can anybody know what I'm doing. As you said there are lies...

      --
      Jonathanjk.com
    2. Re:I call bullsh*t! by slazzy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I wonder if they take into account people downloading music for cds/albums/tapes which they own but are damaged or lost. I have a few friends who have to regularly re-download their music collection each time they get a new computer as they have no idea how to transfer files from one computer to another etc... these same people only seem to download the same 80's music that they already have cassette tapes for, but it's easier to download rather than digitize the music.

      --
      Website Just Down For Me? Find out
    3. Re:I call bullsh*t! by mrsteveman1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How can they be sure 95% of them are illegal?

      This is what is going on here. The media companies decide, beforehand, how much money they should be making in a given period of time, based on voodoo bullshit as far as i can tell, then if they don't make that much money they bitch about the pirates and blame losses on them.

      So while their digital revenue and legal downloads have probably gone up, the RIAA and the companies they represent think it should be going up MORE, a lot more apparently. The problem is they are fucking wrong, and have no credibility to say anything in public anymore.

    4. Re:I call bullsh*t! by timmarhy · · Score: 4, Insightful
      they can't be sure, i suspect they have arrived at his figure by checking for pirated content on torrent sites. so really they should be saying "95% of music on torrents is pirated". Which i would have no issue with - i think they would be right.

      the problem is they then leap straight to this dream land where every download is a sale they missed out on. most of their shit isn't worth a download when it's free, let alone 15$.

      --
      If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
  4. Well then there is only one solution... by 3seas · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... Tell the Artist to stop making illegal music.

  5. One thing this shows us... by riceboy50 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you provide customer-friendly channels for obtaining music legally online, your sales will increase. Quit yer bellyachin' already.

    --
    ~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
  6. In other news... by PixelThis · · Score: 4, Funny

    95% of statistics are made up on the spot.

  7. amazon number 1 - NiN by spandex_panda · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I read that NiNs' freely available album was the highest selling digital music seller on Amazon I just checked tpb and the fellow who created the torrent says the whole album is CC share alike!

    So this means that the album IS available for free to legally download via torrent AND it was the highest sale on Amazon. Remarkable eh!

    --
    like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
  8. In other news by kpainter · · Score: 5, Funny

    5% of all music downloads are overpriced.

  9. Okay, now by willoughby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...let's go through that list of "illegal" downloads & find what percentage are not available for "legal" purchase/download.

    In other words, how much of that music is not available from any "legal" source?

  10. 100% by Nonillion · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sheesh, why not say it's 100%, or even 99.999% At least come up with some believable percentage for crying out loud..

    --
    "I bow to no man" - Riddick
  11. 8 years ago... by K_E_Morr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    100% of music downloads were illegal. Sounds like the RIAA is making progress

  12. Best selling single by Xelios · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The top-selling digital single of 2008 was Lil Wayne's Lollipop with sales of 9.1 million units"

    I think my hope for the human race just died a little.

    --
    Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.