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P2P Music Downloads At All-Time Low
RedEaredSlider writes "According to research group NPD Group, the shuttering of Limewire's music file sharing service has led to a similar decline in the usage of such services throughout the US. The number has gone from a high of 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to just nine percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, right after Limewire shut down its file-sharing services due to a court order, when a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)."
And they are reaaaallllly proud that they /finally/ killed music sharing after the cassette tape, CD, and Intarwebs fiascos.
Most people I know stopped downloading music after Spotify came a few years ago. It's an awesome service, and I gladly pay the monthly fee for it. Others take the ad supported version. But all in all, it did wonders to stop piracy.
The same can be said about Steam. I currently own over 250 games on Steam and I gladly buy more, as it's easy, fast and just works. Yeah yeah, Steam might go down in 500 years, but you know what, I don't care. It's great for me now and I probably won't be playing those games then, if they even work with that generations systems. And if I really want to play some classic again, there will always be (and even increasingly) services similar to Good Old Games and console stores that sell old games cheaply and modified to work with current systems.
Those two services have come to a point where it's easier and better to buy than pirate. Now just give me the same for movies and TV and I'm set. And I wont be making any stupid comments about how music labels are ripping off hard working artists (while forgetting the artists signed that contract themself) or how some item you buy should still be working 1000 years from now, because frankly I don't care. I just want a good working service where I can throw my money and get the product quickly and easily.
And on a related note, I just bought Crysis 2, Portal 2 and Assassins Creed: Brotherhood from Steam. All great games (AssBro has amazingly fun multiplayer where everyone have targets to kill while also being someone elses target).
Editors, can we get a story about the $75 trillion P2P lawsuit soon plz?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
There isn't much left to download.
Music sales suddenly skyrocket right? Right?? Oh, they're still abysmal. Never mind then.
before the interwebs!
There is a decline in music downloads that NPD Group is able to track.
Think about that one for a second.
Technoli
The number has gone from a high of 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to just nine percent in the fourth quarter of 2010
16% of what? the article doesn't mention.
16% of the population? 16% of what it used to be?
Or are services like Pandora, Spotify, and even iTunes giving the consumers what they want at a price they want and thus helping to drive pirating down?
I am guessing this doesn't include the boatload of private tracker torrenting going on...
there has been an economic downturn for the last several years that seems to not be recovering or as the spin doctors like to tell it it is a "jobless recovery" so basically less & less people have the money to waste on movies & music and other trivial entertainment media, and things like beans & rice and bread are taking a higher priority than before since there is less money to spread around...
i wonder how much movies, music and video people will be buying during a complete economic depression like what there was during the 1930's
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You mean lower than they were in, say, 1776?
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Since the death of Miles David and Mr. Cash, no good music is produced anymore. Why would you waste precious bandwith on the trash made in Idols, Popstars and all those other not-music-but-profit related shows?
spotify
... pop music produced at an all time high. Correlation? positive
Part of the reason for this is probably that p2p services have declined in quality with more spam on gnutella than ever and the younger ones who would do the p2p'ing not knowing how to use torrents (i've tried to help people use them often and for some reason they get confused about it) additionally, streaming services cut it for alot of people specially with the advent of apps like pandora. I personally replaced limewire with firefox+media download addon+grooveshark/similar sites. The download speed from such places is often far faster than p2p
if we check back on our nonclear religious/crusade training, that's how it is supposed to be? music in the air at all times? not yet/here.
That most music right now utterly sucks?
Honestly I have not bought a song off of itunes for 3 months now because 90% of it is crap and the other 10% is uninteresting.. Lately I have been looking for illegal remixes and mashups. Those guys have some real talent...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't know about others, but since Amazon started selling unencrypted MP3s, I've stopped turning to illegal sources for music.
Challenge accepted.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I didn't know anyone even still used Limewire in the last few years. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but I assume the amount of people affected by Limewire shutdown was low, and most of them would have just found alternate methods.
I think if anything, any decline in P2P music downloads would be down so streaming services such as Spotify. As always, there will be the minority who will download everything and refuse to ever pay for music, but the majority are those who gladly buy CDs from their favorite artists, but don't want to pay $10+ for every album they might like a song or two on.
Of course, these are also the same sort of people that the RIAA and such count as "lost money", saying they'd have had x millions of dollars if people hadn't downloaded. In reality, these people would probably have never paid full price for most of the music they download illegally. Instead, these people are now giving Spotify money, either through monthly fees or listening to their ads, to listen to those odd songs. I don't really know how Spotify provides the music legally, but I assume they pay the record companies large sums for their music.
Most people never really cared that they were getting music 'illegally', they just wanted to listen to something and services like Limewire provided the quickest way. Now they don't.
It's one thing to say that they've gone down, but another entirely to claim what's causing it.
I used to download music because it was more convenient than driving to the store and let me sample the music before deciding if I even wanted it. Then companies started offering digital downloads, but most of it was DRM-encumbered so I still stayed away. However, after most stores went DRM-free there was no reason not to use them. Sure I could still get it for free somewhere else, but the music stores made it quicker to find what I wanted.
The only thing that still needs to change is allowing me to listen to an entire album at least once before buying it. Not all songs are done justice by thirty second previews and some albums can't even begun to be appreciated if the only thing you get are half-minute slices.
Based on my own experiences, clamping down on P2P isn't going to do anything. There are still plenty of other ways to get at the content if you want it badly enough. If companies started releasing DRM-free video at reasonable prices I'd probably spent a lot more money on that as well. If you give people a convenient solution they'll gravitate towards it. That means online, no DRM-hassle, and reasonable prices. Now that music meets those criteria I've been buying more than at any other point in my life, even before P2P was an option.
gsh
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
when Pandora and Grooveshark can satisfy all your music needs through the cloud? A drop in media piracy likely has little to do with copyright enforcement and much more to do with cloud streaming services that offer content for free.
Once something goes underground, it's increasingly difficult to get reliable numbers because people are trying not to be seen doing it. Obviously some of them are succeeding.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If you believe this, you qualify for a job at the Libyan Ministry of Information ! I hear they pay well !
Pop music is so bad that people won't even pirate it.
If ever there was a time when might be shown a connection between illegal downloads and sales, this might be it. Has there been an increase in legitimate sales? I'm guessing not. I suspect that as other, legal means of collecting music online have come about, people are simply abandoning the illegal means.
People just want what they want. They aren't "criminal minds" and certainly never needed to be attacked with lawsuits. They just want what they want. When they have an affordable and legal way to get it, that's what they will do. I don't think it's any more complicated than that.
OK, so we have a high of 16% in fourth quarter of 2007 and a low of 9% in the fourth quarter of 2010. Leaving aside that neither here nor in the linked story does it say precent of what, we still have the question of what happened between 2007 and 2010. The article concludes that it must be because of the shutdown of Limewire in the 3rd quarter of 2010. I might buy that if the high point had been the fourth quarter of 2009 or if they presented numbers showing a large drop between the third quarter of 2010 and the fourth quarter of 2010. Since the large drop they show me is between fourth quarter of 2007 and fourth quarter of 2010, I conclude that if we had the numbers in between we would see a steady downward trend, which would not support the conclusion they wish me to accept.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
How do they measure "percent" of use?
...music quality down 44% since the fourth quarter of 2007.
Maybe it's just because MUSIC SUCKS these days. You can't give it away.
And get off my lawn!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
it must mean that most music today is definitely not Scottish
Okay, so if P2P is at an all time low and actual record sales are also at an all time low, doesn't that imply that people just don't want new music? Is it hard to replace Limewire? No. But the users need some motivation to go to a new site. It looks like people are less able to justify either their time or money to get new music than ever before.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
That is right RIAA, piracy no longer exists. We certainly do not USEtheNET to download anything.
Good. Now they should ask for only a little over 42 trillion.
This makes perfect sense. My casual observations note that music piracy has been decreasing steadily for years. There is far less reason reason to pirate any longer. Companies are selling music online, cheaper, more easily, without lock-down, and without DRM -- just like people were asking for.
Similarly, anime piracy is down now that you can watch anime online legally. It was pirated most heavily when a series came out in Japan and took 10 years before it was subtitled and released in the US and Europe. Now that they subtitle them and release them within a week, piracy has decreased.
See! Offering a product at a good value really does work!
Correlation != causation:
We don't know if the shuttering of Limewire had this effect or not. I'd wager that the availability of for-sale music at Amazon, iTunes, etc. and the availability of ad-supported music at Spotify, Pandora, etc. essentially killed this. We have to, of course, consider the effect of ridiculous lawsuits on the average user (the obvious goal, so "yay RIAA lawyers....?").
Numbers need labels:
16 percent of what?
Where's your causality now?
If this is causal, can we take the causality further in saying that the lack of increased sales in albums demonstrates that LimeWire wasn't hurting album sales nearly as much as the RIAA made them out to be? Granted, that's obvious to anyone with half a brain (or a friend with half a brain), but it's worth pointing out that the theoretical damages presented by the RIAA were always just this side of fantasy land.
I guess we'll be seeing that huge uptick in music sales anytime now...
*holds breath*
Like I said, most people I know use blogs that link to rapidhsare megaupload and other websites. It is much faster for them, easier and, they claim, safe.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
All the free P2P file sharing has gone underground. Stupid morons.
I blame Justin Bieber, Rhiana, and Lady Gaga. Give me something worth downloading, and I'll download it!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Between library rentals, free services provided by some ISP's and other venues for access through various legal services, there are little to no reason to pirate music. The only time I've done that over the past few years, was when I was searching for a specific version of a track, then I could easily go through dozens of downloads till I had the exact release and title.
Editors, can we get a story about the $75 trillion P2P lawsuit soon plz? ...Oh, I'm sorry. dupe comment.
The comment I was responding to was too long so I didn't bother reading it.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Only downside is that Spotify isn't available in the US. Yes, you can proxy, but it takes gymnastics to get it working on your Android or iPhone, especially if you want a subscription."
Actually, with Premium (£9.99 per month) you can use it anywhere in the world, once you sign up within a member country. See:
http://www.spotify.com/uk/about/features/use-from-anywhere/
The music industry has flat out sucked the past few years. What's good to download? Another iteration of kids bop? That beaver kid? Another Disney star soon to become a drug addict?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Back in the day pre torrents etc, the best thing for me was searching for a track then being able to browse that person's hard disk for their other shared tracks. I used to find all manner of cool stuff I never knew existed or artists I'd never heard of. I'd *never* have bought them via iTunes or whatever because I simply didn't know they were there. This happened a lot with people from other countries who typically had their local bands mixed in there that you'd never find in your own country. I've lost count of the amount of albums/tracks I've bought because of that ability to dig around. Sure, some sites try and offer 'if you liked this, what about that?' but it rarely produces anything of note and misses out completely on stuff that's way outside your normal listening area. These days, most of my 'discovering' is done via obscure podcasts but it's not very efficient.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
So this is all your fault!
(Backstory: Her parents paid $2000 to a couple of guys at the music industry's equivalent of a vanity publisher to pipe their kid's vocals through autotune and spend an hour doing a couple of video shoots with her and her friends. Pretty good testament to what can be done with modern technology on a shoestring budget, but also a pretty good testament to "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".)
Nothing wrong with copying. That's what remix culture is all about. The song itself may be execrable, but the explosion of creativity it's inspired is nothing short of awesome.
I was trying to find an obscure album. I tried harvesting used record stores, p2p, etc. Turns out the damn thing was on iTunes for 10 bucks. Can't beat that.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
As well as fiddling with devices we own, selling our books, CDs, DVDs, iPads, and any other rights we might have over the products we purchase.
Let's just stop pretending we own anything a corporation sells.
I just makes problems and subtracts from the bottom line -- the greatest sin.
I love that the RIAA hasn't recognized that downloading is just another form of taping it off the radio for anyone who would actually consider buying music in the first place. It drives their shitty products even further into the ground, leaving bands that stand on their own to reap the benefits of exposure. Fuck all the useless middlemen. I can't wait until all the labels fold and their entire staff are trying to hock used cars.
Hey music industry suits. You know what will really slow down music pirating? When iTunes goes to a subscription-based services once all those pretty new servers are online in North Carolina, that's what! Unless of course you'll play the usual music industry thug card an not allow that.
HD YouTube videos convert to 256kbps MP3 audio, standard-def to 128kbps (AFAIK).
Quite decent IMHO.
I tend to use the better Web-based-converter sites myself.
Of course, you have to like the performance itself, and it has to be a decent recording job, as usual. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
While the LimeWire company stopped their service it was immediately hacked (the software) to use other servers. It's still running strong. People who use newsgroups still have access to movies and music all day long without fear of monitoring.
I think the stats put out by the NPD Group are mostly meaningless.
From what I have read sales are still declining, if they have managed to make a sizable dent in piracy, what will they have left to blame it on?
With 300GB torrents named ALL MUSIC EVER, I think everyone already has acquired everything they ever wanted, and only need to add the sporadic new tune.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
For me it would be interesting to see how much music sales increase when the sites are shut down (if it causes decrease in overall file sharing) so we can actually have some real statistics 1 downloaded song = x lost sales.
I think there are some websites that are essentially automating this process, giving you only the finished MP3 to download instead of the entire video.
I like http://www.youtube-mp3.org/ for SD videos (128kbps MP3) and http://www.makeitmp3.com/ for the HD ones (256kbps MP3)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I bet the decline in music downloads is due to crappy quality of new music that isn't even worth pirating.
"all i wanted was a pepsi..."
Bullshit
If you're on the phone, or playing a game, you don't need music. (Or cigarettes. Phone usage has made a big dent in young people smoking.) Music competes with Farmville and Angry Birds now.
Somehow, I think it's more likely that NPD Group's research or their method of measuring downloads is flawed.
Pandora certainly plays a part in this. Also, many people I know (myself included) now have massive music collections, that were built up since the napster era. We don't download nearly as much as we used to because we already have everything. And if we are stupid enough to lose our music, its far easier to copy a friend's collection than to re-download everything.
My $.02
The music sucks.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The other day I heard my daughter playing music I didn't recognize on her iphone (plugged into speakers, in her bathroom). I asked where she got it (ripped cd, itunes purchase, loaned from friends) and she didn't seem to understand the question.
Turns out, she's streaming the music from youtube. Apparently you can create a playlist with a youtube account and stream whatever is available there. I didn't realize that. This is a lot easier, and more non-geek friendly, than figuring out how to torrent music, unpack it, and add it to your itunes playlist. She says her friends have basically replaced itunes with youtube playlists because it's easy and it works anywhere you have a browser. I wonder if this could be a major component on the dearth of downloading?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
to be honest, how do you go about recording directly form what the sound card is outputting?
I admit I'm not having any luck with the initial Google-fu on the matter
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
That it might be because everyone is moving to encrypted networks?
if I cannot get it directly from the musician or for free I don't buy it. The website http://riaaradar.com/ helps figure out if the band is worth buying.
Right?
Anthony Mouse was taking about the RIAA trying to make the oldschool distribution model more necessary. One thing that would allow them to do is screw musicians on patent-licensing for DRM schemes
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
That was a rather good comeback. I think we can all agree that as long as it sounds good, it's fine. The question of how much you have to spend until it sounds good enough varies per person and per equipment -- that and some people fall for scams rather easily.
I actually like a fair amount of mainstream stuff - as such, I'm tired of it all getting lumped together and flamed, even though a lot of it _does_ suck. (If I give examples, you'll just think that they suck too.)
[Relative] obscurity and/or the past aren't the only places to find stuff you actually like listening to (even though I've got plenty of that material too.)
Seems problems the music itself is a somewhat different issue from their problems adapting to the change in business models for distribution.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The question of how much you have to spend until it sounds good enough varies per person and per equipment -- that and some people fall for scams rather easily.
Personally, I can hear a difference between a 160kb/s Ogg file and a 320kb/s Ogg file on speakers that cost around £170. I don't know if I could tell the difference betwen 320kpbs and something nearer to it in encoding around 224 or 256kb/s. I think I can with Classical music but I haven't done an actual test, whereas with 160 vs. 320 the difference is so obvious I don't need to test. Likewise, I don't know if I hear a difference between my existing speakers and something more expensive. I also have a Xonar D2X sound card and I can hear the difference between the output on that and my onboard S/PDIF. So in my case, a cost of around £250 gives me a very appreciable difference over onboard sound and my previous speakers (which were around £40 and stereo but extremely good for the money).
I don't know how much more benefit I could get from spending higher
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Publishing headlines such as these typically get reactions that range from "Hell, no! We're still pirating up in dis!" to "I knew it! It's the pirate kiddies who're to blame for music industry losses". Does anyone ever wonder whether publishing numbers like these could be, for the RIAA and associates, a graceful way out of the anti-piracy business? As long as they can indicate that they have made an impact on the P2P music piracy going on they can then look the other way while reaping the word-of-mouth publicity benefits (and others) of this same P2P music piracy. Do you think they've learned from their ongoing 10 year old battle with the P2P industry?
$x = ($x * 10) % 10 >= 5 ? 1 + int $x : int $x
Before there were computers, the total P2P music downloads were, I believe, zero. Are you saying it's lower than that?
Seriously? That's so 2008.
Now you're putting ideas in them weasel heads. You want to distribute music? Well, all the play back device has this nifty patented decoding algorithm that requires our patented encoding algorithm...
Don't laugh, look at HDMI and HDCP, and sons of HDCP on the horizon. Amazing how quickly tech industry caved into the demands of the content industry.
I have doubts rock will ever be back to where it was in the 70s, and it's been downhill ever since - at least in the mainstream. There are still plenty of great bands and artists though -- my favorite being the White Stripes. Now that I think of it, I suppose it depends on your definition or genre of rock.
(1) I have enough music already (~3000 tracks). I don't need to get much more, from any source, legal or not. I expect a lot of people are in this situation now.
(2) One click file hosting sites are among the most popular on the planet for a reason. I think a lot of people have simply shifted to them from P2P services.
Streaming Stations. While previously on a decline—due to the RIAA in ability to think—are getting better. Groove Shark and stations? like it make downloading needless.
affordable good quality music for $1 or less from countless sources
Free music DLs from popular artist and underground a like...
Who needs to steel?
Besides, the stigma now is that what ever you pay for the music helps the artist... so people are paying even if it is free.
Like most of the comments, it's just because people are getting it from elsewhere, places that are not monitored in the same way. Users are smarter now and limewire was too obvious, the youtube rips etc are now unmonitored and uncounted... Easy. Oh and reason B, music has become crap and the reason for downloading it has been diminished, thus sales are still down. Limewire was so 5 years ago...
I mostly listen to music while biking, so low quality doesn't matter. You can't hear highs and lows over the wind anyway...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
White Stripes! Absolutely. You won't find them top 100 though :/ The downloading community is dominated by poor taste in music.
300,000,000 people can be wrong!
The number has gone from a high of 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to just nine percent in the fourth quarter of 2010
16% of what? the article doesn't mention.
16% of the population? 16% of what it used to be?
Dunno what your problem is. They're number and numbers don't lie.
Sheesh. Some people!
The 'pirates' from limewire probably moved elsewhere. How do they know they didn't? Did they magically scan the entire internet to see how many music 'pirates' there are or something?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The combination of free and legal music, streaming music, and increasing mobile bandwidth has caused increased competition in the consumer music market. In my humble opinion, the $12 to $18 cd has been replaced with unlimited legal music for cheap to free. Also recording technology has decreased in price and increasing options for self recording. This change in self recording options has greatly increased the amount of indi music on the web. It is so easy to record your own album, I have made 2 so far this year. http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/84829 http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/87181
And mp3 purchases from amazon.com are at an all time high, wasn't this predicted? We pirated music because you didn't allow legal drm free downloads.
because i have already downloaded all i want, 'cept for maybe new stuff coming out.
So no, i am not downloading as much music as I was say, 5 years ago, by far.
Of course, recently i did start downloading flac's to replace MP3 copies of stuff I didn't have a CD of.
So yes, i can understand that music file sharing isn't as big as it was, but it ain't going to stop.
Be seeing you...
Since I'm helping to publicize this, I recommend the following
"Opportunist, Beaver Leech Equilibrium Principle"
As for a Greek Symbol, I want the omega... ever since I've taught my children to refer to me as their Alpha and Omega when they want to kiss my ass to buy them a new toy, I've grown quite partial to it. Think we can bump Ohm?
P2P downloads are going down because everyone's too busy downloading the latest releases off Rapidshare, Megaupload and all the other clones. I'm not sure if the RIAA just doesn't get this, or is purposefully ignoring it for propaganda reasons.