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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)."
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.
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?
Ugh, both of you ACs, how can you listen to such terrible quality???
You mean lower than they were in, say, 1776?
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
I don't know about others, but since Amazon started selling unencrypted MP3s, I've stopped turning to illegal sources for music.
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.
How do they measure "percent" of use?
So let me get this straight. You say that 100% of music is crap or uninteresting, yet you claim that some other non-musician can take the crap, "remix it," and suddenly turn it into good music? (If they were musicians, they would create their own original music)
I agree with you about modern music, which is basically the equivalent of paint-by-numbers by sound engineers, but your point is absurd.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'd tell you a joke about audiophiles, but you wouldn't appreciate it as text instead of a 5000 kbps sound file wilth an 8000 dollar stereo.
Sssshhhh - don't tell!
There's no way this number is true. I bet it was paid for by the RIAA's lawyers so they can say, "See! The lawsuits are working!!!"
That or they're just measuring it wrong because they're idiots. The article is highly unclear -- 16% of what? If people start using sneakernet and private trackers that they don't have access to measure, did the amount of sharing go down? Or did it go up because downloading 1TB of music from a private tracker once and then passing it around a school or an office on an external hard drive is way more efficient than sucking it through the straw of US broadband a thousand different times?
You don't really want original music. You want music that sounds like something else you like.
There is no reason why a mix of two songs that suck can't be fantastic. I don't like to eat cabbage or lactobacillus but I love sauerkraut. "Fusion cuisine" is usually an excuse for some stupid food concept that is being pushed on you but once in a while it results in nirvana, like the potato, pesto, and garlic pizza at Escape from NY. Potato on a pizza sounds stupid until you eat it. (Of course, the stuff is also a poster child for thisiswhyyourefat...)
Anyway I'm not into Jay-Z and the number of Beatles songs I think are worth a crap can be counted on one hand but DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album is one of the best things I've ever heard. So basically I think you are being ridiculous.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have to disagree about "modern music" being crap.
The difference is that in the past, good bands got the spotlight and were heavily promoted.
These days, what gets the promotion dollars are cookie cutter bands who wouldn't even be able to croak out anything near a melody if it wasn't for Antares's Auto-Tune product. Why do they get promoed? Because it is cheaper to hype some naiive and malleable stars for a few years, then find some new meat when the news stories about their rehab and DUI misadventures hit the press.
There is still good music being made. However, you won't be finding it on the radio (unless you happen to have an independent station). It will be through services like Pandora, last.fm, and other places, not to mention Web forums and word of mouth that one finds bands that don't suck.
Trust me; there are a lot of new bands that are worth the ear; they just don't have the huge money behind them that Justin Beiber and Ke$ha do.
Right now? Mainstream music has utterly sucked since the late 90s. If you want some quality music over P2P, check out bt.etree.org.
Personally, my downloading is at an all time low because I have everything I want. I pass up free leech at the private trackers I'm on, simply because I wouldn't have the time to use it anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I guess we'll be seeing that huge uptick in music sales anytime now...
*holds breath*
Actually, I reckon it might be. In the last few years, we've seen the rise of legal and cheap streaming music services such as Spotify as well as reasonably priced, high quality MP3s available for purchase from services like Amazon. Back a few years, I was sceptical of the claims on Slashdot that if there were cheaper music available for purchase at a decent quality, that people would stop pirating. But it may be turning out that this is at least partially true. I think most people are basically honest and willing to pay for music and movies. Sure there are plenty who do see the opportunity to take stuff for free instead of paying for it and take advantage of that, but maybe a lot of people who were pirating have decided to pay - whether because they've changed their stance of piracy or because they like the reliability and convenience of the legitimate services. But it's no longer possible to say that you can't get quality digital music at a reasonable price anymore without most people thinking you're (a) dirt poor or (b) deluded. It may be that we're seeing an effect from that. Or it may be that the general social shift is to disapprove of "freetards" who take but don't give back. In any case, there are possible reasons why we could have seen piracy drop.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I guess just like me, every audiophile has already downloaded every discography of every band he ever liked.
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 just use iTunes, honestly. Sure, the quality isn't as good as it absolutely could be, but it's leaps and bounds beyond the average mp3 I used to find in crappy malware infested software like Limewire. I've been buying all my music from there over the last few years. Early on the DRM was bothersome (especially when I wanted to listen to my music on my Linux box, though it's easy enough to get around that) but now they've removed that. I get the idea that pirating is "better" because it's free, but at this point in my life I'm willing to spend money on the things that I enjoy, especially when I look at it as an investment
1. Find music I like
2. Support the artist by buying their music
3. Artist makes money, has the means to create more music
4. ???
5. Profit! (Enjoy more music from the artists I like)
Why is it then that I'm looked at like an extra-terrestrial being when I tell people I pay for things?
Sure, not ALL of the money goes to the artists, but that's not within my control. Paying for the music gets the artist a piece of the pie while pirating gives them nothing.
Eventually, artists will smarten up and start selling their own music (see: Radiohead) off of their own websites and get even bigger pieces of the pie.
I should have been a girl, with the way I can dance... my moves are amazing!
I tried iTunes once, HATED the DRM. Probably fine on a Mac, but on Windows the DRM meant I had to use iTunes Media Player (DO NOT WANT), or basically have Quicktime/iTunes load in the background when I tried to play the songs with a Winamp plugin.
(I no longer use Windows, and I'm not going to use iTunes ever again. Currently waiting for a decent online movie/TV store in the UK, tho LoveFilm isn't bad and is getting better..).
which is totally what she said
(If they were musicians, they would create their own original music)
That's not really true though. For starters, the line between "original" and "unoriginal" music isn't very clear. Which of these groups is creating original music?
- The Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with a fantastic new interpretation
- A group playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on kazoos
- A disco group who took Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and rewrote it with a dance beat
- A DJ who took the BSO's recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and made a great dance beat with it
- An MC who took the DJ's great dance beat and busted some rhymes to it.
- A folk singer who goes to some obscure area of Hungary, learns a popular folk song from that area, translates the lyrics, and records and popularizes it in the US
- A second folk singer who adds 10 new verses to that same folk song
All of them took a musical legacy, added some twists or nuances to it, and made something new. But in the RIAA's worldview, the DJ, MC, and second folk singer did something thoroughly horrible.
I am officially gone from
There is no longer DRM on iTunes music files.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
notice they did not see they saw the same increase in music sales. The lawsuits don't work.
What makes you think things were so different in previous decades? Even the Beatles, early in their career, were cookie-cutter. You can go back to the 80s to bands like New Kids on the Block (*shudder*).
There's always been trash on the radio, mixed in with a few gems. If you never find a song you like then you just have grown old and have a selective memory.