A Glimpse At Piracy In the UK and Beyond

Zocalo writes "The BBC has a fascinating look into the music download habits of the UK population based on stats compiled by Musicmetric. The stats, gathered through the monitoring of BitTorrent swarms and geo-locating the IPs, shows the hotspots for music copyright infringement across the UK and regional preferences for certain types of music. Some of the outliers are somewhat unusual though, suggesting some problems with the methodology or sample size, unless people on the Isle of Wight really do prefer trumpet-playing crooner Louis Armstrong to the likes of Rihanna and Ed Sheeran who top the lists nationwide. Not in the UK? There are some global stats on the ' Most pirated near you? tab' of the story. Better yet, if you want to crunch the numbers for yourself all of the data has been made available at the Musicmatch website under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license and a RESTful API to access the data (free for non-commercial use, but requiring an API token) is also available."

Comments

cash

[MadMaverick9]

If you love music, download legally

I'd like to ...

Where's the store that I can go to with my 20 gbp cash and a usb stick and download/buy music/software/movies?

It doesn't exist. That's the problem.

Re:cash

[Yaruar]

You know, it nearly did. I worked for a start-up years ago who were pioneering the music kiosk business, firstly allowing albums and mix albums to be burned on the fly, and there was a working solution for downloads of MP3s straight to devices or USB. The major labels and most of the indies were interested and signed on the dotted line. Millions of pounds were invested. Best Buy were trialing the cd burning, but even 8 years ago we knew the market needed the direct to device solution.

The problem which killed it. Apple. They refused to allow any content to go onto their devices bypassing itunes and wouldn't even consider working with us. We had the product, we had about 80,000+ lossless albums converting merrily stored ready to rock, but apple killed the business model because like it or not iPods dominated the market.

perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

The overwhelming majority of musicians are unpaid amateurs and do it for fun.

Of those who make a living at music, almost all derive most of their income from instrumental teaching.

Of those who derive their income from playing, almost all are paid per performance (think session musicians, orchestral musicians etc), not on a royalty basis.

This whole issue is about a tiny proportion of musicians (mostly modern rock & pop) who perform almost entirely for recorded distribution. The recording business talk of 'killing music' is hysterical horsesh*t.

Human beings have been making music for over 30,000 years. Downloads are not going to stop them.

Re:The British have a long proud history of piracy

[rwise2112]

I remember reading one time:
The difference between a terrorist, a guerrilla, and a freedom fighter is simply how much we like them