Online file sharing has increased
p2pnet.net News:- If a new report is correct, despite the fact that Big Music’s ongoing sue ‘em all campaign is failing to stop Americans from downloading music and sharing files online, its relentless victimization of people who swap music is still having an effect.
The Big Five record labels – EMI (UK), UMG (France), BMG (Germany), Sony (Japan) and Warner (US) – are suing anyone they can identify whom they claim is sharing copyrighted music files without their permission, and the FBI has recently begun acting as the labels’ enforcer.
In the US, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has, on behalf of its owners, the Big Five record labels, sued 1,977 people.
Victims always settle out of court rather than risk potentially huge financial penalties if they lose to the labels’ bottomless pockets and endless, highly-paid music industry legal teams, and of the 532 suits brought a while back, 432 have been ’settled’.
It would be really interesting to know how much has been garnered to date, and where the money goes.
Be that as it may, millions of people around the world – including, of course Americans who are constantly bombarded by the RIAA’s disingenuous statements routinely re-issued by the mainstream media – are under the entirely false impression that Big Music is taking people to court and winning.
The number of people who share music through the p2pnetworks has actually increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s November-December 2003 survey, it says a new report.
However, it also says more than 17 million people (14%) of “online Americans” say at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they don’t do it any more.
“A third of the former music downloaders, close to 6 million Internet users, say they have turned away from downloading because of the suits brought against music file-sharers by the Recording Industry Association of America.
“The retreat is particularly pronounced among online men, Internet users between the ages of 18-29, and those who have broadband connections at home.
Of Net users who have never tried to download music, 60% say the RIAA lawsuits would keep them from trying it in the future, says Pew, going on that women with Net access are more likely than online men to “say they’re deterred by the law suits”.
New data from comScore Media Metrix show continuing declines or stagnancy in the number of people with popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications actively running on their computers, Pew goes on.
“Since our last data memo on downloading, in which we reported comScore data gathered between November 2002 and November 2003, the KaZaa user base dropped most notably. Between November 2003 and February 2004 alone, comScore estimates that over 5 million fewer people are actively running KaZaa.”
One wonders if this might be as much due Kazaa’s continuing efforts to become part of the commercial music industry, turning it into a bete noir to millions of former users, as to any effect the lawsuits may be having.
This thought might be supported by Pew’s statement that according to comScore data, there’s been growth since last November in usage of some of the smaller file-sharing applications such as iMesh, BitTorrent, and eMule.
“The number of those who say they download music online remains well below the peak levels that we tracked in the spring of 2003, but there was some growth in those who reported music downloading in our February survey,” says Pew.
In the most recent survey, 18% of Internet users said they download music files, a “modest increase from the 14% of Internet users who reported in a survey just before last Christmas that they downloaded music files online. But it is still considerably below the 29% who said they had done this when we surveyed in the spring of 2003.”
Among current music downloaders, 38% say they are downloading less because of the RIAA suits. In the pre-Christmas survey, 27% said they’d throttled back because of the RIAA suits and, says the report, “That represents a significant jump in just two months.”
About a third of current music downloaders say they use p2p networks. Another 24% say they swap files using email and instant messaging; 20% download files from music-related Web sites such as those run by music magazines or musician homepages.
But while online music services are “far from trumping the popularity of file-sharing networks,” overall, 7% of Net users say they’ve bought music from them at one time or another, including 3% who currently use paid services.
Online video downloading
Some 15% of Internet users report they have downloaded video files onto their computer, up from 13% who said they had done so in our November-December survey, says Pew and, “Online men are twice as likely as women to have done this. And young adults (those ages 18 to 29) are twice as likely as older Internet users to have done this. However, as bandwidth constraints become less of an issue for users, it is likely that video downloading will become significantly more widespread.”
Sharing files online
Those who say they share files from their own computer, such as music, video or picture files, or computer games rose slightly to 23% in the February 2004 survey. In our November-December 2003 survey, 20% of all Internet users said they shared files with others online.
April 26th, 2004 at 9:53 pm
I use Itunes now. Ipay about Ten cents for each song, Imake cd’s for myself and make more for selling to my friends.
April 26th, 2004 at 10:47 pm
Despite recent downplays in recent downloading rates among Americans after heavy crackdowns from lawyers and increasing the federal government, one overlooked result this is having is quickly coming to dominate free file trading networks. That is, indie bands and labels using the services to spread free music, commerical, and multimedia content to a humongous, and growing audience of music lovers who don’t care about mass market advertised bands and their media owners.
“I spend all my time on the internet, one way or the other” says Todd West, “And I don’t trade bands from the music media mafia via p2p, but hell yes I trade my own music as an indie artist, and if I’m promoting other indie bands and labels and they have a commercial or a song to promote, I’ll thrown them into my shared folder.”
West does the Underground Music Chart Top 100, webzines, and most of the content at Underground Records (http://undergroundrecords.org), which is a direct response to big money and media market saturation of traditional music industry tactics.
“Look, more indie music is traded than all that mass produced shit with a marketing budget. It’s just that is what you see on MTV and in magazines, and for sure on the mafia owned radio. So even though it’s the major owned product getting ripped that you hear about in the media, the underground, with legitimate indie bands and labels trading music, rules P2P.
According to West, turning that into a viable “market” for indie music, has nothing to do with selling “product”.
“If I had to make money in this, I’d have to compete in the mainstream media and press, and that is such a racket only big pockets can play. Plus, myself like a lot of independent creators, are not business people and we’re so outside the mass market vein, it’s not at all easy to get industry people after they have become addicted to the formula of selling “products” and making x amount, to even pay attention to us. So file trading and other means of digital distribution allows us to at least offer our music to everyone, whether some fat cat likes it or not.”
One of the newer ways to promote independent music via p2p is the use of commericals embedded into multimedia. There are many ways to do this, from using mp3’s in a clip utilizing voice over, a standard radio procedure from day one, to producing alternative media such as flash clips or quicktime movies, which can now be reasonably produced cheaply, to promote the artist or label catalog using downloadable networks.
“File trading will never die, it will just go openly underground, where what you get is real creative talent, new ideas and new artists. I’m all for people protecting their content, and to massively download or share someone’s music if they don’t want it to be, yeah that’s stealing. Still, that is what police and the courts are for. It won’t be long until the largest file trading network will be a legitimate p2p program, and the only music there will be artists and content producers who want their material there, it will be a real underground, and by that I don’t mean illegal, I mean a real alternative to the music mafia, and it will have more great material than any corporation, or gonglomerate of corporations, and it will dominate the music industry. May take another ten years, but it is coming, mark my word.”
A vast majority interviewed for this article in the music industry agree, the black hat illegal underground isn’t going to disappear either. While the lawyers and police stay busy trying to catch pirates of major industry content, the networks and methods where that occurs are now becoming encrypted and it is possible to actually mask traffic as one type and it actually be another. The resources and means to completely shut down illegal file trading are so vast, it is a guarantee there will always be illegal file trading networks.
And all the while those spring up and shut down, the advance of the thousands of bands in the underground continue to eat away at the majors market share.
“Years ago I tried and tried to get some major player to invest and us build the first legitimate online distribution network, something similar to a branded napster or kazaa, but where we could control the content, so that a label or band could add their own stuff, but we could stop content that wasn’t licensed, or that we couldn’t conference and approve of with the actual owners. It never happened, myself and hundreds like me who tried to get a major label or distribution company to build such a system were completely ignored. Well, p2p came anyway, but in a different set of circumstances, and now you have like all these online stores like itunes….great, but the final picture will be all these labels with stores like itunes, integrated into a system where even totally unknown indie artists can hook their networks into the servers, like it’s done kinda on p2p, or even host content for the indies where whomever develops the software, which would be like a p2p software distro, not like an online store….when that happens, the domination of the old school music industry will be complete, and the underground shall rule.”
Now it’s up to the software developers, but for sure, the next few years will not see a loss of downloaders, rather a switch from pirated to legit promotion of unsigned and independent artists and labels.
“That kind of traffic is the majority of traffic on p2p music sharing networks now anyway” says West, “It’s not pirated material if you leave out the pirated software and porn going accross those networks, it is independent artists sharing their files and checking out files and music from other indies. No one realizes this, because all the media scream is either lawsuits, porn or pirates, and that is because there is a media mafia of only a few players. The internet is taking longer than some, including myself, thought it would to change that. P2P though, is another network, no, set of networks, that is helping to give choice when broadcast media owners and so many labels and distributorships are failing or combining. It is keeping new music, media and content, alive.”
June 10th, 2004 at 1:00 am
JJDJDJDJD
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:05 am
This West cat is friggin’ brilliant
December 24th, 2005 at 5:22 pm
Getting sued for downloading music has the same odds as being struck by lightning … with millions and millions of people sharing files, guess what. It ain’t gonna happen. The greedy, stupid corporate executives are wasting their money and efforts by taking grandpa’s and 8-year-old kids to court. Free downloads are here to stay because the genie is out of the bottle. To hell with the music industry morons who charge $15 for a CD, and put out worthless crap that no one wants to hear. These are the same stupid business sub-humans who destroyed radio. Can you say Clear Channel? They don’t deserve my business, my money, nor my loyalty.
July 6th, 2007 at 4:45 am
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