p2pnet news view Advertising | Music:- ‘Legal’ downloads are growing faster than ‘piracy,’ claims the NPD Group.

According to a story in  Silicon Alley Insider »»»

The recession is not driving music lovers to piracy. Just away from their CD players.

The volume of legal music downloaded in Q3 increased 29% over the same period a year ago. That beats the growth in illegal music downloads over peer-to-peer networks, which rose 23% y/y.

Overall demand for music declined 2% in the third quarter, research group NPD reports.

But, “I’m not sure I entirely see the story here,” Eric Garland, CEO of media measurement company BigChampagne.

In fact, “The rate of growth paid downloads is down dramatically from previous years, as one would expect,” he tells p2pnet, “Because the rate of growth is not really an instructive measure here.”

He goes on »»»

When paid downloads increase from ten songs sold to fifty, that’s a 500% increase, but only 40 songs sold.  Yet an increase from selling ten million songs to fifteen million songs is only a 50% increase — but five MILLION in new sales.

Put another way, it is the volume of activity that makes for a real comparison, and in our estimation the volume of P2P music downloads exceeds the paid downloads more than ten to one.

On the other hand, though, NPD’s assessment of the growth rate in P2P far outpaces our own.  We do not observe a 23% increase in P2P music downloads y-o-y.  On the contrary, while there is significant growth in film, TV and elsewhere, music is relatively flat.

Note the the growth rate of iTunes et al has slowed considerably and is expected to continue to do so.

International Flavors & Fragrance and Wrigley

Five letters sum up the NPD’s entertainment cartel component:

D – O – D – G – Y

And yet it’s utterances are routinely parroted by on- and offline media as though they’re produced by a reliable source.

It once said iTunes was outdoing LimeWire, and that was back when LimeWire was a major factor in the online music scene and Apple’s iPod user-funded front-end wasn’t even a blip.

“Adidas International, International Flavors & Fragrance and Wrigley typified its client base, but it was nonetheless churning out ’studies’ and ‘reports’ bolstering entertainment cartel party lines,” said p2pnet when the company first reared its head on the entertainment scene three years back.

We emailed it asking how many years’ experience it had in the music research field and wondering about the team of interviewers/statisticians we thought it must have employed, given the nature and number of its outpourings.

We never did get a reply, and when we visited the NPD site, we couldn’t find even one music, or other entertainment industry, client, although since then, the company has added movies, music, video, TV, etc, to the list it professes to be expert in.

With these kinds of ‘reports’ it’s become irresistible to Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG who’ll do anything to ‘prove’ they’re making a significant impact on the hundreds of millions of people around the world who increasingly avoid them, and anything to do with them, like the plague

No need to stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Advertising, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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