p2pnet - rss feed: IFPI file sharing report
p2p news / p2pnet: To read the latest Big Four record label IFPI release, you’d think there’s a booming corporate online music business.
Echoing hollowly would be a more accurate phrase, and that’s entirely due to the fact the Big Four - Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI – are sticking to their physical 1970s business model in the digital 21st century.
The cartel is trying desperately to compete with independent music sites and the p2p networks by selling low quality compressed digital music tracks at sky-high $1 and up prices. But music lovers continue to get their fixes for free on the networks, or for pennies and cents on one or other of the indie download sites.
But the Big Four must needs keep up their pretence that sales of their cookie-cutter product through the handful of sites they support and supply are significant, hence the outpourings of their IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries).
“Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year,” it boasts. Moreover, “legitimate digital music business is steadily pushing back on digital piracy,” proudly declares IFPI boss John Kennedy.
However, during one month alone in 2005 - September - the average number of files available on the p2p networks for download at any given moment (average simultaneous files) was close to three billion, p2p research company Big Champagne told p2pnet. The exact figure was 2,789,154,393.
On the claimed diminution of file sharing, in a BBC interview Kennedy roundly contradicts himself, admitting his masters are merely “containing” the situation. And as the IFPI report itself states unequivocally, “Illegal activity on peer-to-peer networks has stayed static in the last year …” In fact, in the IFPI ‘report,’ Kennedy admits, “The challenges we now face are far too big for any complacency”.
In another bit of nonsense, in Europe’s “two biggest digital markets, UK and Germany,” new IFPI research, “indicates more music fans are legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping,” it says.
“Two years ago, few could have predicted the extraordinary developments we are seeing in the digital music business today,” says Kennedy in the report, going on, “Already in the UK and Germany - two of the biggest digital markets worldwide - legal buyers from sites like iTunes, Musicload and MSN actually exceed illegal file-swappers.”
This is, of course, sheer, unadultrated blarney. But it’ll be reported by the mainstream media as though it’s accurate information from a credible source.
Meanwhile, “I would love to be sitting here telling you that it [file sharing] had gone down,” says Kennedy in the BBC interview. But the Big Four are, “finding it difficult to persuade existing song-swappers to use legal download services such as iTunes instead”.
Meanwhile, “A series of court judgements against unauthorised file-sharing services in late 2005 - in the US, Australia, Taiwan and Korea - has helped transform the market environment for digital music and consumer attitudes to illegal file-sharing,” says the IFPI’s ’study’.
They have indeed.
The publicity generated by the sue ‘em all campaign has turned millions of otherwise uninformed people onto the possibilities offered by p2p and file sharing, as confirmed by the Big Four’s own Nofree organization in Korea, since it singles Korea out for special mention.
“We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they’ve announced that it’s permissible to download music for private listening,” said Nofree’s Kim Young-ki .
Instead, “People who didn’t even think of doing so may start.”
All the signs are, however, that the Big Four will continue their relentless and fruitless attempts to sue their own customers into buying product, and to again attempt to impose the same kinds of Consumer Control that’s generating such terrible fallout for Sony BMG and its rootkit spyware DRM.
It may furthermore be that increased pressure will be brought to bear in ISPs and, hence, national judicial systems to try to force providers to reveal the identities of customers so the Big Four can try to turn them back into being fully compliant consumers.
“Specifically, the music business needs support for Digital Rights Management, which is the key enabler of digital music services allowing new and flexible uses by consumers; it also needs more cooperation from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in protecting music from piracy on their networks,” says the IFPI.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
contradicts himself - IFPI on p2p file sharing, January 19, 2006
strong measures - Big Music Korean balls-up, January 18, 2006
