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‘Filesharing and music piracy amongst UK teens down by a third’
July 14, 2009 | 10:09 am
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By Paul Biba
So says a new survey from The Leading Question/Music Ally. The Leading Question/Music Ally Speakerbox survey is the biggest face to face survey of UK music fans. The syndicated, proprietary project involves 1,000 face to face interviews with music fans aged 14-64 and a series of in depth focus groups which took place throughout the UK. The survey base excludes non broadband users and those with no mobile phones.
Overall levels of regular file-sharing music are down, particularly amongst UK teenagers:
• The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing regularly (i.e. every month) has gone down since the last national survey. In December 2007 22% regularly file- shared tracks, but in January 2009 this was down to 17%, a comparative drop of nearly a quarter.
• The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. (In December 2007 42% of 14-18s were filesharing at least once a month. In January 2009 this was down to just 26%)
This is despite the fact that the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared has, unsurprisingly, increased, rising from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009. The move to streaming – e.g. YouTube, MySpace and Spotify – is clear with the research showing that many teens (65%) are streaming music regularly (i.e. each month). Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%). More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.
There are now more UK music fans regularly buying single track downloads (19%) than file- sharing single tracks (17%) every month, though the percentage of fans sharing albums regularly (13%) remains higher than those purchasing digital albums (10%).
The Leading Question research also shows the comparative volume of pirated tracks to legally purchased tracks has halved since their last survey just over 12 months ago. In December 2007 the ratio of tracks obtained from file-sharing compared to tracks obtained as
legal purchases on an ongoing basis was 4:1. In January 2009 the ratio had narrowed to just 2:1.By the time some of the anti-piracy measures proposed in the Digital Britain report actually come into effect, the nature of the piracy threat is likely to have changed dramatically.
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Comments:
The only thing about surveys like this is that they are asking potential scofflaws how often they violate an established law. It’s like asking a driver how often they speed. You are simply not going to get honest and accurate information like that.
The survey may be worthwhile to indicate general trends. But I wouldn’t accept a single figure from the survey, and more than I’d believe a Washington D.C. resident who said they’d never driven beyond 65MPH on the Beltway.
In January of 2009 the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) released a study that provided a very different perspective. The IFPI claimed that pirated music tracks overwhelmed legal tracks online. The Guardian article describing the study said ”Online piracy: 95% of music downloads are illegal”.
It is not easy to reconcile the IFPI results with the Music Ally claim that “In December 2007 the ratio of tracks obtained from file-sharing compared to tracks obtained as legal purchases on an ongoing basis was 4:1. In January 2009 the ratio had narrowed to just 2:1.” The study methodologies are different. The IFPI ratio given above is for downloads only and does not include tracks that are legally ripped from an owners CD collection. On the other hand, the IFPI ratio also ignores tracks ripped from shared CDs, shared USB flash drives, or nearby wireless transmission.