Over one-third of music listeners still pirate tracks

[midian182]

A hot potato: Back in the 1990s and 2000s, it seemed like almost everyone was pirating music. With the advent of streaming services and being able to listen to tracks for free on YouTube, one might imagine that the practice has died out, but it turns out that over one-third of consumers still pirate their music.

The revelation comes from a new report by The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The trade body’s consumer insight report for 2018 shows that despite more people using the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal, 38 percent of listeners acquire tracks through illegal means.

Stream ripping, which involves extracting the audio tracks from sites such as YouTube, is the most popular way of grabbing music without paying; it's favored by 32 percent of pirates. Downloads via cyberlocker file hosting services or P2P software comes second (23 percent), while using search engines is the third most common method (17 percent).

Providing they can endure a few ads, music fans can listen to tracks for free on sites such as Spotify and YouTube, so why is piracy still a problem? Copyright infringers told the IFPI that the main reason they do it is to listen to music on an offline device without having to pay a subscription fee.

The music industry is fighting back against stream-ripping websites, which it says is one of the most significant challenges facing the business. After being sued by music labels in 2016, the world’s most popular stream-ripping site, YouTube-mp3, shut down a year later and handed control of its domain to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

UK anti-piracy organization MUSO claims that 25 percent of all online piracy is related to music, and demand for unlicensed downloads is rising every year.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/76880-over-one-third-music-listeners-pirate-tracks.html

 

[Tuxie]

I have not pirated music since it was legal in my country over a decade ago, but every time I can't find something _really important_ for my theme playlist, or even worse, when something I already added suddenly disappears from Spotify I am thinking hard about abandoning the streaming services and start collecting MP3s again.

 

[ET3D]

With no breakdown of the stats, and they way of arriving at them, they're quite meaningless. For example it may be that in China and India pirating is rife but hardly exists elsewhere, and that would already account for the stats. The type of music pirated and how easy it is to get legally likely have a lot of effect on what people pirate.

So instead of the recording industry trying to understand why people pirate and make it easier for them to get things legally, it would rather spread FUD.

 

[OutlawCecil]

Yeah! now go buy our CDs again! We're working hard in the music industry and these darn pirates take away 0.0001% of our income! How will we ever afford drugs and parties now?!

 

[axiomatic13]

Woo hoo 96k stream ripping! My ears are bleeding from here. I still prefer to RIP CD's to my collection (and not distribute!)

 

[mrjgriffin]

I think it's funny we can get into trouble by ripping music from youtube, yet somehow they're allowed to host without copyright infringements even though they have no rights to the music lol. they have their hands too full there. the amounts of sites that exist that will download music from youtube is 1 thing. the software that exists to do it is another situation. THEN we go back to the sites that rip music etc from youtube that are blocked in the united states that can be accessed via proxy or vpn. they honestly won't be able to stop this particular issue until they make google do something about it. you can find nearly anything on youtube and I guarantee google doesn't have rights to all of it. so how do they not get into trouble for hosting it? kim dotcom got in trouble for hosting a site with "piratable" music etc , but google is fine.

 

[Evernessince]

So that's just based off raw download numbers? We may never know as they aren't going to release their raw numbers. Chances are 60% of all pirated downloads correlate to a person. The other 40% are double downloads, failed downloads, ect. I know people who will download something simply because it's free and then never use it.

That's not considering the number of people downloading a backup copy who legally purchased the music either.

Music may consist of 25% of all online piracy simply because it's small and easy to download. I'd bet though that so long as a amiable legal alternative download source exists that piracy actually increases sales, not decreases. One of the big reason music piracy has gone down since the napster days is that it's fairly convenient to buy nowadays. It only took companies 10 years to realize that and we could always take a step back at any time.

 

[Burty117]

I've always said and I'll keep saying it, these company's never lost a penny to Piracy. Make your content too hard to access, people will pirate it. Make it too expensive, people will pirate it. And some people would just never pay for content.

To slash piracy, get rid of DRM, It's so hard to play a UHD Blu-ray on a computer, it's completely unreasonable. No wonder people pirate 4k movies rather than buying them.

After a quick Google, 2005 was a peak for Music Torrents, they saw a significant drop in traffic many years later, which just so happens to coincide with iTunes making it's Music DRM free...

 

[treetops]

I've always said and I'll keep saying it, these company's never lost a penny to Piracy. Make your content too hard to access, people will pirate it. Make it too expensive, people will pirate it. And some people would just never pay for content.

To slash piracy, get rid of DRM, It's so hard to play a UHD Blu-ray on a computer, it's completely unreasonable. No wonder people pirate 4k movies rather than buying them.

After a quick Google, 2005 was a peak for Music Torrents, they saw a significant drop in traffic many years later, which just so happens to coincide with iTunes making it's Music DRM free...

I haven't bought music since the 90s. Youtube lets me stream anything, I don't extract it. In my car I actually just listen to the radio. I've heard it all... My own play list would drive me crazy, same songs over n over.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I ripped audio tracks from YouTube and saw they were 128kbps. I stopped immediately.

 

[alabama man]

No service gives money straight to the artist I listen to, they give most of it to big record labels that have no artists I want to support. Once they can actually only pay the people I listen to I will get some music streaming service, until then I have to pirate my music, the artists will get the same so I'm not loosing sleep over it.

 

[captaincranky]

I have not pirated music since it was legal in my country over a decade ago,...[ ]...

Care to tell us what country that is? (Just so the rest of us will know where to set our VPNs).

 

[mrjgriffin]

Care to tell us what country that is? (Just so the rest of us will know where to set our VPNs).

netherlands

 

[Tuxie]

Care to tell us what country that is? (Just so the rest of us will know where to set our VPNs).

Sweden. Pirating music for personal use was technically legal here over a decade ago, but it is not legal anymore. I have not pirated music since it became illegal, but it is sometimes very tempting to begin because it's so frustrating to not be able to have all the songs I want in the same playlist in the same service or application.

 

[sac39507]

I wonder if recording is considered pirating.

 

[GaryMove]

There is a huge music library in VK network.
It's russian, but they have almost everything.