P2P activity drops, but young people find other covert ways to share, finds survey

Music Ally's research, carried out by sister company The Leading Question, backed the company's view that young users are increasingly switching file sharing activity to legal streaming services.

"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)," said a Music Ally statement. "Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%)."

The research found that the number of people illegally downloading tracks has gone down from 22% in 2007 to 17%. Amongst 14 to 18 year olds that figure dropped from 42% to 26%.

The music industry has taken legal action against illegal file-sharers and against companies that have made file-sharing possible, but has failed to stop the mass scale copyright infringement that happens over peer to peer (P2P) networks.

In the past two years, though, major labels have struck deals with YouTube for the legal streaming of music videos. In the UK, the Spotify legal streaming service, which has the backing of major labels, has been a word of mouth success.

But young users are still copying music and breaking copyright laws, the report found. They are just not necessarily doing it via P2P networks.

"More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks," said Music Ally. While an internet service provider could help to identify online file-sharers, bluetooth and physical CD sharing are almost untraceable by record labels.

The research was based on interviews with 1,000 people and it found that the ratio of pirated tracks to paid-for tracks owned had fallen from 4:1 in December 2007 to 2:1 in January 2009.

Leading Question chief executive Tim Walker said that the research demonstrated that the music industry could best battle piracy by creating attractive legal routes to the acquisition of music.

"Ultimately we believe that the best way to beat piracy is to create great new licensed services that are easier and more fun to use, whether that’s an unlimited streaming service like Spotify or a service like the one recently announced by Virgin which aims to offer unlimited MP3 downloads as well as unlimited streams," he said.

His view echoes that of the European Commissioner for the Information Society, Viviane Reding. She launched a Digital Europe Strategy last week in which she called on the content industries of Europe to create services which compete with piracy.

"My first and most important priority for Digital Europe is to make it easier and more attractive to access digital content, wherever produced in Europe," Reding said in a speech in Lisbon. "In my view, growing internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy makers."

"File-sharing is a moving target, so industry and Government policies need to recognise this," said Music Ally chief executive Paul Brindley. "It’s already being somewhat displaced by other means of accessing music for free. Some are licensed, many are not licensed and some involve a bit of both. Kids find services like YouTube much more convenient for checking out new music than filesharing. But even YouTube can become a source of piracy with some kids ripping YouTube videos and turning them into free MP3 downloads."