Report: Illegal Music Downloading Climbs

Found on Miami Herald on Thursday, 15 January 2004
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LOS ANGELES - The number of people downloading music illegally surged a month after recording companies began suing hundreds of music fans, a marketing research firm said Thursday.

The number of U.S. households downloading music from peer-to-peer networks rose 6 percent in October and 7 percent in November after a six-month decline, according to a study of computer use in 10,000 U.S. households conducted by The NPD Group.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Washington-based RIAA, which coordinates the industry's anti-piracy campaign, said that effort is on the right track, regardless of what the NPD studies show.

"For us, the ultimate measurement of success has been, and continues to be, creating an environment where legal online music services can flourish," Lamy said in a statement. "All indicators point in the right direction - sales of CDs, legal downloads and awareness that file sharing copyrighted music is illegal - have all increased."

A survey released earlier this month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore Media Metrix found that since May, the percentage of U.S. Internet users who download music was down by half, to 14 percent. The same report also found declines in usage of popular file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Grokster.

I'm not really surprised; filesharing won't die, despite what the RIAA says. A rise in sales, legal downloads and awareness doesn't mean sharing is dropping. Those two variables are independant. And concentrating surveys on Kazaa and Grokster can of course produce a decreasing number, because many sharers move to other, better networks.