From USAtoday
Leslie Zdory is the music industry’s worst nightmare. She visits pirate online swap service Kazaa three times a week to download songs for her custom CDs, putting favorites from artists such as the Righteous Brothers and Billy Joel into personalized packages such as “Love Songs of the 1970s.”
“When you buy a CD at the store, you’ve spent all this money, but probably only like three songs,” she says. “This way, I get just the songs I like, without having to press fast-forward.”
Zdory isn’t a high school or college student, the demographic of the majority of music downloaders. She’s a 49-year-old bookkeeper for a Los Angeles law firm and the mother of a 14-year-old boy.
And she’s a prime example of the real woes that face the music world. The passion for free song-swapping is spreading from the core audience of teenagers to adults like Zdory. A sizeable chunk of her age group, too, is making downloaded music as regular a part of their lives as morning coffee and rush-hour commutes.
According to a new study from researchers Ipsos-Reid, more than 61 million people in the USA say they have downloaded songs onto their PC from the Net.
“The music industry did this to themselves,” she says. “CDs cost too much money, and concert tickets are totally out of whack. If things weren’t so expensive, people wouldn’t be going to these alternative methods to get music.”
Kevin Grant, 44, says trading sites have made him more interested than ever in music. “I use my PC like my parents used their stereo,” says Grant, who works for a Los Angeles insurance firm. “I have 600 MP3s on my hard drive, and I just leave it on all weekend.”
He uses Kazaa as a tool to find acts and music he hasn’t heard of, and to pick up obscure music from the 1980s that’s no longer in stores. “Radio’s so bland and predictable these days,” he says. “This is the only way to discover new music.”
Says Raymond James analyst Phil Leigh: “Kazaa is on 157 million computers, with a typical daily usage of 3 million users. AOL’s (daily) peak is around 6 million. That shows downloading music is a daily part of life.”
Even though record companies continue to win court battles against file sharing services, new ones keep popping up, notes Leigh: “They’re winning the war, but losing on the battlefield.”
You can read the entire article here.
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