P2P here to stay: Music companies must get real

The international music recording companies are spending millions of dollars in legal fees these days. Their target – the online file swapping business that is allowing consumers around the world to avoid buying CDs by downloading songs and even complete albums for next to nothing.

But the aggressive tactics of the record companies’ lobby group, the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and its US counterpart in trying to close down file swapping of music seem doomed to failure. Until the music recording industry comes to grip with the fact that its product is too expensive, the file swappers – P2P traffic as it is called – will grow their market.

New research by the University of California, to be presented at a major global conference on communications in Dallas at the end of November, finds “The assertion of declining P2P traffic was in direct contrast to the constant increase of P2P activity over the last year and counterintuitive to the fact that P2P applications are still the top most downloaded applications (on) the internet”.

The research paper, Is P2P dying or just hiding? is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the impact of the American recorded music industry’s attempted crackdown on free music downloading.

In spite of the millions of dollars that have gone into investigations, raids and court cases across America – over 5,000 people have been sued – in the past couple of years, this paper concludes “P2P is here to stay” and that the amount of P2P traffic for 2004 is equal to, if not more than the amount for 2003. The P2P providers are smarter than the recording industry, say the researchers. Providers are making their “traffic harder to identify”.

In the US, at least, the P2P providers are forcing a small reduction in the price of CDs – albeit only 50 cents.