Finds that over half of respondents (54%) said that streaming has led them to quit illegally downloading music, a figure in line with several UK studies from last year that also saw a decline in P2P thanks to streaming.
Lost in the debate about illegal file-sharing and its effect on the record industry in the digital age is the fact that methods of music consumption are always evolving, and that this evolution has also had an impact on illegal file-sharing.
Streaming is rapidly becoming the preferred method of listening to music thanks to its relative ease of access, particularly with advances in smartphone technology, and of course, the cost – it’s free! Streaming has in many cases replaced the need for illegal file-sharing because it has no legal or technical hurdles to overcome, and services like Pandora or Last.fm make vast libraries of music available that could simply never matched using P2P.
Two surveys of UK youth last year confirmed this shift in taste, and both even reported a decline in illegal file-sharing of between 5 to 6%.
A new survey conducted in Norway by Norstat on behalf of Aspiro Music, a mobile music streaming services company, has reconfirmed this shift. Though it lacks detail of demographics, fairly important considering 28% of the women surveyed said they didn’t know what streaming means, it does say that one third of Norwegians stream music.
More importantly, according to the survey over half of respondents (54%) said that streaming has led them to quit illegally downloading music. That’s a big deal these days as govts around the globe try to enact “three-strikes” legislation to deal with the problem. If more and more people, particularly youth, opt for streaming instead of P2P then it lessens the need for intrusive measures that risk the Internet connections of entire households, ban public wi-fi, and filter the web.
Streaming could become an important part of the revenue puzzle for the music industry as it struggles to adapt to the realities of the digital age. The only question is how to monetize it, and Aspiro Music, obviously thinks it has the answer.
“We believe that streaming is a giant step in the right direction, both for people in general and for the music industry, and it is definitely a part of the solution for the future,” says Aspiro Music’s CEO, Per Einar Dybvik.”The key success factor is to develop payment solutions that satisfy the whole music machinery.
Stay tuned.
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- Apple upset by the illegal file-sharing it enabled
This article is wank………….i cant do any work from it u fokin nobsssssssss
Streaming gives the control back to distant websites, which are in some way controlled by the mafiaa. Nothing can replace a DRM free format on your own hard-drive, like a good old mp3, or better, ogg vorbis or the lossless FLAC so that you are in control. No geographic filtering, no files that suddenly disappear from the website and so on.
Of course free streaming decreases piracy. The question is: Can you make any significant money for IP holders doing it? Spotify has been unprofitable. Imeem folded into Myspace. Playlist.com just died.
Doesn’t seem like it so far.
The downside is that some streaming sites filter people out based on geography. That is a huge stumbling block for streaming. Yes, you can bi-pass this with proxies, but why should such a step need to be taken in the first place?