TorrentFreak

After nearly two decades Black Sabbath came out with a new studio album this year. Today, the band released the first single “God Is Dead?” which was also posted on the official Black Sabbath YouTube channel. This modern technology gives fans to check out the song before buying it. At least, that was the idea. [...]

New research published by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that online piracy doesn’t hurt digital music revenues. The researchers examined browsing habits from 16,000 Europeans and found that there’s a positive link between online piracy and visits to legal music stores, irrespective of people’s interest in music. The study concludes that the music industry should not see piracy as a growing concern.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the ninth year in a row SXSW is sharing DRM-free, RIAA-safe songs of performing artists, totaling 7.39GB so far. All the tracks can now be downloaded for free in one go, thanks to BitTorrent.

For the major music labels the sales of recorded music represent the majority of their revenue, but a different picture emerges when looking at the income of individual musicians. A new survey among 5,000 U.S. musicians of different genres shows that on average only six percent of all revenue comes from recorded music. The research concludes that copyright law mostly affects the revenue of the highest-income musicians in a direct fashion.

By now it’s common knowledge that nearly all content on the Internet can easily be removed or censored by filing a single DMCA notice. For some reason, however, this doesn’t seem to apply to most mainstream music stores. When The Flashbulb, aka Benn Jordan, found out that another artist was selling a “copy” of his music, he learned that it is pretty much impossible to get it removed. According to Jordan the mainstream music industry only cares about profits, not the actual artists.

One of the most comprehensive studies into media sharing and consumption habits in the United States and Germany reveals that file-sharers buy 30% more music than their non-sharing counterparts. The result confirms that file-sharers are actually the music industry’s best customers. In addition, the research reveals that contrary to popular belief, offline “copying” is far more prevalent than online music piracy.

A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.