Technology has made it easier for everyone to enjoy, and share music. The Internet has changed the way people interact with music. Sites like OiNK made it easy to find and share virtually every piece of music ever produced. Services like last.fm made it easy to discover new artists and interact with other fans.

Music might be more popular than ever among today’s youth. Indeed, the survey shows that the vast majority of the younger generation owns an MP3 player nowadays, including up to 93% of 14-17 year olds. If people had to pick three items to take with them to a desert island, 73% would take their music collection.

For most participants these music collections are acquired illegally, as the study shows that 63% – nearly two-thirds of the respondents – use filesharing services to download copyrighted music. On average they download 53 tracks a month, but some of the heavy downloaders say they download up to 5,000 tracks a month.

The average MP3 collection contains 1,770 tracks but some contained as many as
75,000. The average size of the music collection does not differ among age groups but there is a huge different in the proportion of pirated vs. paid music. The younger participants, aged 14-17, indicated that over 60% of their collection consisted of pirated music, compared to 13% for the age group 25 and up.

The survey also explored whether people would be interested in paid filesharing services that offer licensed tracks. Of all the participants, 73% said they would be interested in such a service and that figure went up to 80% for the people who already use filesharing services.

The respondents indicated that they are most interested in “download to own” services, streaming services are less popular with only 35% expressing an interest. The study further shows that people would continue to buy CDs and visit concerts if they were allowed to share legally, mostly because they want to support certain artists.

British Music Right Concludes from their survey: “There is a terrific opportunity for the music industry to grasp right now. This survey shows just how much respondents love and value music, and
highlights that a significant amount of that value is currently unmonetised.”

We couldn’t agree more with this conclusion, as we have said time and time again. The Internet and filesharing technologies make it possible to make production (of the copies) and distribution costs disappear, yet the prices still don’t change. Why? Because the industry insists on clinging onto its old business models.

The music industry should focus on monetizing filesharing networks instead of bringing them down. Sharing is a good thing and there are tons of possibilities to profit from it.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Younger artists that broke through in the era of filesharing are more positive and see it as something that actually helps their career. One of the artists said: “Where I am now, filesharing is positive and makes good PR. If I were to get bigger, I believe it would affect me negatively.”

There are older artists who think that filesharing could benefit them, one of them noted: “You can look upon filesharing as a way of promotion, a way of putting new stuff out there.”

One of the Swedish artists who definitely profited from file-sharing is the Swedish glam rock band “Lamont”. The band was featured on on The Pirate Bay frontpage last year. Not without success, over 100,000 people downloaded their album in less than 24 hours, numbers that other artists can only dream of.

At the time Brokep told TorrentFreak that they love to support bands who are willing to share their music using BitTorrent. And indeed, a little later The Pirate Bay supported Familjen, which resulted in a Grammy win for the band.

Perhaps these might be two extreme examples, but there is ample evidence that most artists actually profit from filesharing, even without The Pirate Bay.

The survey further found, and this might also come as a shock to the record labels, that a majority of the artists, 59%, admit to having downloaded copyrighted music themselves.

Although nearly half of the respondents had a favorable opinion towards filesharing, 58% of the artists still think that that sharing copyrighted material should be illegal.

One of the artists was rooting for a pirate crackdown, as he said: “My wish is that the punishment will be harder and that it will become easier to catch filesharers. I think all musicians should go to parliament and grab those politicians.”

The survey further showed that a majority of the participants in the survey are angry at the record companies. One of the musicians said: “For 50 years, the sole purpose of record companies has been trying to grab as much money away from the artists as possible. Now, suddenly they’ve become some kind of interest group for the artists and that’s not true.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.