The following is published in the latest Edition of 'Music Week'.

 

Brian :(

 

BPI wakes up the nation

09:21 | Thursday December 16, 2010

 

By Robert Ashton

 

The BPI has delivered a wake-up call to those who have lost sight of the UK’s illegal downloading problem with a new study that shows more than three quarters of all music tracks downloaded this year were done so illegally.

 

The conclusions of Digital Music Nation 2010, which for the first time harnesses Data and trends from both the legal and illegal side of the street, will make sobering reading for politicians and the media.

 

In the most comprehensive and sophisticated study of how people consume their music digitally the BPI estimates a total of 1.2bn illegal tracks will be downloaded by the end of this year; a figure which dwarfs the 370m tracks that will be purchased in 2010.

 

“To find that 76% of downloads are illegal is shocking,” says BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor, who launched the report this morning. “Despite the progress of the legal market and the high awareness of legal services illegal downloading is not decreasing.”

 

With these and other headline figures, which spell out the current digital landscape, Taylor wants to regain the agenda – currently dominated by the forthcoming judicial review of the DEA and problems over how the Act will work – and remind Government and others that the illegal market is still huge and holding back the development of the UK’s legitimate digital entertainment sector.

 

“There has been a relentless focus on the details and implementation of the Digital Economy Act,” suggests Taylor. “I think some people have lost sight of the need for urgent action. Our job is to lift their eyes.”

 

And the report doesn’t shy away from the hard truth. It shows:

 

- 1.2bn tracks illegally downloaded in 2010 from unauthorised sources

 

- The illegal proportion of all music tracks obtained in 2010 is 76%

 

- The retail value of unathorised tracks is worth £984m

 

- 28.8% of the UK online population are involved in illegal downloading

 

- 23% of the UK online population used P2P sites and software to obtain unauthorized music

 

- 7.7m UK internet users engaged in illegal downloading across all sources

 

Taylor says he believes these and other statistics in the new report will remind policy makers why the DEA is right for the digital economy and could even help bring about implementation of the Act much quicker: frustratingly the code underlying how the Act should work is long overdue, bogged down with Ofcom and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It is now not expected until January.

 

When the DEA was passed earlier this year, it had initially been hoped that notification letters could be sent to illegal filesharers as early as January. But, now executives fear that if the timetable slips any further letters are unlikely to land on doormats before next winter.

 

The BPI’s move comes just days after the shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis suggested the Government creates a cross party forum to help grow the UK’s music and creative sectors.

 

 

I don't see how you can blame people who illegal download. Higher quality for free. why pay 99p for a w*** itunes m4a when you can get the same track in FLAC for 0p. it only makes sense.

 

i know a music sharing site with more stuff than itunes, everything in better quality than itunes, it's just logic not to legally download, i'd pay for the service i get at said site, infact i do donate to it, and i'm sure most people who use it would actually pay quite alot a month for a service like that, but the music industry is far to backwards to actually make money properly these days.

 

support independent artists and not major record labels. pay for decent quality and not $h!t quality or illegally download. rant over.

I only download illegally what i can't attain through legal methods.

All this nonsense about illegal downloading when single sales are at their highest, lol.

 

albums... OK poor sales, but I put this down more to people being able to cherry-pick tracks off albums.

Not being funny, but I just can't be bothered to go into HMV and buy a physical copy for £12, where I can get it online for free. (Why would I download something of iTunes either, it's crap quality).

I only download illegally what i can't attain through legal methods.

 

Same, although the cost of the legal downloads is still too expensive. I think 59p per mp3 is a reasonable price, but sites like 7digital are now charging up to £1.29 for a single track which is ridiculous. Amazon's prices have also increased slightly in the past few weeks.

 

CDs are also too expensive aswell, £6.99 would be a fair price - there have been some recent high profile releases sold for that price upon release, so why can't all CDs be that price?

The music i have acquired through non-legal methods in the past month or so would have cost an absolute fortune to import. I refuse to pay £20 to import a CD from Norway.

 

However, i am more than willing to make a legal purchase upon it's UK release. Like Agnes's Dance, Love, Pop. I acquired that illegally first, then purchased it on it's UK release and Tone Damli's I Know which i pre-ordered from HMV the second i saw it was being released here even though i have the Norwegian release illegally.

 

 

If we had a pan-european download service, or an iTunes EU i wouldn't download anything illegally.

 

 

 

The question has to be asked, of those 1.2bn illegal downloads, how many were of material unavailable to purchase legally at the time of downloading? I'd imagine the figure to be quite high.

 

 

 

The attitude of the industry to illegal downloading is quite frankly ridiculous. From a business perspective, they should be looking at illegal downloads as competition. Generalise every illegal download as coming from company X and then go about trying to destroy the competition like Tesco would. They should identify straight off the bat that prices are far too high for legal downloads. The difference between 99p and 0p is huge, especially when you take into account the vastly reduced cost of releasing a track to download. A large reduction in price of individual track downloads, and those of albums [bring albums down to £3 and tracks to 25p] will increase demand. It's basic economics. You can't undercut your rival, but by making your product more appealing [ie cheaper than it is now] you can significantly reduce their market share. It's business 101 for crying out loud. If this is they was record labels react, then it's probably time the big labels all went under. What's the point in chasing massive profits in a market where you could sell significantly more and in the long run potentially increase profits by cutting the end cost to the consumer. Quite frankly, if the record industry in the western world wasn't so profit driven and f***ing retarded the illegal download market would be tiny.

 

I also don't understand why the download providers can't provide different formats. It's just m4a and mp3 but there are many other audio options out there that are in some cases superior.

 

If iTunes was to offer a track for 25p with the option of downloading it in one of a few formats they would see sales dramatically increase. [The default option would remain m4a, but there would be a drop down box on the download page to allow the downloader to request a different format for example]

 

I don't understand some of the decisions made by business people in the western world sometimes. They border on insanity

http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/7586/downloadacar.jpg

 

so true..

 

i don't see the big problem with it. i'm sure there have been more people who have bought albums after downloading it online first than there have been just go out and buy it without hearing it (other than like megafans).. it also annoyed me when they tried blocking youtube videos when people are much more likely to buy a song after hearing it a few times and realising they want it on their ipod or whatever

We were told years ago that copying records onto tape would 'ruin musicians'. Never happened, then TV would 'ruin cinema', never happened. Then copying on to Video tape would 'ruin the entertainment business', never happened. Now copying onto computer media, will bring about doom and destruction. Will it happen? I doubt it!

The music i have acquired through non-legal methods in the past month or so would have cost an absolute fortune to import. I refuse to pay £20 to import a CD from Norway.

 

However, i am more than willing to make a legal purchase upon it's UK release. Like Agnes's Dance, Love, Pop. I acquired that illegally first, then purchased it on it's UK release and Tone Damli's I Know which i pre-ordered from HMV the second i saw it was being released here even though i have the Norwegian release illegally.

If we had a pan-european download service, or an iTunes EU i wouldn't download anything illegally.

The question has to be asked, of those 1.2bn illegal downloads, how many were of material unavailable to purchase legally at the time of downloading? I'd imagine the figure to be quite high.

The attitude of the industry to illegal downloading is quite frankly ridiculous. From a business perspective, they should be looking at illegal downloads as competition. Generalise every illegal download as coming from company X and then go about trying to destroy the competition like Tesco would. They should identify straight off the bat that prices are far too high for legal downloads. The difference between 99p and 0p is huge, especially when you take into account the vastly reduced cost of releasing a track to download. A large reduction in price of individual track downloads, and those of albums [bring albums down to £3 and tracks to 25p] will increase demand. It's basic economics. You can't undercut your rival, but by making your product more appealing [ie cheaper than it is now] you can significantly reduce their market share. It's business 101 for crying out loud. If this is they was record labels react, then it's probably time the big labels all went under. What's the point in chasing massive profits in a market where you could sell significantly more and in the long run potentially increase profits by cutting the end cost to the consumer. Quite frankly, if the record industry in the western world wasn't so profit driven and f***ing retarded the illegal download market would be tiny.

 

I also don't understand why the download providers can't provide different formats. It's just m4a and mp3 but there are many other audio options out there that are in some cases superior.

 

If iTunes was to offer a track for 25p with the option of downloading it in one of a few formats they would see sales dramatically increase. [The default option would remain m4a, but there would be a drop down box on the download page to allow the downloader to request a different format for example]

 

I don't understand some of the decisions made by business people in the western world sometimes. They border on insanity

The problem with that is that it makes it incredibly difficult to make back how much you actually spent on producing it etc. unless it's a truly huge selling track. Make it 25p and sales increase, yeah, but they won't increase enough as it's still a choice between free and 25p. Basic observation of illegal downloads/torrents also shows it's not stuff that's not out yet that dominates (although that's a sizeable sector) but more stuff that is huge at the time - hence why Eminem, Rihanna et al absolutely dominate the most popular download/torrent sites.

I would probably illegally download more if I could consistently find good quality stuff - I think I need to be pointed to wherever Chris gets his music. In terms of albums, it's very rare that I download albums at all - there's something unbeatable about having a physical copy but anything over £10 for a single CD is ridiculous.