This is rather amazing to say the least. It seems that a significant portion of society is still reluctant to pay 99 cents for a lossy product sprinkled with Digital Rights Management annoyances. According to this study by data resource company BigChampagne, many are throwing caution to the wind and get their tunes from P2P applications illegally.
In the US, that represents a 4.78 percent increase over October figures, and a 20.6 percent jump over the same period in 2004. Globally, the numbers represent a 3.14 percent increase month-over-month, and a 21.3 percent increase year-over-year. Both totals are close to recorded highs for BigChampagne. The increases are rather pronounced, and are part of a growing P2P population. BigChampagne tracks average simultaneous users, instead of total files, to help normalize against network debris like spoofed and incomplete files. |
The study cannot determine the amount of file trading going on by other means. For instance, they cannot determine how much music is traded privately via email or instant messaging. Not only that, they cannot tell how many are sharing music via rips and burns.
Source: Music Industry News
