Apparently, 70% of Music Piracy Happens OFFline
Digital Music News has published this chart (leaked to Torrentfreak) featuring data collected by NPD Digital Music Research. This is a slide from a presentation by the RIAA.
So 70% of music piracy comes from OFFline file trading? Torrentfreak promises more “revealing findings” will be published soon.
It'd be interesting to see exactly what they are tracking. Are they counting the number of copies, the number of unique songs, the amount of data? What really makes me wonder is the numbers for harddrive trading. That's a pretty high percentage for something I doubt the average music fan participates in. Harddrive trading, to my knowledge, is typically about collecting an artist's body of work. I wouldn't think that this would target many "average" music fans who typically consume chart topping singles and albums, not discographies. Also, again in my experiences, harddrive trading usually includes "bootleg" material, lots of live concerts or other demo material that is not commercially released. Whether or not this material should be available to the public is a different argument, but, for the sake of transparency, I hope the RIAA does not count these as lost sales. Final point, back to what is making up these percentages, I'm wondering if they are going with the amount of data. Why? Well back to harddrive trading, that's an awful pricey way to pirate music, but one transaction would easily trump the sale of hundreds of CDs. Also, if we stick with the "bootlegger theory" about harddrive traders, these people are probably more likely to be audiophiles and trading stuff at much higher resolutions; results, fewer songs, more data. OK one more point (or maybe a couple). Where do vinyl sales fall? What about the digital downloads that come with some physical purchases? Where are they on this graph? Do they count twice? I think this asks more questions than it answers. Maybe that's why they didn't want it out. Oh, RIAA.