Music

Music Piracy Way, WAY Down, Apparently

This story on Digital Music News points to indications that file-sharing now accounts for less than 10% of US traffic on the Internet.  No similar numbers are provided for Canada, but we might–might–be able to assume that piracy is down here, too.

According to research by a company called Sandvine, file-sharing once took up 70% of bandwidth back in 2004.

This new stat also includes a 20% drop in BitTorrent traffic, which, of course, is widely seen as the technology used to steal stuff.  

Why the drop?  The rise in legal services as reasonable prices, for one.  It’s just much easier to use iTunes, a music streaming service or YouTube than it is to torrent something.  

And maybe people are using their time online to do other things.  Mashable reports on how bandwidth is being used in the US these days.  

Juliette Jagger

Juliette Jagger is a Canadian music journalist. She is on Twitter @juliettejagger.

Juliette Jagger has 562 posts and counting. See all posts by Juliette Jagger

2 thoughts on “Music Piracy Way, WAY Down, Apparently

  • Makes sense to me… in my case, it's really just a simple cost-benefit analysis. I pay about $10/month to rdio.com and I can listen to whatever I want, when I want & where I want. It's far more convenient than hunting around for files, and I don't feel like I'm being ripped off in the slightest.

    Reply
  • YouTube can be worse for that. When it's not official content, it's piracy for people who don't know how to torrent.

    Reply

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