Music piracy is down: A lesson for Hollywood

Steve Jobs is often credited for offering a revolutionary way to curb music piracy. It wasn’t to drag music fans into court, saddling them with crippling debt and legal fees. It wasn’t about convincing ISPs to institute a copyright alert system to hassle users. No, the Apple co-founder had a much simpler solution: Jobs believed you could convince people to obtain legitimate music tracks by competing with piracy and offering a better user experience.

Nearly ten years after the iTunes Stores debuted, people are still turning away from piracy to buy music from vendors such as Amazon and Apple. And the trend of obtaining officially sanctioned music from legitimate sources is only increasing, according to the NPD Group’s annual survey of music consumer behavior.

Music piracy over peer-to-peer networks declined by 17 percent in 2012 compared to the year previous, based on NPD’s online survey of more than 5,000 U.S. Internet users between December and January. That decline translates into about 12 million fewer American audio pirates between 2011 and 2012. And the number one reason NPD cited for the precipitous drop in music piracy was free, ad-supported streaming services such as Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify.

Free streaming isn’t just taking a bite out of P2P piracy either. Other forms of music sharing are also on the decline, such as borrowing and ripping a friend’s CD, trading music files through good ol’ sneakernet, and sharing via online storage services. The decline makes sense. Why bother going through the hassle of ripping a CD yourself or importing files from a USB thumb drive when the same music is only one click away on Spotify or Amazon’s new AutoRip service?

:story: PCWorld