Legal music downloads soar in Sweden

New Swedish laws against illegal file sharing seemed to have the desired effect for copyright holders, as legal music downloads have doubled since the laws’ passage.

Digital content provider inProdicon told The Local that sales have jumped 100 percent since the iPRED law went into effect last week. InProdicon provides half of Sweden’s legal music downloads through clients such as MTV and Telia. "I don’t know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,” managing director Klas Brännström said.

The iPRED law, enacted two weeks ago, requires Internet service providers to hand over their customers’ IP addresses in cases of suspected illegal file sharing. The courts decide whether there’s sufficient evidence for disclosure. A day after the laws took effect, Internet traffic in Sweden dropped by 30 percent (as seen below).

The company won’t release hard numbers, and believes last week’s results won’t be the norm. Downloads have been growing steadily anyway, by 20 percent to 30 percent per year. Brännström said Swedish artists created the majority of the downloaded music.

Hypebot suggests that the forthcoming release of iPREDATOR — a domain masking service from BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay — could reverse the trend, pointing to statistics that 80 percent of the 113,000 beta registrants are from Sweden. Still, I don’t think legal and illegal file sharing are directly related. If a consumer is willing to use workarounds to share files illegally, I doubt that the same person will also start spending money in reaction to tougher laws.

It’s more likely that Swedish music fans are giving legal venues a try. Whether they stick with it remains to be seen.