Recently we reported that Bittorrent traffic is heavily watched by numerous companies. One of them appears to be MusicMetric, as this company has released a report on music downloading. The company has monitored music downloads in the first half of 2012 and released interesting figures. According to the company there were more than 775 million songs downloaded in the USA alone and in the UK, music pirates downloaded nearly 347 million songs.
The most downloaded release of the first six months of this year was from Rihanna with ‘Talk that Talk’ which was downloaded 1.2 million times. The second most popular release was from Billy Van, an American dubstep artist who was previously unknown before making his music available through Bittorrent. The content was sponsored and this way he could distribute his music legally to a whopping 1 million users. Adele has the dubious pleasure to be third with 990,000 downloads.
The researchers also found that people downloaded less torrents , relative to the GDP, in countries where Spotify and iTunes are available. If you want to read the entire report, get it here (Word document warning).
3 Comments on ‘Less torrent downloads where iTunes and Spotify are available’
I'd further the question ... how many illegal downloads are actually simply because people want to put their music on their MP3 player, but they can't rip it due to CD protection mechanisms and/or the music is not made available as a usable digital download?
Darn, I remember when I wanted to purchase a CD, I had to go to a store, then find a CD, ask an employee to put it in a CD player, then put on headphones and listen if I liked it or not, if not, start over again
For example, if I want to listen to a particular song on demand, I go to YouTube, look up the title and click the result. If I'm not interested in watching the video, I just minimise the browser (or switch tab). Same goes with on the move - YouTube App, assuming I'm in an area with 3G coverage. Most of the time, I just listen to FM, DAB or Internet radio, as there are very few recently released songs that I would be interested in listening to on demand.
However, in many countries where iTunes and Spotify are not available, there is generally much tighter Internet caps and worse mobile data coverage & charges. Assuming an Internet connection is quick enough to watch something on YouTube, the data usage would quickly eat up one's monthly allowance, especially if they listen to multiple songs a day. MP3 downloads on the other hand take far less bandwidth, even if they end up being uploaded multiple times through BitTorrent sharing.
As for listening to music on the move, those in poorer countries either don't have handsets capable of watching YouTube and those that do probably could not afford the data usage, so the main alternative would be to download the songs before heading out.
Most popular headlines
Windows Blue to allow boot to desktop and brings start menu back? (3)
- Tue 16 Apr 16:12 by DoMiN8ToR
- Software, Windows 8
The upcoming update of Windows 8 might allow users to boot to the desktop again.
Jobs in US entertainment industry on all-time high - piracy?! (8)
- Fri 12 Apr 15:10 by DoMiN8ToR
- Piracy
The number of jobs in the film and music industry in the United States has increased despite the claimed negative effects of illegal downloads.
The Piratebay domain moves to Greenland - circumvents blockade (3)
- Tue 9 Apr 14:23 by DoMiN8ToR
- Piracy
The PirateBay has moved to the domain thepiratebay.gl in fear that their previous domain would be ceased by Swedish authorities
Intel 9 series chipset has native SATA Express (SATA over PCIe) support (2)
- Wed 17 Apr 13:57 by DoMiN8ToR
- Solid State (ssd)
A Chinese tech site has posted a picture that reveals details on Intel's 9 series chipset.
