New Report: Streaming Music Gains Ground over File Sharing
Teenagers’ preferences have been directed more to streaming music services lately, the report says.
Teenagers prefer to discover music via services like YouTube instead of using file sharing sites, the study says
A recent study could bring a timid smile on the faces of record labels owners as it reveals that the percentage of teenagers sharing copyrighted songs has dropped dramatically over the past year.
Accord to this survey the overall percentage of sharers had plunged from 22 % back in December 2007, when the reserach was last conducted, to 17%. It seems that the biggest decline comes from 14-18 year olds – 26 % admitted they shared once a month compared to 42 % in the previous report.
Involving interviews with 1,000 subjects and a series of focus groups, the research was conducted by Music Ally, in conjunction with media and technology research company The Leading Question.
According to Tim Walker, chief executive of The Leading Question, the best method to combat piracy is to launch new viabile licensed services. He exemplified: "That could be an unlimited streaming service like Spotify, or a service like the one recently announced by Virgin which aims to offer unlimited MP3 downloads as well as unlimited streams."
Chief executive of Music Ally Paul Brindley also emphasized the new for new business model deevlopment: “File sharing is a moving target, so industry and government policies need to recognise this,” he said. "Kids find services like YouTube much more convenient for checking out new music than filesharing," he concluded.
Feeling the pulse of these latest stements together with the survey’s results major labels tend more and more to invest in streaming music services. It remains to be seen how user-oriented they’ll manage to be in fact.
To wrap up the study also shows that "more UK music fans regularly buying single track downloads (19 per cent) than file sharing single tracks (17 per cent) every month, though the percentage of fans sharing albums regularly (13 per cent) remains higher than those purchasing digital albums (10 per cent)".
