The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has reported a few pieces of good news for the industry.
Firstly, the IFPI are claiming that the number of illegal, copyright infringing music files on the internet is down 800 million files – down from a peak of 1.1 billion files this time last year. Now, you know as well as I do that there is now way of measuring the numbers of anything on the internet, especially music files – but we’re pleased that they believe that the problem is getting better, not worse.
Any drop in infringing files can no doubt be attributed to the 100 or so legal music services that have popped up in the last couple of years. It’s as we’ve said all along: people don’t want an illegal copy of a track when they can have a properly encoded, licensed file from an official source.
Secondly, they are pleased to report that seven out of ten Europeans know that file sharing is illegal. To help raise awareness, the music industry sent 23 million instant message warnings to people using P2P services in 9 countries.
Interestingly, 45% of those surveyed in Italy said that “they expected to stop over the next three months” — implying that they were either waiting for music services to start up, or they were finding it difficult to kick the habit.
Registered users at music services in Europe now stands at 830,000 people – up from 380,000 at the end of September.
Prosecutions are still taking place amid all the improvements – 24 more cases were rolled out, and the IFPI says that several hundred more cases are planned for the coming months.
