More Research Again Shows: Good, Authorized Services Compete With Piracy (original) (raw)

from the well-duh! dept

We’ve been arguing this for years, but the best and so far only way that’s been shown to effectively deal with the “challenge” of piracy is to figure out ways to compete against it. We’ve highlighted this point for quite some time, but people still try to argue against it. However, the evidence keeps coming in. We just posted about some data on unauthorized file sharing in the US and attitudes towards it. Those showed that it was a mainstream activity, especially between friends and family. Furthermore, it showed that “enforcement” campaigns targeted at trying to make people think that “piracy is theft” were almost certainly going to fail for not taking context into account.

Instead, focusing on new and useful legitimate services has to be the way forward… and the data from that same Musicmetric study seems to confirm that. It showed that there was a notable dip in BitTorrent usage in countries that had good authorized offerings:

Musicmetric found that music file downloads using BitTorrent tend to increase in countries that don’t have legal music streaming services such as Spotify. Among the top 10 countries with the fastest growing BitTorrent market share in the first half of 2012, only one, France, had Spotify.

Conversely, in the top 10 countries where BitTorrent activity has decreased fastest, five have access to Spotify.

Of course, it also seems worth noting that the one country that has Spotify and shows increasing BitTorrent market share is France… which has Hadopi, one of the strictest “enforcement and education” plans out there. I’m sure it’s just a total coincidence…

Filed Under: authorized services, competing with free, competition
Companies: spotify