In my earlier blog about Napster’s launch of prepay, I observed that the market seems to be restricted as so many free P2P sites were still available.
Actually, latest figures highlighted by The Guardian, show it’s worse than that.
Research firm NPD disclosed that the number of users downloading music has fallen from a high of 1.3 million a month to 1 million. The drop off coincides with the end of launch promotions.
Meanwhile, the number of households using P2P free downloading sites has risen to 6.4 million.
This is really concerning for the legit sites.
Firstly, P2P dwarfs the legit ones, despite all the marketing dollars invested.
Secondly, the RIAA actions seems to have done nothing to discourage users from using P2P.
Thirdly, while the research tracks 40,000 computer users, I personally wouldn’t agree to being tracked if I was planning to use P2P downloads and risk being sued. So it could be that the stats for P2P use are vastly under-reported.
Fourthly, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to persuade teens on limited budgets to “do the right thing” and go legit. When all their friends are going P2P, this becomes the “normal” behaviour and paying for music becomes deviant. When user values are so out of kilter with the industry, something has to change. And it’ll have to be the record industry.
This is all sobering news for the record industry (who were holding legit downloads up as a saviour) as well as for the legit download sites themselves. Unless they can stamp out P2P (they can’t!) the future looks grim for both. They need to quickly work out how they can add value to the music itself, or they’ll go the way of vinyl.
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