Comments on: Legal music downloads triple worldwide

Record industry says digital music sales are rising around the world, while peer-to-peer growth slows.

[unknown unknown]

Lets consider the source.

I am sure their is more than a little bias in these numbers. It's really hard to get an acurate picture of P2P growth because of it's distributed nature. BitTorrent especially is hard to track (yet it would seem to account for a third of all internet traffic). I'd like to see data that attributes this alleged decline to lawsuits. When compared to number of people who use P2P, the number of lawsuits in minuscule. The chance that a given individual will be sued is remote.

[Darryl Snortberry]

??

One report says "legal downloads" are up...another says music sales are down...another says sales are up...another says "piracy" has increased...another say it has decreased. Hey music business, whatever you got to say to make yourselves feel good is fine with me...and whatever I have to do to keep money in my pocket is fine with me also. I will admit I don't download music like I once did...but thats because it's all similar sounding garbage. Even at a free rate music isn't appealing. The movie industry is noticing the same thing...but let the movie industry explain it and they'll blame "piracy" just like the music industry. They'll never consider the public just doesn't want the junk. I guess they say "we have trained the american public to be nothing but consumers so how can they resist buying our product....the only explanation is they must be stealing."

I Agree..

Yeah, this article is a load of rubbish to be honest. It's comparing 3 month figures (illegal sharing) to 12 month figures (legal). If you do the maths, you will notice that the legal sharing has had 123million track downloads in 12 months and illegal sharing has increased by 30million in 3 months. If you multiply 30 million (3 months) by 4 you get 120million, this is an accurate figure for the amount of tracks illegally aquired in 12 months by users. This is just the same as legal use, which just shows that the article is infact twisting the figures to make it look good for legal sharing when infact they are just the same. Also, you gotta add about 10 million onto 120million track for the illegal downloads because it has slowed down a bit in the last few months. As the person above me said, ways like Bit Torrent to get albums etc aren't easily tracked and won't have been included. This is a poor article.

[w8less]

due to lawsuits

these guys kill me. it was asserted by programmers even before napster got crucified (and was resurrected as a shadow of its former self) that the problem with illegal downloads was behavior oriented but that that behavior could be re-programmed, hacked even with fast and easy downloading available online. (and cheaper as well; as in closer to a non-rip-off profit margin; and when music downloads cut out the (retrograde?) middle mans of cd pressing, warehouse storage, transportation and trucking (truckers, yes, they have a union), storefront costs including pay and benefits etc., (and when the lowering of pressing costs went from 2bucks for vinyl to 50cents for cd just where was this non-rip-off mindset anyway? "lost in the 80s") just what is that new non-rip off profit margin? Now? is it 99cents a song? because with 15 songs, thats the same price as a CD with all the middle men un-cut-out) Me? I like e-music, the price of 20-25 cents a song just sounds sexy to me, and i like. also, they have songs in mp3 form, no need to go through the easy but irritating process of converting downloaded songs to mp3 like i have to do when i use itunes. I aint got-ta and i aint gone-ta have five different music formats in my massive song folder so i cant figure out why my favorite song by flavor of last year's band won't burn on the software i just bought or got off of open source today. BUT I DOWNLOAD LEGALLY BECAUSE FINALLY SOMEONE IS NOT TREATING ME LIKE A FOOL, TRYING TO PIMP ME. Wise up, music industry and stop treating the customer like a mark. And stop fooling yourself. Especially with the new Supreme Court ruling clearing the way for your suit-happy intellectual property "suits" to sue the hell out of the internet businesses. Suing the customer was clumsy, dumb, and just bad mojo. Surely you can at least admit that now, and stop lying to yourself and us, acting as desparate as a private on shore leave talking to a virgin in a one woman town. It's embarrasing. To whit, the programmers are right, and your lawsuits, uh, sucked. Whew. Glad I finally got that off my chest. It was like an incubus, or an entertainment company strategy, thrashing to mr. brownstone, or something.

[MeepIsTheWord]

idiots ... music stores are closing down .... only place I see music CDs is in department stores and food stores ... just goes to show you ... that people who download there own songs ... do so ... to make up their own music compilations .... horrible buying mixed compilation CDs and you only like 3 songs out of the 20 on there.... whatever the download .... legal or not ... just goes to show you .... that if music industry wants illegal downloads to stop ... should be suing there own stupid selves for not keeping up with internet industry .... Boo Yah!!!