A new study by Ipsos-Reid
indicates that unauthorized music downloading is on the wane in Canada, a trend fueled by fear of industry lawsuits on
one hand, and dissatisfaction with the P2P experience on the other. Earlier this year, the Canadian Recording Industry
Association threatened Canadians with the same type of litigation deployed by the RIAA in America.
Now, here's the music industry shooting off its mouth and putting a bullet in its foot:
"If it was actually true, then I would be very delighted today."
That was Graham Henderson of Universal Music Canada. The label is dissing the Ipsos-Reid report, despite the fact that the study strongly points toward authorized download services, and is clearly aligning itself with the label agenda. Henderson's got his panties in a bunch because he thinks people lie in surveys about illegal activity. Never mind that the study was comparative, not absolute, and showed a decrease in unauthorized downloading from a previous study.
It must be noted that, despite the decrease in P2P downloading among Canadians, America's northern neighbors are still more likely to download infringing files than U.S. music lovers… by several percentage points.
1. Napster's coming to Canada soon, but iTunes and MusicNet are launching in Europe first due to some delays here -- somebody's whining, surprise.
I still have a computer with Windows 98 built inside of it so I can't even buy from the two Canadian music sites because Windows Media Player 9 doesn't support below Windows 98 SE. Oh well, I'll keep my subscription at DI.FM for awhile yet because 160k reliable streams are worth the price.
( I only sample 10 mp3's/day from blogs, but I long for a subscription to the Napster of old; and the old eMusic was acceptable too. I was hoping the Big 5 Music companies would've launched a service based on the old eMusic. )
Thanks for blogging.
Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Aaron