It took a while, but the music industry is finally beginning to come around to the whole streaming thing and reckon it could be the way to make business as profitable as it once was, which isn’t to say there won’t be growing pains.
With endless databases of music at everyone’s fingertips (in some cases completely for free) it’s a wonder music piracy still exists. After all, paying about $10 a month for all the music you could possibly want is hardly exorbitant.
But piracy is alive and well, it’s just changing. More specifically, it’s going mobile. Whilst traditional peer-to-peer music piracy, the stuff that had Metallica irked back in the day, is indeed going down thanks largely to streaming, mobile piracy is on the rise.
As Digital Music News reports, earlier this year research group MusicWatch revealed that instead of torrenting music on the Pirate Bay, modern pirates stream-rip their music from YouTube, and all this is happening as the industry fights YouTube for better royalties.
According to London-based firm Muso, via DMN, mobile-based piracy surged eight percent in the last year alone, with a growing number of users ripping music videos from YouTube or downloading from web-based MP3 sites.
Among the trends Muso noticed was a dip in the number of internet users employing torrents and even visiting piracy sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents. However, this was paired with a spike in visits to MP3 sites and employing Popcorn Time-style streaming piracy.
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According to Muso, 28 percent of all visits to pirate hubs in 2015 came from mobile users. The company tracked some 141 billion visits to more than 14,000 pirate sites, which equates to roughly 40 billion visits from mobile devices.
Smartphones now account for nearly 30 percent of all music piracy, and the numbers are going up not down. “The usage of these sites is far larger than many realise,” Muso researchers told Digital Music News.
In other words, just as consumers left brick-and-mortar music stores for Napster, many are now leaving legitimate streaming platforms like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music for Popcorn Time-style music piracy services.
