Music Doesn't Crack The Pirate Bay's Top 100

There is good news and bad news when it comes to piracy. According to an MBW analysis of the newly returned online sharing site, music doesn't even crack the top 100 of most downloaded files.

That means that, like many have been saying for a while now (including me), piracy is no longer a major issue for the music business.

The bad news? It could mean that people don't care enough about music anymore to steal it, although I'm inclined to believe that it's more about the new streaming paradigm than anything.

So what dominates the top 100 most pirated files? As you can see from the chart on the left movies are about 50%, followed by television shows at 33%, porn at 9% and games and apps at 4%.

What were the top 5 most downloaded files?
1. Wild Card (movie)
2. The Interview (movie)
3. American Sniper (movie)
4. Nightcrawler (movie)
5. The Blacklist (television show)

The most pirated music?
1. True - Avicii (album)
2. "Shake It Off" - Taylor Swift (track)
3. "All of Me" - John Legend (track)
4. X - Chris Brown (album)

There will always be pirating of material that people can't either afford, think is too highly priced, or is inconvenient to get legally. As we've seen with music, once at least one of those barriers are broken, pirating decreases, except for in the case of some techies who will pirate things anyway just because they can.

UK ISPs Must Block Pirate Bay

Here's another European court ruling that may eventually influence entertainment law in the United States (see last week's post as well). Britain's High Court has ruled that UK Internet service providers (ISPs) must now block access to Swedish file sharing service The Pirate Bay.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI, which is the equivalent of our RIAA) asked them to voluntarily block the site in 2011, but the ISPs refused at that time. Now it appears they have no choice, since they've now been ordered by the court to do just that. 5 ISPs, (Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media) have announced that they will comply immediately with the order.

This really isn't the first time this has happened in Europe, as courts in the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Italy and Denmark have already ruled similarly.

The significance of the ruling is that, although the US is a different kettle of fish in terms of the law, it's beginning to look like the ISPs might eventually assume responsibility for a lot more than they originally signed up for, like policing piracy and collecting royalties.

Personally I don't believe that having an ISP block a pirate site will make a hill of beans of difference. First of all, the whole piracy issue is totally blown out of proportion by the record label organizations (RIAA, BPI, IFPI) as an catch-all excuse for a variety of economic and creative problems that trouble the industry. Since the majors are shareholder-owned, it's a convenient justification to pacify the shareholders while the real issue is more about performance (or lack thereof) of the executives, and their lack of vision.

There have been studies that have concluded that piracy is actually a good thing for music in that it promotes discovery of new music (I believe this myself). As the music world moves toward subscription streaming at high speed, soon there will be no reason to pirate any more. When you can hear virtually any song you want for a low flat fee per month, all the incentive to pirate goes away.

As far as US ISPs are concerned, many people much smarter than I believe that soon your subscription music fee will be included in your Internet access fee every month. At that point, it's all over for music piracy, then the suits in the executive offices will have to either find a new excuse or finally start to earn some of the big bucks they make.

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