Piracy And Copyrights 2010

  My buddy Richard Feldman, who's president of the American Independent Music Publishers (AIMP), a Grammy-winner producer and songwriter, and owner of Artist First publishing, wrote an interesting post on the AIMP blog the other day.

Richard takes a look at the current state of music copyright and music piracy and has some interesting numbers that can be downright scary or hopeful, depending upon your outlook for the business. Among the numbers:

• Illegal P2P trading is estimated to be close to 90 million files per year, according to the IFPI's 2009 report.

• Worldwide music sales for 2009 were $16 billion, again from the same IFPI report.

• If just 10% of illegally traded songs per year were monetized (that adds up to 9 billion songs per year), $6.75 billion additional dollars could be injected into the industry if the income from song were 75 cents.

• The technology doesn't exist to actually catch someone in the act of illegal file sharing (this was a surprise).

Digital piracy is not the only reason that the music business is in trouble these days, but if only a portion is converted to real sales, the music industry could change almost overnight. Check out Richard's post at the AIMP blog.