Tidal Exclusives Bring Back Piracy

Just when you thought music piracy was dead and buried it comes roaring back as alive as ever. The reason? Exclusives by Kanye West, Beyonce and Prince on Tidal.

These exclusives have been great for Tidal, as they have helped it to jump more than 100 places on the App Store most downloaded app chart, where it now sits at #3 on the iOS list.

As a result, Tidal is now the most popular music app in the US, even above Pandora and Spotify (Apple Music doesn't chart since it's a native app).

That's the good part of the story. The bad part is that some people just don't want to pay a monthly fee to stream a single album, they're not fond of Tidal, or they already subscribe to another service, so they resort to piracy instead. As a result, it's been estimated that West's The Life Of Pablo was torrented over 500,000 times in just its first day of release!

It looks like the same thing all over again in the initial hours after the release of Beyonce's Lemonade, as it's already on top of the the charts of both Kick Ass Torrents and The Pirate Bay.

And while Lemonade may be getting all the credit for Tidal's sudden ascendancy, the fact of the matter is that it's the only place online (other than YouTube, of course) where you can stream Prince's entire catalog. After his passing last week, there's been a tremendous appetite for his music, again helping Tidal tremendously.

So it looks like the only one making out on these exclusive's is Jay-Z and his Tidal service. The artists lose sales and streaming royalties to piracy, and the entire industry loses a chance to further the streaming cause. It's a missed opportunity.

The real smart move here would have been to make the exclusive's available only on the paid premium tiers of every service to give consumers a reason to sign up or upgrade. It could have happened with Adele's 25, it could have happened with The Life Of Pablo, and it could have happened with Lemonade.

Instead they've resurrected a scourge to the music industry where no one benefits except the pirates.

(This post was first posted on Forbes)

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Maybe Piracy Hasn't Gone Away After All

Just when you thought music piracy was over comes this study from Music Watch which claims that there are more people stealing music than ever.

Most studies contradict this notion (which is what I believe myself), but the following infographic takes an interesting look at the situation. It's short on data, but this article does give a lot more detail.

Note that it was also published a year ago, and the streaming world has certainly gone up a notch since then.

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Who Were The Most Pirated Artists In 2013?

Piracy is way down since the mid-2000's but it does still happen. Here's a list of the most pirated artists on BitTorrent in 2013, according to MusicMetric.com. I think you'll find few surprises in terms of the most popular artists.

rank	artists	est. downloads
musicmetric.com
1	Bruno Mars	5,783,556
2	Rihanna	5,414,166
3	Daft Punk	4,212,361
4	Justin Timberlake	3,930,185
5	Flo Rida	3,470,825
6	Kanye West	3,199,969
7	Eminem	3,176,122
8	Jay Z	3,171,358
9	Drake	3,139,408
10	Pitbull	3,138,308
11	One Direction	2,920,445
12	Maroon 5	2,857,652
13	Zed	2,828,764
14	Nicki Minaj	2,681,177
15	Adele	2,594,275
16	Avicii	2,562,151
17	David Guetta	2,441,235
18	Linkin Park	2,352,385
19	Pharrell Williams	2,336,996
20	Katy Perry	2,318,740

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The Lie That Fuels The Music Industry’s Paranoia

We’ve heard it for a decade now. “We’re losing more than half of our music sales thanks to digital piracy,” says the music industrial complex. The problem is that the music industry has freaked itself out so continually over hyped-up numbers attributed to music piracy that it can’t tell the facts from the reality anymore. The truth of the matter is that while music piracy was a real live problem at one point in the past, today it’s just a distant memory.

Don’t believe me? Let me give you a couple of data points:

• A study released earlier this month by networking company Sandvine on Internet traffic trends found that peer to peer traffic is now below 10%, down from 31% five years ago and 60% eleven years ago. Less P2P traffic equals less piracy according to a report from Envisional.

• Meanwhile, a combination of Netflix and YouTube now account for more than 51% of all Internet traffic in North America. YouTube is now the go-to platform for consuming music for US teens according to Nielsen’s annual Music 360 report, with more than 64% of teens consuming their music that way.

Here’s the bottom line - people don’t pirate songs anymore because they don’t need to. They can get whatever they want for free online via YouTube or a streaming service like Spotify.

After all, what’s the point of clogging up your hard drive with songs that you rarely listen to when you can have access to literally millions more any time and any place you want, and a lot more conveniently too? And why try to steal a song from a Torrent when you’re not sure if what you’re downloading is the original song or if it’s encrypted, corrupted or spoofed? You can waste a lot of time just trying to find a usable song to listen to. Who needs that? Read more on Forbes.

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Studies Show Piracy Doesn't Affect Music Sales

If you've read this blog for any length of time, or my Music 3.0 Internet music guidebook, you know that my mantra is "Your music is your marketing." I've advocated that you never worry about piracy, and should in fact embrace it, since that's the single best way for people to become aware of your music. In fact, sales will grow precisely because your music was interesting enough to be freely shared.

This was born out by the latest studies by the NPD Group and IFPI, as shown in this recent post. Now a new study from the EU has concluded that "digital piracy should not be viewed as a growing concern for copyright holders in the digital era."

Digital Music Consumption On The Interent: Evidence from Clickstream Data is a 40 page study full of statistical detail by the EU's Information Society Unit that used data from 5000 Internet users from the EU's five largest countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. While most of the data pertains to Europe, the conclusions are the same as previous studies.

No artist, songwriter or copyright owner wants their property stolen, but an odd quirk of music online shows that the more it's available for free, the more it sells. A number of artists have found that when they take the free music down from their website, their iTunes sales fall. Put it back up and the sales rise. You can look at it loosely like radio, where a song is heard for free, but it exposes it to people who might want to buy it.

It used to be that you'd buy the song or album because you wanted the convenience of hearing it when you wanted, instead of waiting for it to be played on the radio. Today you can find most songs instantly anywhere online, so the convenience factor is gone if you're into streaming. That said, some fans want to pay simply as a way to support an artist. Then again, it's been found that the biggest sharers of music are also the ones that buy the most.

Regardless, unless your music is heard in some way, it's invisible. That's why it doesn't matter how someone hears your music, just that they hear it.

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2012 Music Sales: No Reason To Celebrate Yet

In the last few days just about every print and online publication has had an article about the triumph of the music industry last year. It seems that sales were up for the first time since 1999, which no doubt is a good thing. But look a little closer at the stats and you have to come away with a "hmmmmm."

According to reports from both the international trade group IFPI and research company NPD Group, last year's sales jumped 0.3% to around $16.5 billion, and digital music, which increased 9%, represented 34% of that total. All well and good there.

Then you read that a lot of that was due to the fact that music piracy was down a lot last year:

• Consumers using P2P services to download music declined 17%
• The volume of illegally downloaded music files from P2P declined 26%
• Music files burned and ripped from CDs owned by friends and family fell 44%
• The number of files swapped from hard drives dropped 25%
• The volume of music downloads from digital lockers decreased by 28%
• 40% of consumers who illegally downloaded in 2011 stopped doing so in 2012

On the surface, all good news. By every account, music piracy is on the decline. But think about it - all this and total music sales only rose 0.3%?

Something's not working with these numbers, but I suspect it's the same as when the RIAA and IFPI were claiming that for every one sale, somewhere between 9 and 19 were pirated, depending upon the day and what side of the bed the researcher got up on. Let's face it, numbers like these were never dependable in the first place.

Here's something else that's scary. The biggest selling album of 2012 was the same as 2011; Adele's 21, this time with 8.3 million compared with over 18 million the year before. Once again, on the surface it's great that any album in the Music 3.0 age (soon to be Music 3.5 by the way) can sell this many, but bad in that there was no new album released in 2012 with enough juice to overtake it.

I don't want to come off like a naysayer, since I'm the biggest proponent that things aren't as bad as they're sometimes made out to be, and what we're living through is only the natural evolution of things. I'm just saying to always take industry numbers with a grain of salt.

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Music Pirates Buy More Songs

The music industry has been blaming piracy on decreasing sales forever, but it just might be that they were more off-base than anyone thought. A new study from Columbia University called Copy Culture In The US And Germany has determined that frequent users of P2P "piracy" networks in the US actually legitimately buy 30 percent more music than their non-stealing counterparts.

Of course this hasn't been the first study that points this out, but each one is immediately shot down by the RIAA as flawed. The problem is that we all know somebody that's such a music freak that they have to either have the latest release or something that no one else is hip to yet, even if that means they have to download it illegally. Of course, kids with no money tend to steal music, but they wouldn't have bought it in the first place anyway.

Some other points from the study include:

• Nearly half the population in the US and Germany (46% US; 45% DE) has copied, shared, or “downloaded for free” music, movies, and TV shows. 

• Much of this activity is casual and small scale. In both countries only 14% of adults have acquired most or all of a digital music or video collection this way. Only 2%–3% got most or all of a large collection this way (>1000 songs or >100 movies / TV shows).

• Copy culture tracks strongly with youth. Among adults under 30 in both countries, around 70% copy, share, or download media for free (70% US; 71% DE). In the US 27% in this age group acquired most or all of their digital music/video collections this way, and 10% acquired most or all of a large collection this way. In Germany the corresponding numbers are 33% and 7%.

• In both countries offline “private copying”—copying for personal use or sharing with family and friends—is comparable in scale to online file sharing. In the US, private copying and online file sharing contribute roughly equal shares to the average digital music collection: 22%–23% among those under 30. In Germany, online file sharing contributes more to average collection size (34%, versus 18% for private copying among those under 30) but less when controlling for collection size (17% for downloading; 25% for private copying). Put differently, most Germans copy more than they download.

• Copying and online file sharing are mostly complementary to legal acquisition, not strong substitutes for it. There is no significant difference in buying habits between those who copy or file share and those who do not. 

• P2P file sharers, in particular, are heavy legal media consumers. They buy as many legal DVDs, CDs, and subscription media services as their non-file-sharing, Internet-using counterparts.  In the US, they buy roughly 30% more  digital music. They also display marginally higher willingness to pay.

• In Germany much of this copying is legal under the “private copy” provisions of copyright law, which carve out a space for noncommercial personal uses, including passing copies to family and friends. This exemption does not extend to downloading or to copies made from “evidently unlawful public sources.”

• In the US little to none of this private copying is presumed legal, and much of it is now subject—in law if rarely in practice—to high criminal penalties.

Here's one last piece from the study that may be the most important; pirating and copying is declining as streaming music use climbs. Why steal it when it's always at your fingertips?

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.