Napster ruled the internet for several years as its most controversial record store. But there was no exchange of cash since it was a free file sharing site pirating music. Napster was closed down a decade ago due to legal action. This in turn paved the way for the emergence of iTunes and eMusic and much later Pandora and Spotify.
The findings of a new study conducted by Envisional shows that music has ceased to be the primary target of the internet pirate. It examined 10,000 popular files on the BitTorrent tracker PublicBT and discovered that music composed only 2.9% of files. It appears that the threat of possible law suits encouraged fans into seeking legal services such as iTunes, eMusic, Amazon MP3. But also the growth of free music, legal streaming (Spotify and Songza ) have made piracy redundant.
That leaves one last gripe. In the world of YouTube music and music for free is there any need to pay? A song costs 99p to download and at Grooveshark you can try before you buy. Contract restrictions ensure that some songs by certain artists cannot be downloaded in every country. This does seem stupid and archaic for a business operating in what is a border free zone.
But there are good reasons to buy pop music. When you buy instead of pirate, you are paying money directly into the pocket of the music artists. 70% of each sale by download retailers goes to the record companies who own the music. Artists usually get 15% of 70% or about 10.5 pence per pound. The most popular arrangement now is to write your own music and run your own publishing company, obtaining another 9.1 pence in “mechanical royalties.” Every download sends almost 20 pence straight to the band.
A recent US court ruling against Universal records brought by the rapper Eminem could lead to downloads of back catalogues being treated not as sales but as licensed music. Today all written contracts address digital music sales directly. That would increase the artists split to above 15%. Not forgetting of course the issue of live music.