Jupiter expects online music industry revenues to quadruple over the next five years, to be worth $3.3bn by 2008, when web sales will account for one in four record purchases. Jupiter does not expect digital sales to surpass $80m this year, yet iTunes alone reaped $1m in revenues within a week of launching its Mac-based service in April and has now sold $14m worth of music. It launched a Windows version two weeks ago and generated $1m in three days.
Sandvine: eDonkey up in Europe P2P
eDonkey accounts for 52% of all upstream P2P traffic in Germany, compared with 44% for FastTrack-based applications, 3.6% for WinMX and 0.4 percent for Gnutella. In Israel, the split is 52% eDonkey to 47 percent FastTrack. UK PC users favour FastTrack (59% of all upstream traffic), but both WinMX and eDonkey play a major role, with 20% of the P2P activity each.
Nielsen: Kazaa users down 40%
Nielsen//Netratings charted a 40% decline over the summer in the number of people using Kazaa. But a lot of that drop may be due to “the summer doldrums, when people are away from their computers.” Many college students, sometimes cited as among the heaviest downloaders, would have been away from their high-speed Internet connections.
Informa: Digital music $3.9 B by 2008
As part of the fourth edition of its “Music on the Internet” report, Informa also notes that the strength of the P2P file-swapping services will not allow the digital music business to fully thrive, as $2.4 billion will be lost to P2P services this year, and $4.7 billion will be lost by 2008.
Macrovision: 150M CDs globally are copy-protected
Macrovision says that elsewhere in the world, primarily Europe and Japan, more than 150 million discs have been manufactured with its copy-protection technology.
P2P usage stats
Recent data shows the RIAA’s stepped up efforts have had an impact on file sharing. July statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings showed that traffic dropped on P2P networks more than 15 percent in the first week after the RIAA issued its lawsuit warning.
A recent study issued by market research firm The NPD Group said households acquiring music files online illegally reached a high of 14.5 million in April of 2003, but that the number dropped off to 12.7 million households in May, followed by another drop to 10.4 million households in June.
Online music services cost US$700m in CD sales
A new report from Forrester Research claims the music industry lost nearly US$700 million in CD sales last year through the proliferation of online music download and subscriptions services.
The latest report, entitled ?From Discs to Downloads?, also concludes on-demand and fee-based media services, such as the iTunes music service launched by Apple earlier this year, will overtake piracy in the near future.
?Piracy and its cure – streaming and paid downloads – will drive people to connect to entertainment, not own it,? the report stated.
With the aim of monitoring how piracy, legitimate downloads and streaming services affects the consumption of CDs and video, the Forrester report predicts 33 per cent of music sales worldwide will come from downloads and online subscriptions by 2008, rather than hard media sales.
As a result, revenues from CDs will be down 19 per cent by 2008, while DVDs and tapes will drop 8 per cent, the report states.
Adding to this view, 49 per cent of the 12- to 22-year olds surveyed by Forrester in the US who downloaded music last month said they now buy fewer CDs.
The research firm derived its US$700 million figure using estimates on the total number of CDs which would be bought by the 23 million or so ?juvenile pirates? and ?retro rippers? identified in the US by the research firm if they did not download music files from file sharing services on the Web.
67% Steal Music
Data gathered from Pew Internet & American Life Project surveys fielded during March – May of 2003 show that a striking 67% of Internet users who download music say they do not care about whether the music they have downloaded is copyrighted. A little over a quarter of these music downloaders – 27% – say they do care, and 6% said they don?t have a position or know enough about the issue.
The number of downloaders who say they don?t care about copyright has increased since
July-August 2000, when 61% of a smaller number of downloaders said they didn?t care about the copyright status of their music files. Of those Internet users who share files online (such as music or video) with others, 65% say they do not care whether the files they share are copyrighted or n