P2P File Swapping on the Rise Again?

asdf 101 writes "News.com reports today that 'After six months of declines, peer-to-peer usage recently climbed 14 percent.' Their bottomline: 'The decline came as the RIAA launched more than 300 lawsuits against file swappers. The reversal cast doubts on the music industry's claims that its lawsuits are working to deter people from illegally downloading music files.' I guess wake_up_and_smell_the_coffee time just gets that much more imminent for all the hacks at RIAA." There's also an AP story, and you might want to review this story from just a few weeks ago that has different conclusions.

I haven't used p2p in months

[Travoltus]

I've been getting my music via second hand stores or I've been getting free (not bootlegged, but totally freely given) music from places like http://www.modarchive.com.

I'll keep going until the companies that support the RIAA are bankrupted or they relent with their assault on fair use rights.

Re:It depends on who you ask...

[MoonFog]

Seriously, from Day 1 of those lawsuits it was different stories every week. P2P use declining

It doesn't say exactly which networks are monitored, just:
NPD uses two tools to monitor peer-to-peer activity. MusicWatch Digital is a tool that continuously examines PCs of roughly 40,000 participating individuals, recording which sites they have gone to and what they have downloaded on their hard drives. The ongoing survey has been compiling and analyzing data on a monthly basis since April 2003. The second tool, called MusicLab, is a traditional paper survey mailed to 5,000 individuals asking them to report their usage and Web surfing. The results represent the U.S. population.

There are bound to be variations, and yes, it definately does depend on who you ask. This is perhaps as "neutral" as they come though.

4 million online at Kazaa

[AmVidia HQ]

That's a rough average of how many are online at a time, the last time I checked. That would be 10 or 100s of millions of Kazaa users. And there are many other P2P systems other that Kazaa.

Can RIAA sue them all? There is strength in numbers. People would not take them seriously, if the chance of getting caught is next to nothing (if you don't share your entire HD worth of britney sphere =b)

Decline of Individual Music File Sharing...

[aSiTiC]

..does not mean decline in total music file sharing. People are moving to downloading complete ALBUMS via eDonkey/eMule. Users don't want to deal with many, many rips of the same song (many of which are faked) on KaZaA.

As a quick check visit top 100 lists such as Pitchfork top 50 of 2003 [pitchforkmedia.com], which contains sub-pop music flavors. Now search for the albums on edonkey networks with clients or FileDonkey [filedonkey.com]. It's amazing to see so many RARs and ZIPs.

Less fakes, more helpful comments, better hashing, etc... at least for time being.

Look at the Sales Figures

[serutan]

Keep in mind that the litigation campaign and stopping P2P activity are not ends in themselves. The real measure of success of anything record companies do is sales figures. Money is, after all, the only language they understand.

I couldn't find any year-end figures, but here's a look at the RIAA's own sales figures (pdf) [svenrox.com] for the first half of 2003. Notice that CD sales were down 14% from the previous year. Apparently the wave of lawsuits launched in April had no immediate effect on CD sales. However, look at the sales of CD singles. Up 162% ! ! !
Unless I'm crazy, the fact that music sales in album form are down and in singles form are up might indicate that people want to decide which songs they pay for, instead of being forced to buy a few good songs along with a lot of filler.

People have been trying to tell the record industry this for quite a while. With hard evidence in the form of actual money, do you think they still have no clue why their profits in recent years have declined? It's because of their own outdated marketing rather than "piracy."

According to this article in the Register [theregister.co.uk] music sales overall for 2003 fell only 0.8% below 2002. They credit a big rise in music videos on DVD, but the RIAA will no doubt be singing the praises of their legal crusade. Reminds me of Caligula ordering his army to fight back the incoming tide.

Canute

[meehawl]

Reminds me of Caligula ordering his army to fight back the incoming tide.

Canute [google.com]. Caligula [straightdope.com] was the sister fucker [google.com].

You're still helping the RIAA

[rsilvergun]

Since by buying the used CD you raise it's value in the market, and make it more likely someone will buy the CD new (either because it doesn't cost much more new or they can't readily find the CD used since it's in demand). If you really want to stop helping them go here [magnetbox.com] and use it to stop buying music that supports them all together. I'm too weak though, several of my favorite bands have record contracts with the RIAA.

Re:It never really stopped

[EinarH]

It's not just the RIAA IP they block...:

PeerGuardian v1.99b pr11
http://xs.tech.nu

http://www.peerguardian.net

Successfully loaded 395213296 IPs from 3098 profiles.

Re:What?! You mean

[aardvarkjoe]

Despite the fact that apparently five moderators were duped into calling this insightful, if anyone had bothered to read the story (or all the similar stories over the last week -- slashdot is becoming a slow and poorly edited version of google news) they would note that music swapping increased during the final months of the year, not decreased, and it has been hypothesized that this has to do with increased interest in music as Christmas approaches.

We now return you to your regular uninformed slashdot comments.

Re:What?! You mean

[ElGnomo]

*ahem* Article's first sentence: The NPD Group, an independent market research firm, reported on Friday that peer-to-peer usage was up 14 percent in November 2003 from September.

Crypto P2P is next (article at the Register)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34937.html

p2p usage is going up and it's going undercover!

Re:I haven't used p2p in months

[jrockway]

Yes. I was just about to post something about mods. They sound wonderful, they're small, and you can even modify them! It's like the Open Source of Music. So much fun... go and download some and play around with them in something like cheesetracker (anyone know of GNOME/Gtk-2 trackers?).

Re:Socialists

[legoleg]

....here's your thin slice of pie [fastcompany.com].

Re:I haven't used p2p in months

[teamhasnoi]

You're comment made me get off my ass and post an email that Bill Evans (Slashdot - Ask a Music Producer) sent me awhile back.

I'll say no more, but there is a link to the mini-interview in my sig (or Journal).

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's astounding how much crap your full of! Slashdot users have recommended that artists use alternate services that get them MORE money then they do now. Services where the money goes to the artist INSTEAD of the RIAA. They don't hate the artists, they hate the putrid company that claims that care about them. Don't post if you don't know what your talking about.