Spike in Piracy Predicted as Musicians Continue to Abandon Streaming Services
Sir Paul, say it isn't so! Are you really pulling your beloved content out of streaming services?
Digital Music News recently shared part of a study about the effects that online content distribution, particularly streaming, has on conversion rates. Following the results of this study, musicians began to pull their content out of subscription streaming services like Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody in order to mitigate the damage to record sales. At the risk of looking foolish, the question begs to be asked: Can the entertainment industry continue to demand that a debt-laden society continue to finance it? Isn't that the major reason for the rise in streaming services?
Recession Drives Permanent Shift in Consumer Behavior
U.S. entertainment sales, particularly in the area of the video, have been falling for several years now, according to Digital Entertainment Group, which noted a shift in consumer behavior toward rental and subscription streaming services starting during the recession. The purchase of physical and electronic content is down 29% from seven years ago, while mobile device adoption is rapidly growing and projected to continue to rise worldwide. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Hollywood came up with a nifty idea for a cloud-based digital locker it calls UltraViolet, and they began launching "UltraViolet-enabled Blu-ray discs" to encourage consumers to purchase the content and subsequently be able to access it from a variety of devices, while starving streaming services of their most lucrative content. Adoption of digital lockers has been slow and consumer response lukewarm.
Along with decreased consumer spending on entertainment media, there has been a dramatic increase in piracy of copyrighted content, facilitated by peer-to-peer file sharing services that are cropping up all over the world. And yet, the "solution" to this appears to be for the entertainment industry to utilize streaming services. Bloggers at thehill.com reported "In a 2010 UK-based study evaluating the relationship between illegal P2P file-sharing and Internet radio services, researchers found that over half of the survey's participants reported stopping illegal downloading activity due to the presence of online streaming services. A US-based study due out later this year is expected to report similar findings."
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