So, perhaps P2P file-sharing was, after all, a short term distraction that the music industry really shouldn't have got so stressed out about. Though there's been such conflicting research on the scale of file-sharing over the years, I'm never sure what to believe in this domain.
But it is surely entirely believable that P2P file-sharing is finally on the wane now that broadband internet access is the norm, and user-friendly on-demand streaming music services like Spotify, We7, YouTube and MySpace Music are more prevalent.
Well, that is the trend being reported by Arbor Networks who, as everyone knows, are "global providers of flow data analysis and deep packet inspection solutions for network security and visibility". So they should know.
According to Arbor, P2P now accounts for 18% of all internet traffic, down from 40% in 2007. Web page based traffic now accounts for 50% of net traffic, up from 10% in 2007 - a result of the growing popularity of streaming services, and the relatively recent tendency to provide such streaming through web browsers rather than digital media players.
Arbor Networks' Craig Labovitz told C-Net that there is a simple explanation for the change - compared to the engaging and easy to use streaming services that have arrived on the market in the last few years, "P2P is a headache".
Of course Arbor's figures could, at first glance, exaggerate the actual decline in P2P usage. File-sharers are possibly still file-sharing, it's just that enough newcomers to the net are using legit streaming services to skew the overall percentages. And let's not forget, email-to-email and offline file-sharing has been the big growth area in the last eighteen months, alternative ways to illegally share music without utilising P2P technology. And even if Arbor's stats do show people are drifting from P2P to streaming services, not all those streaming services are yet fully licensed.
On the flip side, perhaps music file-sharing has declined even more than Arbor's stats suggest. The illegal sharing of films and TV shows has certainly boomed in the last few years, and with the movie and TV industries generally slower to offer compelling on-demand archive-rich online services, perhaps an increasingly large amount of that 18% of net traffic which goes on P2P is used up for sharing video rather than audio files.
So, all in all, Arbor's stats possibly don't tell us very much at all. Though there is a certain logic to the theory that as legit services get better, and the number of digital music consumers grows, the relative size and significance of the file-sharing community will decline. So, while it doesn't necessarily mean record companies should stop pursuing authorising/contributory infringement lawsuits against the providers of unlicensed content sharing platforms, nor even drop ambitions to get some sort of three-strikes system on the statute book, I still think there's a high chance that, like with home-taping in eighties, the record industry will ultimately learn to live with, and prosper despite, P2P file-sharing.