Music piracy that takes place online grew slightly in Europe last year, according to a new report from the European Union Intellectual Property Office based on data from piracy protection service MUSO. However, music piracy levels today are down by 75% from 2017.
Consumers also now use music piracy services less than piracy platforms that provide access to TV programmes, films, software and publications. In the case of TV, considerably less.
The study also looks at differing levels of piracy across the various EU states, explaining that a country’s “wealth, inequality, population structure and youth employment opportunities”, as well as “attitudes towards piracy” and availability of legal content services, all impact on how many people choose to access content from unlicensed platforms.
Most of which is unsurprising, though when it comes to levels of youth unemployment, the findings are sometimes somewhat counterintuitive.
With film, higher levels of young people being unemployed results in higher levels of piracy, which makes sense as those people will have less expendable income. However, with TV and music piracy, higher levels of youth employment in a country seems to actually reduce piracy levels.
One possible explanation for that trend, the report says, “could be that unemployed young people tend to live with their parents who are likely to pay their subscriptions” for TV and music services.
The core metric in the report relates to how often, on average, an internet user accesses a piracy platform each month. For the EU at large, on average users access piracy services 10.2 times per month. TV piracy is most significant, accessed 5.1 times, with pirated publications next, accessed 2.7 times. With music, piracy services are accessed 0.6 times a month.
The disparity between content types may reflect the fact that, in music, a single digital subscription usually gets you access to most music, whereas with TV and publications, including magazines and books, any one subscription will only give you access to a selection of content.
Which possibly makes users more likely to rely on unlicensed sources if a specific programme or publication is not covered by one of their subscriptions. Or, indeed, because no one subscription provides access to all the content the user wants, they may just opt to go the piracy route for everything.
Within music, stream-ripping remains the most prevalent form of piracy, followed by illegal downloads and illegal streaming services. In 2017, which is as far back as this report’s data goes, the average internet user was accessing music piracy sites around 2.6 times a month, compared to 0.6 times last year.
In terms of countries, Latvia currently has the highest levels of music piracy, followed by Cyprus and Estonia. The lowest levels are found in Austria, Italy and Romania.