A new survey from research firm The Leading Question and music business website Music Ally reckons the kids are not file-sharing as much as they used to. Perhaps they've realised owning 85GB of music, 99.9% of which you will never ever listen too, isn't as exciting as they first thought.
Leading Question's annual survey of 1000 music fans found that less respondents were file-sharing less now than just over a year ago - 17% said they accessed music via unlicensed file-sharing networks at least once a month, compared to 22% when a similar survey was done in December 2007. Interestingly, the biggest drop off in file-sharing usage was among 14-18 year olds, a group in which 42% were file-sharing a year ago, compared to 26% now.
Needless to say, the growth of streaming music services, and the high-spec broadband connections needed to use them, is partly behind the declining interest in file-sharing. 65% of teens now say they use streaming music services at least once a month.
Though the expansion of a la carte download stores - and probably the introduction of MP3 as the default format for these stores - has also seemingly had an impact. In fact overall more respondents in this survey were buying single track downloads than getting content via P2P (19% versus 17%).
Commenting on the survey, Music Ally top man Paul Brindley told CMU that record companies and government need to recognise fast moving trend changes when considering their policies towards online piracy, saying: "File sharing is a moving target, so industry and government policies need to recognise this. It's already being somewhat displaced by other means of accessing music for free. Some are licensed, many are not licensed and some involve a bit of both. Kids find services like YouTube much more convenient for checking out new music than file-sharing. But even YouTube can become a source of piracy with some kids ripping YouTube videos and turning them into free MP3 downloads."
Leading Question boss Tim Walker added: "Ultimately we believe that the best way to beat piracy is to create great new licensed services that are easier and more fun to use, whether that's an unlimited streaming service like Spotify, or a service like the one recently announced by Virgin which aims to offer unlimited MP3 downloads as well as unlimited streams".