Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 25, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The digital music market continues to grow. This emerges from the “IFPI Digital Music Report 2008” published today, Thursday, in London. According to the report, revenue of $2.9 billion was achieved for the full year 2007, an increase of 40 percent compared with 2006. The download offering has grown to more than six million tracks, available to music lovers in more than 500 legal online shops worldwide. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) http://www.ifpi.com, this development was primarily attributable to massive investment by the music industry in new digital offerings and distribution channels.
Although the positive development in the digital music market is good news, there are also negative aspects concerning the online market to report. “The bad news is that this positive development continues to be massively slowed by illegal file sharing,” explains Franz Medwenitsch, managing director of IFPI Austria. The upswing in legal music sales did not come close to covering the billions in losses caused by music piracy on the internet. The ratio of illegal downloads to legal sales currently stood at 20 to one.
The continuing popularity of file-sharing networks in particular is causing problems for the music industry. To address this problem, Medwenitsch proposes an initiative based on the French model. There, in the course of an initiative launched by French President Sarkozy, internet service providers were required, after several warnings, to block internet accounts demonstrably and repeatedly used for illegal file sharing. “It is time for internet service providers to make a contribution to protecting intellectual property too,” says Medwenitsch. It could not be the sole responsibility of the music and other creative industries to protect their content on the internet. “The internet service providers also bear responsibility, because they benefit from it too,” says the IFPI managing director.
Figures published by media control GfK two weeks earlier had already confirmed positive development in the legal music-download market. According to those figures, around 38 million digital music products were downloaded in Germany in 2007. In its handling of the file-sharing issue, however, the music industry had meanwhile suffered a setback: the industry-backed proposed amendments to the EU report on promoting the cultural industries were rejected by the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture. The demands they contained for internet service providers to monitor their customers and for an extension of protection periods for music recordings were not adopted.
