Music piracy still a global problem – IFPI

Based on research carried among people between 16 and 64 and online, the report, which was released 9 October, uses findings from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, UK and US.

Together with India and China, the 18 countries listed above account for more than 91% of the revenue received by the global music industry, which is dominated by pop and rock, the biggest genres worldwide. Metal is at the bottom of the top-10 genres, while hip hop comes in at No 5.

While only Western forms make the top-10 genres reflected in the report, it makes an allowance for the popularity of local genres and their chance at finding a wider listenership: “As ever, local repertoire continues to dominate countries' charts. There will always be something special about local music that speaks to us. In this interconnected world, country-specific genres, like K-pop in Korea and música popular brasileira in Brazil, are not only embraced at home but are also beginning to find a broader global audience.”

The report also presents the ways in which music is listened to around the world. Radio and streaming, in particular, are notable. While Japan (50%) has the lowest percentage of radio listeners among the countries polled, the sole African country, South Africa (94%), ties with Poland at the top of the list. Meanwhile, when asked to choose a single way of listening to music, 50% of people between the ages of 16 and 24 prefer to stream music.

Unfortunately, streaming also offers the highest means by which piracy thrives, as 38% of people get access to music “through copyright infringement”, of which stream ripping is the commonest kind at 32%.

“Stream ripping users are more likely to say that they rip music so they have music to listen to offline," the report says. "This means they can avoid paying for a premium streaming subscription.”

The other two popular kinds of infringement are through cyberlockers or peer-to-peer file sharing (23%) and using search engines in seeking platforms hosting infringing content (17%).

In addition, the presence of YouTube complicates the possibility of revenue for other stakeholders in the music industry. The online giant’s relatively free access to music offers a cheaper solution to services like Spotify and Deezer, which require payment. Thirty-five percent of its respondents say they do not subscribe to any paid audio platform because “anything they want to listen to is on YouTube”. 

In a statement on the official IFPI website, the organisation's CEO, Frances Moore, said industry stakeholders continue seeking ways to engage the opportunities and problems brought up by the Internet.

"This report also shows the challenges the music community continues to face – both in the form of the evolving threat of digital copyright infringement as well as in the failure to achieve fair compensation from some user-upload services. Policymakers around the globe have been scrutinising these issues and increasingly acting to address them." 

Moore's words might refer to a recent decision taken by the EU Parliament a few weeks ago: "Many of Parliament’s changes to the EU Commission’s original proposal aim to make certain that artists, notably musicians, performers and script authors, as well as news publishers and journalists, are paid for their work when it is used by sharing platforms such as YouTube or Facebook..."

Read the full IFPI Music Consumer Insight Report 2018 here.