A British study this week revealed that online legal music downloads are spreading and growing at an incredible rate, moreso than illegal music downloads, which came as a shocker to researchers, and might be evidence that legal music downloads are actually filling the niche needed in the music market for the first time. Music industry lawyers have long decried legal downloads as a fluff option that won’t stop the “plague” of illegal downloads, and that only lawsuits are the way to resolve the problem, but perhaps now a little more evidence on the side of “give people a better option and they’ll take it” has accumulated.
Personally I think that legal music downloads are the way to go, and had this service appeared earlier and the music industry not fought tooth and nail to make them either go away altogether or prohibitively expensive, they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in right now, with fans alienated and music buyers jaded and having to pay armies of lawyers, but I used to think they’d eventually smarten up. They haven’t yet, and while I can only hope this study might lend some strength to the argument, I doubt they will. Until the day they do, the rest of us can take joy in knowing that legal music downloads are popular among our peers, and probably going to grow and become more competitive in the future, which can only mean good things for you and I, the consumer.
[ http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121924,tk,dn072205X,00.asp ]