The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)—a trade group representing the global record industry—today released its annual Music Consumer Insight Report. Among IFPI’s most notable findings is that 38 percent of consumers acquire their music via copyright infringement. The most popular way to obtain music illegally, according to the report, is through stream-ripping: Thirty-two percent of all consumers get music through ripped streams, according to IFPI. In addition, 23 percent of consumers use cyberlockers (e.g., BitTorrent) and another 17 percent simply use a search engine to locate illegal files.
Speaking with The Guardian, David Price, director of insight and analysis at IFPI, commented, “People still like free stuff, so it doesn’t surprise us that there are a lot of people engaged in this. And it’s relatively easy to pirate music, which is a difficult thing for us to say.”
Along with the piracy stats, IFPI found that 86 percent of all listeners use on-demand music streaming services. Among that population, most people (52 percent) use video streaming sites (namely YouTube) to listen to music. Twenty-eight percent of streamers pay for their service, and another 20 percent use free audio streaming sites. Check out the full report here.
Read Pitchfork’s feature “Playlists! Lawsuits! Fake Songs! The Biggest Streaming-Music Trends of 2017.”
