Digital music piracy became prevalent in June 1999 with the release of Napster which enabled its nearly 80 million users to file share MP3s and has since has been a part of the debate, “is digital piracy hurting the music industry?” Since the age of 11, I have listened to music on cassettes and even spent time recording music from the radio. By the early 2000’s, CDs had changed the devices we used for music and with that, came a new way to acquire music. Napster was the first file sharing program made available and was used to share MP3 files between users. Quickly, older tracks and albums were made available to users around the world and so did the question, does digital piracy hurt the music industry?
In an article by K.C. Jones, he explains the cost of music piracy costs to U.S. Economy is near $12.5 billion and more than
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According to the a report released that same year, Digital Music Report 2007 reports show double digit growths in all areas of digital income. (IFPI, 2007)
According to a study completed by Bart Cammaerts, Robin Mansell, and Bingchun Meng at the London School of Economics and Political Science the music industry has evolved and shows in an increase of nearly $4.4 billion from 2005-2012. In figure 1 of this report, it shows sales from CDs and recorded music dropping, while massive increases in digital profits such as streaming, subscriptions, publishing, and even digitally viewed concerts. (Cammaerts, Mansell, & Meng, 2013)
In his article, The Lie That Fuels The Music Industry's Paranoia, author Bobby Owsinski explains peer to peer traffic is down from 31% to 10% within the last five years. He explains the reasoning for this is due to streaming, subscriptions, applications and free services online that do not require hard drive space. Although profits from 1999 to 2009 dropped from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion Owsinski