

Thank Spotify: people who pirate music has dropped by 25% in Sweden - lleims
http://torrentfreak.com/music-piracy-continues-to-decline-thanks-to-spotify-110928/

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wccrawford
Wait, you mean people really are willing to pay for things when they are
priced correctly? Imagine that!

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pyrmont
Yeah! Screw you, musicians that want to earn minimum wage!
[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-
music...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-
artists-earn-online/)

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cageface
I hope programmers are so sanguine when their work is "correctly" priced into
oblivion. I do think that subscription services are the wave of the future but
I don't see how you can argue that Spotify helps artists.

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TeMPOraL
Not-much-$ is still better than none-$-at-all. It's not exactly the choice of
Spotify vs. buy a CD in shop, it's a choice between Spotify and BitTorrent.

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12334454
That does not make it the correct price. The correct price pays back the
production cost (including paying for the time and creativity of the artist in
making up the song) and adds some profit. Get that from volume or high price
but low price is not correct price.

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nate_meurer
You appear to be using your own definition.

Correct pricing, in an economic sense, is that which an undistorted market
will bear, using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like. It's that
simple.

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cabalamat
> using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like

My definition includes the absence of violence, threats of violence, or
dishonesty.

If the only reason people aren't using BitTorrent downloads is threats of
violence (which is what threats of internet disconnection are, albeit at
several levels removed), then it isn't a free/undistorted market.

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petercooper
It doesn't matter! Business-wise, the key metric is if profits are up for the
artists. Imagine two customer scenarios:

1\. Pirate 100 albums in a year, buy 5 albums, yielding $7.50ish collectively
for the 5 albums.

2\. Listen to everything on Spotify, play 2000 tracks, each paying 0.2 cents
per play. $4 is spread amongst everyone.

A fall in "piracy" doesn't necessarily cause (or even correlate with) overall
earnings to go up.

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555imon
Since Sweden adopted anti P2P laws (IPRED) in 2009 Spotify usage has grown. In
2009 France adopted an anti P2P law (HADOPI). Since then music sales in France
declined at a lesser rate than global sales and therefore artist earnings
declining less than on global level ([http://www.fortherechord.com/hadopi-and-
cartes-musique-franc...](http://www.fortherechord.com/hadopi-and-cartes-
musique-france%E2%80%99s-answer-to-piracy/)). This would point to a
correlation between "piracy" and music sales.

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gerggerg
Some fun things to think about:

\- _About 23 percent continue to pirate music, but this number is dwindling._

23% is hardly dwindling. With margin of error it could easily be over a
quarter of all consumers.

This doesn't take into account, non-legal ways of acquiring music that are not
classically "sharing" like you tube and sound cloud

Methods of collecting this information are often as reliable as alexa is for
page rankings.

And MOST IMPORTANTLY none of this _directly_ means anything for the bottom
line of the artists. Piracy goes down, but middle men go up, middle men win.

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paul9290
Right now I have a hobbled together iPhone meet car stereo set up.

I was just thinking I want Spotify in my car and the ability to talk to my car
to play any track (Ford already has cars you speak to start listening to iPod
music).

When Spotify or another has created this feature/service then it's worth the
$10 per month. Until then I'm using my hobbled system to listen to tracks on
YouTube and Vevo for free (Pandora too which lately has tons and tons more
commercials then it did in 2009 and 2010).

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mhd
How much of that is due to Spotify, and how much can be attributed to
IPRED[1]? (Either by people actually not downloading stuff or people not being
counted due to services like Ipredator[2])

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPRED>

[2]: <https://www.ipredator.se/>

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stfu
Yeah, these single "cause-action" relationships are always questionable.

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phzbOx
In Canada, spottify is illegal. So I had to "hack the system" to get an
"illegal" software in order to get music legally. (Had to register and
download the app from a us proxy and asked a friend living in us to pay with
his credit card.)

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tvon
That was the only way to get the music legally?

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chrischen
I thought it was legal to pirate music in Canada, so long as you're not
providing the download?

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fastfinner
anybody know why spotify is mentioned so much more than grooveshark?

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kupo
Spotify is 100% licensed. AFAIK, Grooveshark is more like Napster in that it's
a free-for-all with user uploaded content, though they have worked out deals
with some of the record companies.

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Greg12x
I personally like grooveshark, because it literally has everyone song I want.

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kalleboo
That's a pretty good sign that it's not really legal.

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dstien
Spotify also started out with a lot of unlicensed content before they came
clean in early 2009: [http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2009/01/28/some-
impo...](http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2009/01/28/some-important-
changes-to-the-spotify-music-catalogue/)

~~~
shinratdr
Right but they solved that problem in 2009. It's 2011 and Grooveshark is still
mostly pirated content.

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fernandotakai
I would easily pay for spotify – it's not that expensive and it's quite good.

The only problem is that they can't accept my money because I don't live on
USA/UK/Sweden.

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cmilas
"Pirating" music and DL'ing an app that you can listen to copywritten music is
the same thing. Major differentiating factor is that on spotify, you now have
the option to be a paid member. Love spotify nonetheless, but is just pushing
%'s around to make the article sound like "Its working"

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jsavimbi
In case anyone cares, music sharing is about to return to 100% at my house due
to the shortsighted inabilities of whomever is running Spotify.

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shennyg
What inabilities? Spotify reduced my "sharing" dramatically.

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shoota
I believe they're talking about the Facebook required to signup for Spotify
which is causing a lot of controversy lately.

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jsavimbi
Yes, that is correct. I could however just look at it as paying $10/month for
a service that I know will only be around for the short term, or around in the
short term in a format that I like to consume but will change dramatically and
without notice in the near future due to the magical* whims of some product
lead over at the Parent Company (Fb).

* I'd like to know what sort of of process a product person goes through whence writing stories or making suggestions for a product. Do they eval their own ignorance, stupidity, pettiness and laziness, choose two for average and proceed to operate forward using only those two qualities backed up by a mid-ranked college's beer-stained diploma?

tl;dr: even Angry Birds didn't sell out sooner.

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Greg12x
Yay.

