Music Weblog

The blog has been rather neglected for the past year with the last update made way back in May 2010! I now have more time to dedicate to and I hope to get some new posts out very soon… watch this space!

Music Internet pirates everywhere rejoice, for it would seem that the record companies and retailers are now finally coming to appreciate the futility of their crusade against consumers. They have finally come to realize that no matter how hard they try, they will never stop the Internet pirates.

But who has spelt out the message for them? Ironically, none other than the organization that has the dubious honor of being one of the most targeted for software piracy in the world – Microsoft.

A research paper which was recently commissioned by Microsoft into the phenomena of online music piracy and the best methods to combat it, identified that given the current level of technology as well as prevalence of the problem of piracy, it is neither cost effective nor practical to shut down the pirating community as a whole, or in the long term.

The cost of media and media converting software/hardware packages is continually falling ;we can now pick up multi-terabyte hard drives for under £80; CD/DVD burners for under £20; and new PC’s for as little as £200.

As more people have gained access to this kind of hardware, interest in downloading music has grown and we’re seeing more and more groups who may not have previously been interested in downloading music illegally experimenting with P2P software and binary newsgroups. This process has accelerated as software has become more accessible to novice users, requiring very little technical knowledge to download thousands of media files.

It would also be easy to argue that feature length films and in particular HD content have become more accessible by these groups, as broadband speeds have increased dramatically whilst prices have plummeted over the last decade.