Illegal Downloading Close To Being Stopped??

The music industry sees illegal music downloading as the #1 problem and cause for the state the industry is in today. In recent years the industry has pushed for stricter copyright laws and harsh punishments for music pirates. With the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to "support and promote the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies" the music industry doesn't have to worry as much about their livelihood being taken away because of bootleggers and illegal music downloading. The RIAA is continuously working to protect the intellectual property and First Amendment rights of artists and music labels so that they are getting paid for their work and not getting ripped off.

Some of the major moves that the RIAA has made along with Homeland Security (shut down RapGodfathers) were the shutdown of major sites such as Napster, RapGodfathers and most recently Limewire.

Here are some statistics taken from the RIAA website on how "Music theft is a real, ongoing and evolving challenge. Both the volume of music acquired illegally and the resulting drop in revenues are staggering. Digital sales, while on the rise, are not making up the difference.":

-In the decade since peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the U.S. have dropped 47 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion.
-From 2004 through 2009 alone, approximately 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks.
-NPD reports that only 37 percent of music acquired by U.S. consumers in 2009 was paid for.
-Frontier Economics recently estimated that U.S. Internet users annually consume between $7 and $20 billion worth of digitally pirated recorded music.
-According to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, the digital theft of music, movies and copyrighted content takes up huge amounts of Internet bandwidth – 24 percent globally, and 17.5 percent in the U.S.
-Digital storage locker downloads constitute 7 percent of all Internet traffic, while 91 percent of the links found on them were for copyrighted material, and 10 percent of those links were to music specifically, according to a 2011 Envisional study.

Studies, however, are divided as to whether illegal downloading decreases legal sales much because illegal downloading may be a benefit to lesser known artists because it increases exposure. In the hip-hop industry, artists have taken it as an advantage by releasing free mixtapes and "albums" for listeners to check out in hopes that when they release an actual retail album that those same listeners will purchase it in support of their new favorite artist. With these varied opinions on illegal downloading and how it can be either detrimental or beneficial raises another question for artist (at least Hip-Hop & R&B artists) of "If illegal downloading of music does come to an end, how will the artist and fan and in the end the music industry react?"


For more info about the RIAA check out the FAQ portion of their website.