Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Music Wars: Scene 16
In which the "big fish" pirates are still Runnin with the Devil but the small fry users are Little Runaways
The scare tactics of the RIAA subpeonas have indeed worked, but not as expected:
Evidence is popping up that the record industry has millions of Internet music pirates on the run -- but not the heavy-duty song swappers the industry has vowed to prosecute.The NPD Group market-research firm released data last week showing that the number of American households acquiring music files on the Internet dropped 28 percent over three months, from 14.5 million in April to 10.4 million in June. The total number of music files acquired online each month declined less, by 23 percent, from 852 million files in April to 655 million files in June.

That's because the average number of files each household downloaded actually increased by 6.7 percent during the same period, from 59 files in April to 63 in June, NPD found.

Russ Crupnick, NPD vice president, said in a statement that the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites)'s legal campaign against file swappers is only scaring "light downloaders" rather than the big fish the RIAA says it wants to catch.
Seems using the Death Star to kill gnats works but the huge mutant cockroach is unimpressed.

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