The latest survey of 1000 music fans from Music Ally, a UK based digital music business information and strategy company, has revealed that the percentage of people who regularly (i.e. every month) download music from illegal file-sharing sources has declined from 22% in December 2007 to 17% in January 2009. The drop is even more significant amongst 14-18 year olds, where it fell from 42% to 26% over the same period.

However the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared has increased, rising from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009. Likewise more fans are now regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.

Still, there are now more UK music fans regularly buying single track downloads (19%) than filesharing single tracks (17%) every month, though the percentage of fans sharing albums regularly (13%) remains higher than those purchasing digital albums (10%).



The move to streaming - e.g. YouTube and Spotify - is more apparent with the research showing that many teens (65%) are streaming music regularly. Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%).

The research also shows the comparative volume of pirated tracks to legally purchased tracks has halved since their last survey just over 12 months ago. In December 2007 the ratio of tracks obtained from file-sharing compared to tracks obtained as legal purchases on an ongoing basis was 4:1. In January 2009 this had narrowed to just 2:1.

It will be interesting to see what happens after the measures proposed by the recent Digital Britain report are finally introduced, sometime during 2010. Those suspected of piracy can expect a warning from their ISP, followed by information release to rights holders (court action) for repeat offenders and ultimately technical measures (reduced broadband speeds etc.) for those that still fail to comply.