Download versus File Sharing

Digital Download Day 2, the event organised by music company OD2 to raise the profile of legal Internet music downloads, can be considered a partial success, according to the latest figures from Nielsen//NetRatings. The April 18th event helped the website of the company sponsoring the event, OD2.com, attract 523,000 visitors during April to become the UK's fifth music website for that month.

Other paid download sites are also starting to increase the size of their audiences. Subscription site Emusic.com is the most prominent example, with 165,000 UK users during the quarter ending in March 2003. But does this mean that paid downloads are winning the battle against file-sharing sites?

File-sharing sites still bring in high audiences, with kazaa.com the most popular music site in the UK attracting over 1.3 million people in April and WinMX.com attracting nearly 400,000 in the same month. 'Kazaa actually performs less well in the UK than in most European countries' said Nielsen//NetRatings European Market Analyst Tom Ewing, 'and even then its audience figures don't represent the full extent of file-sharing by any means. Kazaa, WinMX and similar sites allow users to download software which they use to share files without accessing the web.'

'The music industry has been suspicious of the Internet as a medium for selling music, pointing to file-sharing as the reason for falling sales. But these figures show that at present CD retailers like CD-Wow and HMV are attracting higher online audiences than any paid download site. You only need to look at the success of Amazon, as well as these sites, to see that there's a market for buying CD's online which dwarfs the paid download audience,' commented Ewing, 'The problem for paid download sites is that while security, legitimacy and convenience are their main advantages over the file-sharing communities, those advantages are also shared by sites which sell actual CDs. Events like Digital Download Day 2 are a poor indication of demand for paid downloads because they are offering a limited amount of free credit so users don't actually need to pay anything. It remains to be seen whether paid-content music sites can become a mass audience proposition, rather than a successful niche, while the file-sharing communities are still thriving.'

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

• The Nielsen Company (UK)
• All news
• MrWeb info