Study confirms people still love pirating the hell outta music

[News]

With Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the like streaming an infinite supply of music for affordably prices, you’d think that music piracy would be a thing in the past. Or, at the very least, unpopular. Well, you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.

On Tuesday, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) released its annual Music Consumer Insight Report, which states that 38% of consumers still acquire their music via copyright infringement.

More specifically, the IFPI reports that 32% of all consumers grab their new Drake albums via ripped streams, 23% of ’em use cyberlockers such as BitTorrent, and another 17% simply use a search engine like Google.

“People still like free stuff,” David Price, director of insight and analysis at IFPI, told The Guardian, “so it doesn’t surprise us that there are a lot of people engaged in this. And it’s relatively easy to pirate music, which is a difficult thing for us to say.”

The good news, at least for the music industry, is that the report also states that 86% of all consumers do actually use streaming sites such as Spotify or even YouTube, with 28% paying for the services and another 20% using free audio streaming sites.

Anyone else feeling a brush of nostalgia for Kazaa?

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