News

UK Filesharing down by a Third

• 16th Jul 2009

File sharing amongst teens in the UK is down by a third, according to the recent digital Britain report. Teens are now choosing to stream music on line or to buy a digital copy rather than download.

The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing regularly (i.e. every month) has gone down since the last national survey. In December 2007 22% regularly file-shared tracks, but in January 2009 this was down to 17%, a comparative drop of nearly a quarter.

The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. (In December 2007 42% of 14-18s were filesharing at least once a month. In January 2009 this was down to just 26%)

This is despite the fact that the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared has, unsurprisingly, increased, rising from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009. The move to streaming – e.g. YouTube, MySpace and Spotify – is clear with the research showing that many teens (65%) are streaming music regularly (i.e. each month). Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%). More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.