If those low-level copyright cheats could be converted to using legal music services, the digital music business would get much-needed help. Yet even industry executives acknowledge that until recently, they were not giving those listeners many ways to do what they wanted: to sample new music and to play it back anytime, at little or no cost.
Over the past year, however, as sales of CDs have continued to fall and paid-for downloads from services like Apples iTunes have fallen short of hopes, record companies have moved to embrace casual file-sharers. Legal services offering free, unlimited streaming of music, rather than downloads, are proliferating. According to a survey published last week, they are taking some of the wind out of the pirates sails.
Consumers are doing exactly what we said they would do, said Steve Purdham, chief executive of We7, a service that says it has attracted two million users in Britain in a little more than half a year by offering unlimited access to millions of songs. They werent saying, Give me pirated music; they were saying, Give me the music I want.
The music industry has high hopes that the growth of sites like We7, whose investors include the former Genesis musician Peter Gabriel, can change the reputation of Europe as a hive of digital piracy. Similar businesses include Deezer, in France, and Spotify, which was started by two Swedish entrepreneurs and has grown rapidly in Britain and elsewhere. All of them are licensed by the music industry and hope to make money from advertising.
Last week, Microsoft said it, too, planned to offer a music streaming service in Britain, via its MSN Web business, though it provided few details.
