Via Engadget, we read about research on paid versus P2P digital music downloads. Both Engadget and the Guardian seem to be missing something. The Engadget headline reads “paid music downloads slow, peer-to-peer sharing grows”, while the Guardian weblog reads “NPD cited no slowdown in the number of households with a member using peer-to-peer (P2P) sites to download music for free, with 6.4 million tallied in July 2004, compared with 5.1 million in August 2003.” Check out the chart:
“No slowdown”? It looks to me like both models took a distinct plunge over the summer (no doubt because schools weren’t in session), and are recovering. In fact, in the last month, paid music downloads are recovering at a faster rate (13% to 11%, if my math is correct).
DarrenBarefoot.com 
people still mostly getting it for free
hmmm..
kinda like sex, eh?
hi darren, here is a link to some shots from this evening:
http://davin.ws/blog/
thanx for putting the gathering together! it was nice to meet everyone.. friendly bunch!
d
let me try that again..
blog.davin.ws
Darren, how are you getting on with your evaluation of the google desktop search engine http://desktop.google.com. Looks good. Do you like it?
The legend on the chart is interesting: P2P vs Legal, implying that P2P is NOT legal. This intentional linguistic dichotomy appears to me to be one of the most effective tools the recording industry is using against P2P.
While much of the music shared via P2P is indeed not legal, there’s a nontrivial amount of legal content out there on the P2P networks.
As a musician, this linguistic campaign by the recording industry endangers my ability to freely distribute my own music to a broad audience. Of course this direct musician-to-listener link may pose an even greater threat to the music industry than does piracy, so it’s not surprising that they would want to disparage it.