UPDATED 13:31 EDT / SEPTEMBER 28 2011

NEWS

Spotify Goes Up, Piracy Goes Down by 25% in Sweden

Though Spotify isn’t getting rave reviews with their recent Facebook partnership, it seems like they’re on the good side of the whole music industry.

Piracy has always been a pain in the ass of everyone in the music and movie industry, as their revenue surplus continues to decline and people continue to keep buying bootleg copies and downloading unauthorized copies of their work.

When Spotify launched in the US, it was immediately slapped with a lawsuit from PacketVideo Corp. for infringement of its United States Patent No. 5,636,276 entitled “Device for the Distribution of Music in Digital Form.” Spotify contested the claim and nothing was heard from PacketVideo regarding the issue again.

A recent report showed that since 2009, music piracy significantly dropped by 25% in Sweden now that users can listen to all the music they want for free though they have to put up with the occasional display ads or they opt to pay a small price to enjoy an ad-free music experience.

Since Spotify opened publicly in 2009, it only took three months for Spotify users to outnumber music pirates.

“The long-term trend is a sharp increase in legal streaming while we see a reduction in illegal file sharing and downloading,” Music Sweden’s CEO Elizabet Widlund said commenting on the results.

And as music streaming services continue to flourish, it only shows that consumers are willing to pay a small amount to get quality music rather than illegally download copies of the tunes they like.  The growth in users of such services can also be connected to the growth in the demand for personal cloud.  People don’t want too much clutter occupying space on their computers or devices so cloud music services are great space savers.  Also, as they are cloud-based, you listen to all your favorite music in all your connected devices without having to sync or connect them with a USB cable or via Bluetooth.

And with Spotify’s partnership with Facebook, more listeners would rather use the service than spend hours trying to download a crappy copy of their favorite music.


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