Pirates could be subscribers claims report

07:15 | Wednesday May 26, 2010

The report, published by law firm Wiggin and Entertainment Media Research, claims that 44% of those using pirate sites would be willing to pay a small fee each month to continue downloading from the favourite sites - but on a legal basis. Some 29%, however, said they would just migrate to another free online source.

The majority of those polled (59%) stated that £3.00-3.50 was a reasonable price for such a service while 25% were willing to pay up to £14.50 a month.

The publication of this report comes after LimeWire has started to make overtures to the industry to convert its 50m users to a legal platform. The service was recently held liable for mass copyright infringement following a case brought against it by the RIAA.

While there was optimism regarding the conversion of users from illegal sites to legal sites, the report found that anti-piracy messaging was still not getting through. Just over one-third of pirates (34%) said they could not change their behaviour if warned by their ISP.

A quarter of respondents did, however, state that they best way to stem online piracy was to block access to illegal sites.

The report also suggests there is a new future for the recorded music industry in a business model based around micropayments.

It found that 28% of those polled would be willing to pay a small fee of 10-20p to stream albums without interruption from ads (rather than take out a full monthly ad-free streaming subscription).

Against this, almost half of respondents (48%) had heard of sites like we7 or Spotify but were not interested in using them on a subscription basis.

This Friday, the authors will host an online debate about the findings in the report: http://www.studiotalk.tv/show/business_threats_opportunities_and_issues_exposed_by_uk_digital_diet

The 2010 Digital Entertainment Research Report costs £199 and can be purchased here: www.digitalentertainmentsurvey.com

See next week's Music Week for a full analysis of the figures.