Today's free WSJ features "Apple's iPods Prosper as Piracy Flourishes, But Who Is to Blame?" by Nick Wingfield:

Apple says it has sold more than 600 million songs over the Internet, from zero just two-and-a-half years ago when the iTunes Music Store opened for business. But week-over-week growth of online song sales this year, including from the iTunes Music Store, has significantly slowed as iPod sales soared. In a research report last month, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Fulcrum Global Partners, estimated the average annual song purchases per iPod online fell to 15 songs per iPod in the third quarter from 25 in the same quarter last year.

. . .

The amount of downloading from file-sharing networks is roughly double what it was two years ago when iTunes started. File-traders swap more than a billion songs a month, says research firm BigChampagne.

Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, imagines a typical experience for new iPod users goes something like this: They purchase $10 worth of songs from iTunes for 99 cents each, copy their personal CD collections onto their iPods, then start thinking about the thousands of others songs they have room for on their iPods. Then, the next step is to start loading up on pirated content from file-sharing services.

Mr. Garland thinks it would be a mistake to blame Apple for profiting from piracy, because file-sharing was flourishing years before Apple introduced the iPod. "If you need a bogeyman, and the entertainment industry always needs a bogeyman, the best I can offer is the 21st century," he says.

posted by James DeLong @ 1:47 PM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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