Digital Music Piracy Research Paper

1.1.1. Digital Music Piracy

Music piracy is a big thing and concern for the music industry and law enforcement. It is supported by the MP3 invention that enables users to send, copy and keep their music over an Internet connection. The Internet itself is the primary appliance to implement digital music piracy by empowering Internet users to commit crime easily because Internet does allow anonymous communication. Music piracy is transnational and shifts in thinking from ownership of physical property to ownership of ideas (Wall, 2005). Digital music piracy is generally done through file sharing websites such as 4shared or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) sites such as LimeWire. These websites commonly let users share their documents, videos, files and music

1.1.2. On-Demand Streaming Music Service

In this digital age, everything online becomes popular and marked as more efficient, including listening to music. With the support of Internet, On-Demand Streaming Music Service (OSMS) is the approaching the music industry with its distribution of music as a service rather than as a product, contrary to the concept of traditional way of trade from seller to buyer (Burkart, 2008). Means, rather than downloading the song –the transmission of a music file from a computer server to the users’ devices over the Internet (Supp, 2007)- and inputting it to an MP3 player, the users will buffer the song and able to listen to the music but does not employ ownership of it (Fox, 2005). Spotify will be taken as the example as it is one of the leading streamed music application that available in 60 countries, including Malaysia and Spotify is the OSMS that has the most users in Malaysia compared to other services. In general on-demand streaming music services, listeners may choose one service to subscribe. They offer free subscription and the paid package if listeners want to listen offline, by limiting the

It becomes much easier to access and enjoy the music in every medium, yet MP3 is the first lead that brought peer-to-peer (P2P) to transfer the music with no charge. From this P2P online industry, music piracy in digital medium started (source xxx). Another study stated that iTunes has become the lead of digital music piracy although it acts as a legal online music stores in 2000’s. A thirty seconds sample for each song is provided in iTunes, allowing the consumer to try the songs before they purchase it. After the application is officially available for PC users, iTunes sold more than 20 million songs online. iTunes takes a big role player in music industry as it is not only to gain the music sales, but also to expand target audience (Gopal, Lertwachara, Marsden & Telang, 2007). However, these two contrary studies are not principled as the fact that MP3 requires the transferred files from computer to be stored in, but yet it depends on how did people get the music from. It is the same case for the iTunes. Eventough iTunes is a legal music stores; what matters is what do people do after they have the soft copy file of the music in their computer. As long as the users do not get the music for free from P2P sharing, it will not be considered as a