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Music Week looks at the latest developments in the war on piracy, and discovers what steps need to be taken to ensure hard working music professionals are compensated for their work...
PIRACY PREVENTION
Looking at the headlines recently, you could be forgiven for thinking - perhaps counter-intuitively - that a breakthrough has been made in the war on music piracy. In the year since Music Week last took an in-depth look at this thorny subject, there have been many demonstrable victories.
Throughout 2015 and 2016, the BPI seized over £12 million worth of infringing recordings - comprising CDs, vinyl and digital tracks stored on hard drives and removable storage. In December 2016, a joint investigation between PRS For Music and City Of London's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) led to a Liverpool man being sentenced to 12 months in prison after pleading guilty to pirating music. Most recently, February 2017 saw Google and Microsoft's Bing sign a landmark agreement to enter into a voluntary code of practice demoting piracy sites in their search results listings.
Decisive battles are being won, but the war rages on. Most pressingly, the rules of engagement - and the key battlegrounds - are constantly changing. The most pressing development is that streaming piracy has brought illegality to the legal sphere.
"Piracy is always evolving, we are seeing a general global decline in P2P and torrent usage, but a massive increase in stream ripping," says Andrew Chatterley, chief executive officer at MUSO. "MUSO tracked over 8 billion visits to stream-ripping sites globally for the music industry in 2016 and it is now the most used method for music piracy in the UK. Stream-ripping is a massive problem for rights-holders and is growing exponentially."
In a day and age when streams determine chart positions, the implications are profound. In February last year, Torrent Freak reported that Kanye West's The Life Of Pablo had been illegally downloaded over 500,000 times in its first 24 hours of release. October, 2016, saw MUSO report that Frank Ocean's much-delayed album, Blonde, had reached a global piracy audience of over 2.3m in under two months.
"There's an increasing shift to piracy [via] legitimate platforms such as YouTube, Google and across social media due to ease...