Music Piracy Plunges in 2019, According to Industry Report

Every year, the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) conducts research across leading music markets in order to provide consumers insights into music listening habits. As expected, the issue of copyright infringement pops up, and this year, it was no different. More specifically, IFPI suggested 27% used piracy as a way to listen to or obtain music in the past month.

But hey, there’s always a silver lining right? Well, if we compare this number to last year’s number, the industry should be happy to see a drop from last year’s 38%! The number of stream-rippers also dropped substantially from 32% last year to 23%.

These declines suggest that music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have been effective in getting music fans to ditch piracy. That’s pretty in line with the rest of the report, which suggests that 89% now listen to music through on-demand streaming. That makes sense though – it does provide “instant access to millions of songs”. 62% of the surveyed population believed so too in picking that as their primary reason for using on-demand streaming services.

Let’s look at a few more interesting data points below:

• The average time we spend listening to music per week is 18 hours, up from 17.8-hours in 2018. That’s more than 2.6 hours daily!
• 54% (but 100% of you EDMTunes readers I’m sure!) say they love or are fanatical about music. (So that’s what’s pushing live music ticket sales to exceed $25 billion by 2023!)
• Netherlands tops the list of countries that spends the most time – 10.5 hours – listening to music on broadcast radio. Must be the power of Armin’s ASOT radio show!
• Dance/Electronic Music ranked #5 in ‘The World’s Favorite Genres.’ (#1 next year?)

That’s it from us, but if you want to dive deeper into the statistics, here’s the full report from IFPI.