Music Ally’s sister consumer research company The Leading Question has released data from its fourth annual Speakerbox survey of UK music fans showing a drop of a third in regular music filesharing amongst UK teenagers.For the first time the survey also showed a higher percentage of fans regularly purchasing downloads (19%) compared to obtaining tracks from file sharing (17%). The volume of tracks obtained for free compared to purchased tracks had also narrowed from 4:1 in Dec 2007 to 2:1 in Jan 2009 when the face to face survey of over 1,000 music fans was carried out.We think the positive figures represent both greater takeup of legal streaming services among teens – in particular YouTube – and other competing ways of finding music for free such as CD burning and Bluetooth. Nearly twice as many teens (31%) stream music every day compared with most music fans (18%).However, the fact that UK teens are using YouTube as a legal source of music jars with the fact that YouTube UK has removed all premium music videos due to a dispute with PRS for Music. Perhaps this research will provide an extra incentive for the pair to resolve their licensing disagreement.