Sweden is justifiably held up as a poster-market for digital music, thanks partly to the popularity of streaming music services like Spotify there, and also to the country’s IPRED anti-piracy legislation in 2009. Yet a new report suggests that the latter hasn’t been the piracy-killer you might expect.
“In Sweden we saw a moderate drop in file sharing in 2009 when IPRED was implemented. Since then it has remained at approximately 60 percent among 15-25 year old people,” Marcin de Kaminski of the Cybernorms research project, which published the research, tells TorrentFreak. “Our conclusion is that repressive actions that lack societal support may still have effects, but that the effects are limited.”
We need more data to uncover the music implications of the report – for example, has music filesharing fallen thanks to the legal streaming services, while TV and movie filesharing has risen? But the report hammers home the point that while hardcore pirates won’t be easily put off filesharing, what’s much more important is the scale (and ability to convert free users into paying subscribers) of legal music services.
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