Norway is an exciting and intriguing music market in 2013, with total recorded-music sales up 17% in the first half of the year, following a 7% rise in 2012. Now David Gjester, of local digital distributor Indigoboom, has provided some more data to explain what’s going on in Norway, citing the recent piracy study by Norwaco and Ipsos MMI. Key figures: 1.7m people in Norway now use legal streaming music services – a third of the population – with 54% of them premium subscribers. And Gjester reminds us of the study’s claim that illegal music downloads have dropped from 1.2bn files in 2008 to 210m last year, pointing to Spotify’s launch in 2008 as a key trigger. But Gjester thinks streaming can go hand-in-hand with other anti-piracy strategies too. “Convenience is the best remedy and will in the end marginalise piracy to the point of insignificance,” he writes in an op-ed for Digital Music News. “Blocking TPB [The Pirate Bay] would accelerate the process, since they, too, provide a form of convenience. Tell every politician you meet to block them and similar sites… And please stop repeating the baseless falsehood that Spotify does not pay artists. I am a distributor. I write the checks to the artists. Streaming royalties are significant percentages of these checks.”
Source: Digital Music News
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