Music industry lures 'casual' pirates to legal sites
Primary Topic Channel:
Computer security
Record company executives say there are three kinds of music fans. There are those who buy music, and those who get a kick out of never paying for it. And then there are those whom Rob Wells at Universal Music Group calls "dinner party pirates": the vast majority of listeners, those who copy music illegally because it is more convenient than buying it, The New York Times reports. If those low-level copyright cheats could be converted to using legal music services, the digital music business would get much-needed help. Yet even industry executives acknowledge that until recently, they were not giving those listeners many ways to do what they wanted: to sample new music and to play it back anytime, at little or no cost. Over the past year, however, as sales of CDs have continued to fall and paid-for downloads from services like Apple's iTunes have fallen short of hopes, record companies have moved to embrace casual file-sharers.
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