When It Comes to Illegal Downloads, Movies Trump Music

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Napster. KaZaA. LimeWire. All three of these existed in the glory days of illegal music pirating. But new research shows that the good ‘ol days of copping the latest Britney tracks from someone’s library are as good as over.

A P2P file-sharing study (PDF) conducted by Envisional shows that out of all the media we share (illegally) on the Internet, it’s film, both pornographic and Hollywood-style, that gets traded the most. Envisional looked through the 10,000 most popular files on the PublicBT BitTorrent tracker and broke them down into categories in the chart below.

While it’s not astonishing that movies and porn trump all other media in illegal downloads, what’s surprising is just how much the once wildly popular music download market has shrunk. I mean, 2.9 percent? These days, it appears that pirates even want software more than they want the latest Kanye track.

With the proliferation of online music recommendation services and streaming radios like Pandora, Last.fm, GrooveShark and their U.K. cousin Spotify, it makes sense that people are relying increasingly on legal ways to get their groove on. But who knows? Maybe if services like Netflix and Hulu continue to grow, they’ll have a similar effect on the movie download market.

As for porno, we’re staying out of that one.

[via Wired]

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