Digital music sales

FT.com / Home UK - The week in technology: Digital music: "Sales of legally downloaded digital music passed the $1bn mark last year thanks to more legitimate online music stores and mobile phone ringtones, said the music industry’s leading trade body.

However, the International Federation of Phonographic Industry also warned that the upsurge was largely thanks to new downloaders while most illegal filesharers were not migrating on to authorised sites, and added it would be stepping up its campaign of legal deterrents.

The IFPI said digital music sales tripled to $1.1bn from $380m in 2004 and predicted “further significant growth” this year.

The rise came amid an explosion of activity in the sector, with digital music players becoming the accessory of choice and fans legally downloading 420m tracks from the internet - 20 times more than two years ago - while the volume of music licensed by record companies doubled to more than 2m songs. Digital music now accounts for about 6 per cent of record companies’ revenues.

Meanwhile, the IFPI claimed that illegal downloading activity was “static” despite a 26 per cent rise in broadband use over the year.

“Already in the UK and Germany - two of the biggest digital markets worldwide - legal buyers from sites like iTunes, Musicload and MSN actually exceed illegal file-swappers. We expect this trend to spread as new and pioneering legal music distribution channels open up to consumers,” said John Kennedy, IFPI chairman and chief executive.

The success of iTunes, Apple’s market leading online music store, has inspired many others to follow suit with the number of legal downloading sites increasing to 335 from 50 two years ago. Stores popped up across the globe with the music downloading services arriving in China and Argentina for the first time and iTunes now available in 21 countries.

Digital music charts raised the market’s profile, with James Blunt’s ubiquitous “You’re Beautiful” generating huge sales topping Europe’s first digital music chart, while the Arctic Monkeys’ digital-only single “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” reached number one on the traditional UK charts.

Music downloaded to mobile phones also took off as new enabled handsets hit the stores and demand for favourite ringtones soared. In Japan, mobile music’s most developed market, sales reached $211m - or 96 per cent of all the country’s digital music sales - in the first quarter of the year. Worldwide, the IFPI said mobile music now accounted for about 40 per cent of record company digital revenues...

Google vs US government

... Google has refused to comply with a US government subpoena for information about how people use its search engine, opening one of the first legal battles over whether law enforcement agencies should have access to the increasingly far-reaching data held by search engine companies.

The legal tussle could also raise questions in internet users’ minds over whether information about their personal searches on websites like Google’s could be seized by the government, Google has warned.

The company argues that the government could obtain the information from other public sources and that acceding to the request “would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its service”.

At the centre of the brewing legal storm between the powerful internet company and the Department of Justice is a long-running effort by the US administration to defend an internet child pornography law that is unrelated to Google and has been struck down by the Supreme Court.

The DoJ says it needs data from Google to prove that filtering software is not effective in protecting minors from pornographic websites.

Google argues in correspondence filed in a California court that the DoJ’s request for information, issued in August, 2005, was “overbroad, unduly burdensome” and “vague”."