S/B/130. Dissertation. Pirate Bay: A research on both legal and illegal digital music downloading activities and how it affected the UK’s music industry.

The music industry in the U.K has, in recent years, experienced a dramatic slump in profits. It has widely accepted that this is as a result of piracy and more specifically the illegal sharing of copyrighted material via p2p networks such as Kazaa. Whilst the industry long considered the Internet to be a threat to its ability to protect its copyrights and therefore its profits, it has, over the last year or so, seen how legitimate on-line music selling has the potential to be a profitable revenue stream. It has been argued that the drastic slump in industry profits has been the result of the industry’s slowness to react to the possibilities of the internet as a new distribution medium. This study intends to examine the impact of digital downloading on the music industry in the U.K, playing close attention to developments in the U.S which, as usual, is one step ahead of the U.K industry in terms of how the industry there is tackling on-line developments. The U.S and U.K music industries are world leaders and lead the world in terms of both domestic and export sales (IFPI 2005). The two industries are closely linked, with artists from both sides of the Atlantic featuring heavily in both respective charts. In addition, both markets are dominated by an oligopoly of five major record labels (‘The Big Five’) that all operate on a major international and global level. Many of the Internet entries referred to in this study, by their very nature, also have a global reach. So while this study focuses on the industry the U.K, is must be recognised that the U.K industry cannot be seen as entirely independent of a larger, international and global industry network. This paper has the following objectives: To investigate the cause and effects of illegal digital music downloading in the U.K; To research and investigate, with the basis of the progress in U.S markets, how the U.K music industry will evolve to be able to adapt to the changes caused by digital downloading.