STUDY: Pirated Music on P2P Networks Valued at $69 Billion in 2007

Calculated by multiplying number of music tracks illegally shared on P2P networks and services by the fair market value per track.

MultiMedia Intelligence, a market research and consultancy firm, which "specializes on the markets and technologies for delivering and monetizing digital content and services across multiple platforms," has released a new study claiming that the value of music illegally shared in 2007 was some $69 billion USD.

The research,P2P Networking: Content's "Bad Boy" Becomes Tomorrow's Distribution Channel, analyzes the P2P market in terms of worldwide broadband penetration, consumer consumption of data, audio and video files and its associated revenue

"A US$69 billion figure is staggering to contemplate, but it effectively illustrates the impact of piracy on the music industry," claims the company's Rick Sizemore. "It is important to note that piracy has expanded well beyond music. Content owners of TV episodes and full length movies are seeing a growing impact. This is precisely why efforts from groups like the DCIA and those related to digital fingerprinting (e.g. MySpace and MTV) are vital to foster a 'safe' environment - one conducive to growth and maturation. With an ever burgeoning flow of content over the digital pipes, the need for efficient distribution becomes all the more vital and we would be remiss to think of P2P exclusively as a tool for pirates."

MultiMedia Intelligence's new research also found:

• The number of unlicensed full length movies "shared" will grow almost 4 times from 2007 to 2012 -- although number of video files will remain smaller than music.


• Not all P2P content is unlicensed. The grow rate for licensed content files distributed over P2P networks is much higher than unlicensed, although it is fair to note that we are starting from a much smaller base.


• P2P Internet traffic, despite having grown at a torrid pace for years, will grow almost 400% over the next 5 years. Growing from a level of 1.6 petabytes of Internet traffic per month in 2007 to almost 8 petabytes per month by 2012.

It could very well be that the figure is actually much higher than $69 billion depending on to what extant the company was able to collect data on private music-related BitTorrent tracker sites like Waffles.fm and What.cd. Either way it proves that the music industry will never be able to fight P2P and can't ever hope to sue it's way out of a technological conundrum.