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Universal launch loaded survey
Universal music are currently doing a spot of market research, aimed primarily at seeing what Spotify is doing to the music market. It's being run by an outfit called Angus Reid Strategies through a service called Springboard UK, and the idea behind it makes sense.
Disruptive technologies being disruptive, why wouldn't you want to try and work out what they're going to do to you?
One problem, though: when the survey gets onto torrents, it starts to sound less like a disinterested investigation, and more like it's - and let's be generous here - trying to educate. Hence the torrent systems themselves as described, more than once, as "non-legal" services.
Apart from being wrong - and deliberately confusing the networks with the data on the networks - if you make the question sound so hostile, isn't it going to skew the responses you get? "Did you touch that naughty thing?" is much less likely to get an honest answer than "do you use that thing?", right?
3 comments:
That really irritates me too. It's amazing how much ignorance there is about what constitutes peer-to-peer services. For example, I'm not sure how many people are really aware of the fact that the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 On Demand and Sky Player all use Kontiki's peer to peer program, which operates as a background process, usually without the user's knowledge. These are perfectly legal services operate in pretty much the same fashion as any torrents (legal or otherwise). They are also extremely popular. In fact, I'd be willing to believe (although I obviously don't have any proof and I could be completely wrong) that these services are more used than illegal alternatives. Sadly, the way people like Universal here portray internet file-transfer technology is constantly skewed to make it look like most people who use the internet are evil thieves who steal grannies' handbags.
The music industry has always worked on grossly over-simplifying the arguments - "home taping is killing music" and beyond. The inability to suggest there are nuanced positions to be taken doesn't help it, though.
iPlayer doesn't use peer to peer these days, they
changed it quite a while ago to Adobe AIR. Basic point still valid though.
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