Average Teen's iPod Has 842 Stolen Tracks

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A new study conducted by British Music Rights claims that the average teen has 842 stolen songs on his/her iPod. That number is roughly 50% of the music held on an average MP3 player.

Although illegal copying has become widespread, the scale of the problem uncovered by the University of Hertfordshire left the music industry surprised. On average every iPod or digital music player contained 842 illegally copied songs
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Alright, I’m calling BS on this one. I personally have a total of over 13,700+ songs on my PC and none of them are stolen. I find it damn near impossible to believe that 50% of all kids with MP3 players have 840+ stolen songs each.
 
I agree. Shens on this one.

I have about 3000 tracks and every single one of them is paid for.
 
Who is going to post on any forum especially one as highly traced as this one that they do anything illegal.

That being said. I had a boss at my last place of employment who had 5 servers at his house. 3 of them had 1 TB, the last two having about 5 TB each. One was for Music, One for Applications, One for applications he didn't trust, and one for porn (the 5tb). His Porn server was about 85% full of stolen porn. His movie server (the other 5tb) was about 75% full of stolen movies. And his music server he was just about to pop another TB because it was too low to run a defrag on anymore.

1TB of stolen music. 728 DAYS of music without hearing the same song twice. That's about 250,000 songs. People like him really throw the curve.
 
TechLarry said:
I agree. Shens on this one.

I have about 3000 tracks and every single one of them is paid for.
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If the copying of your own CD tracks to an iPod is illegal--as it is in the UK--the numbers get skewed upward pretty quickly.
 
They're pimping 'averages' when they should be be talking about 'medians', if they have any desire to really paint an accurate picture.
 
Alright, I’m calling BS on this one. I personally have a total of over 13,700+ songs on my PC and none of them are stolen. I find it damn near impossible to believe that 50% of all kids with MP3 players have 840+ stolen songs each.
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You're one of the exception and not the rule.

You don't know how many computers we get at Best Buy that has limewire on it. I can almost guarantee that every computer with a virus of some sort has limewire on it. And yes, they tell me that they use it to download music.
 
I buy it. We live in an entitlement society now. Punks think everything should be free, and have never had to work for anything.

Damn kids, get off my lawn!
 
qkool said:
You're one of the exception and not the rule.

You don't know how many computers we get at Best Buy that has limewire on it. I can almost guarantee that every computer with a virus of some sort has limewire on it. And yes, they tell me that they use it to download music.
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as they should. I look at viruses as the checks to the system. Those who are smart enough to find and download music deserve it. Those who get viruses can go back to feeding bloated corporations.

I stand by what i say all the time with music. I will happily buy merchandise directly from the bands i support. And i will happily go see them live so long as they are within a reasonable distance from my home. i will NOT show my "support" via retail establishments overcharging for cds, of which both the musicians and the graphic designers see little compensation for. Simply put the system needs to adapt.
 
Well aside from you guys here i dont know anyone that pays for music so I can believe 800+ songs per iPod easily
 
I can see this being true also. Like gkool, every computer I see that somebody ask me to work on has limewire installed on it.

As I stated before, a lot of people use limewire even though they barely know how to use a computer and think it is a a legit way to get music. Their friend or a coworker tells them to get it and they do without knowing what they are getting. Similar to how they get 20 different spyware programs. Somebody tells them to try this program, somebody else tells them they think something else is better,... in time their machine is full of useless programs that bog it down. They have no idea what they are doing other the putting something on there that they heard about.

Thus I would have no problem believing that on average about 800 songs on a person's mp3 player are stolen.
 
Well, I actually find this to be a very believable number. I work on a university campus in a computer store. We are owned by the university, and we talk to the different IT departments all the time. Also, keep in mind the age range of most of our clients are 18-25 year-old students. You have no idea how many times I have heard, "I need to back up my computer before my hard drive is replaced/erased/fails because I have a bunch of music in iTunes that I can't get back." Typically, 'can't get back' means 'illicit'. Stealing media files on campus is so rampant that the central IT department refuses to help students back up any music or movie files in fear of liability. Hell, I've had police officers and lawyers ask me how to get music downloaded through Limewire into their iTunes play list (and they've all admitted to not wanting to pay for music they could get for 'free').

842 illegal songs on your average MP3 player sounds like a reasonable average to me.
 
ianken said:
I buy it. We live in an entitlement society now. Punks think everything should be free, and have never had to work for anything.

Damn kids, get off my lawn!
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Kids and about 3/4 of this forum at times.
 
i would say... your an adult... thats why yours are not stolen...

12k mp3s... the average kid does not have 12,000$ to buy mp3s at 99cents each... thats the bs in the system.

id say 99.9% of the thousand computers i fixed at uwm had at least 1000 stolen mp3s from faculty, professors down to students.

"buying them off of limewire" for free... does not count lol. or... this is what someone told me last week "im against downloading music... i use limewire". i then asked but you dont pay for them... "oh i mean i am against other users downloading from me". lol

ok... so you can rape a goat, take that goat, make a kid rape it, then you rape the kid while raping the goat... then have the kid butcher the animal live within city limits... then kill the kid and bury them in your backyard, and you'll serve less years in jail than if you stole 10,000 mp3s... come on.. thats justice?

not that they have given the 1-5year sentance per violation... but 10,000 years in jail for mp3s vs murder, incest, rape etc is a joke. you can get more jail time in wisconsin for stealing mp3s than raping your kid. as a teacher who had to complain about the government.... allowing parents to force their daughters to sleep with their dads... 10-20x a year... then the government's goal is to reunite the kid with their family... thats fucking sick.

this is a sick system.
 
I really don't see how this a "surprise" with media devices become smaller, and yielding higher capacities it makes it all the more easier for people to copy those 4-8gb of music in minutes and distribute to any other type of media player device with storage.

Never mind P2P sharing...


Just think about Moore's Law, every two years the number of transistors and storage capacity will increase exponentially as will the number of illegal or stolen media files that are played on these new devices.

Until files can be protected properly we will see this trend increase along with the times.
 
I'm sure that the definition of "illegal" is extremely broad for this study, as it's obvious they are trying to make a point.

And out of curiosity, is it illegal to use a streamripper on internet radio? If so then this study doesn't surprise me one bit...
 
yep... and it doesnt help bestbuy and circuit city advertise "holds hundreds of hours of movies" or thousands of mp3s...

for that one guy, that spent 20k on 20k mp3s? come on bullshit.
 
840 songs * ~45,000,000 teens * $750/song = $28,350,000,000,000

Amazing how their damages can exceed $30 trillion from one sub-group alone when the entire worldwide industry is what, 10% of that?
 
srangara said:
If the copying of your own CD tracks to an iPod is illegal--as it is in the UK--the numbers get skewed upward pretty quickly.
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That's what I was wondering. Probably 50% of the stuff on my player is ripped from my own CDs rather than (legally) downloaded, and in that article they mix "copied illegally" and "illegally downloaded" without making any distinction.

Although frankly I can believe it of students. They have less disposable income (after beer), live in an environment where you're exposed to a lot of bands etc that you might not have listened to before, and have the know-how and facilities to easily share files with each other. I was a student when napster originally appeared, and I don't remember spending much on music back then.
 
well, they are losing that much annually duh! people are starving in china, buy your mp3 from america.
 
Jutsu said:
Until files can be protected properly we will see this trend increase along with the times.
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And who gets to decide what constitutes "proper" protection. The media companies that are desperately clinging to failing business models? The industry pundits that could care less about consumer "rights" and want to fill their coffers by forcing said consumers to watch mainly what the content providers serve up and in DRM'ed formats that expire at their discretion? I remember a time when companies would solicit my business if they wanted my money, not dictate terms and create pseudo-monopolies or set policies.
 
its definitely true. pretty much everyone i know in college downloads at least 50-60% of their music.
 
dbu8554 said:
Well aside from you guys here i dont know anyone that pays for music so I can believe 800+ songs per iPod easily
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I believe it as well. I pay for all my music off itunes now and just crack the DRM to play on my truck's MP3 player. Itunes has a lot of DRM free music now, but apparently it's still rampant on most of their older albums. And I don't give a fuck what they say, I am not going to buy all that compatible itunes junk just to play music in my truck with DRM. Plus I know some people that still use limewire and other places to download music.
 
I agree with the statistic every computer or ipod I've touched and seen clearly had nothing but illegal music or video. It even had comments, tags, and metadata that obviously made it illegal. This is from the age range they suggest Teens and College Students.
 
I don't steal music anymore but I would say a good bit of what I currently have was stolen at one time. I've gone back and picked up or deleted most of that music. A lot of the music I have is from local and independant artists so I feel better about giving them money.

My room mate on the other hand downloads quite a few albums.
 
I don't know how many times I have told the younger generation that the songs there downloading from Limewire is not legal despite Limewires claim that it is. I then have to enter into a long drawn out conversation to tell them why it is not legal and why Limewire claims it is.

I got to admit, that at one time I was also guily of such downloads, but a couple years ago I made a pledge to myself that nothing would go on my computer that was not 100% legit.
 
It's believeable. I know people with over 80 GB of downloaded music. Ironically those same people are some of the music industries best customers.
 
ok... so you can rape a goat, take that goat, make a kid rape it, then you rape the kid while raping the goat... then have the kid butcher the animal live within city limits... then kill the kid and bury them in your backyard, and you'll serve less years in jail than if you stole 10,000 mp3s... come on.. thats justice?
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Wow... You... really thought that one through :eek: speaking from experience?
 
lol how is this hard to believe

in real life i know exactly ONE person that still buys cd's.
his dad is also the ceo or some shit of georgia power and his itunes account is directly linked to his pops credit card. i would buy music too if i had unlimited $$$ because itunes is faster then p2p (usually)

to me though 842 seems like kind of a low number... maybe they should have surveyed in the u.s. lol we have been p2p since what? 2001? 7 years of downloading should give you way more then 842. unless u dont listen to a lot of music

here in the dorms we all set our itunes libraries to share and then just copied everything that would fit to our hard drives so we didnt get bitched at by IT for file sharing.
 
I remember in my first year of University I was bored and decided to grab random music.

I was usign DC++ and searched for *.mp3 within the rez network.

By the end of the week it finished downloading the ~500GB of music it found. Granted, a lot it was repeates, but you can be damn sure they count them in this "study", meaning I would have counted as somewhere in the range of 100,000 songs.
 
I've spent about $15,000 on music in the past 5 years, but not all of the tracks on my iPod are "legit," as it were.
 
Looks like greedy bastards will have to become Lawyers instead of musicians which is a good thing.
 
I am in no way surprised.

As a teenager, none of my friends can afford to spend too much on music. One person would usually buy a CD and then other ppl could borrow and rip if they need to.

It's so commonplace. So many of my clients have Limewire (what a POS) and so many don't even realize its illegal.

IMO I do the best to support the bands I like the most because I can't buy all the music I might listen to.

Also... If its ok to borrow a CD from a friend... Then what if you lived next door and borrowed it whenever you wanted to listen to it... As long as you didn't both listen to it at the same time, this is the same thing,

lol
 
adzadz said:
I am in no way surprised.

As a teenager, none of my friends can afford to spend too much on music. One person would usually buy a CD and then other ppl could borrow and rip if they need to.

It's so commonplace. So many of my clients have Limewire (what a POS) and so many don't even realize its illegal.

IMO I do the best to support the bands I like the most because I can't buy all the music I might listen to.

Also... If its ok to borrow a CD from a friend... Then what if you lived next door and borrowed it whenever you wanted to listen to it... As long as you didn't both listen to it at the same time, this is the same thing,

lol
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No it is not the same thing as by borrowing the cd there is no possible way for you both to listen to it at the same time. Nor can a 3rd person listen to it then. If you share out every song you own to everyone, then they give it out to everyone... more likely then not there are going to be more than 1 person listening to the song at a given time. Not only that but only so many people can borrow a cd from you. Not the case with an mp3. A mp3 could be shared with billions of different people, something that can't be done with a cd. Your type of logic is just some the bs that is though up to try to justify sharing music/movies/software online.
 
Yea I just read what I wrote again and that is a load of crap.

I guess you can't really justify it, just people don't see who's loss it is when they steal music or simply don't care.
 
"Lars wants to have a gold-plated shark tank bar installed next to his pool, but must now wait a few months"
 
I can't feel sorry for the music industry when they act incredibly shady, get court rulings that are rediculous, and aren't exactly hurting for money.
That said, I will keep listening to pandora and other streaming internet radio type things because if I got sued for 20k dollars for a few songs I could listen to on the radio I would lose all hope in humanity.
 
The music industry isn't losing nearly as much as they claim becuase well over 90% of the music downloaded would have never been purchased in the first place. I have whams greatest hits downloaded for shits and giggles but there is no way in hell I would ever pay for that crap so they sure as hell didn't lose any money from me.

music industry needs to STFU and learn to due business around the current environment not try and change the environment to suite their business.
 
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