Studying How, And What, We Download

As we near the end of another year, the music industry has a few reasons to be optimistic. Digital music sales are expected to reach record highs this year, and legal streaming services continue to gain in popularity. But unauthorized music file sharing is still going strong.

This fall a firm called Musicmetric published what’s being called one of the most comprehensive studies of unauthorized music downloads. In the first half of 2012 Americans downloaded nearly 760 million songs using the software known as BitTorrent, which is the technology most often used for unauthorized file sharing. And most of those downloads happened in cities and towns near universities, says study co-author Marie-Alicia Chang.

“When you looked at the top download charts they were predominantly their big, kind of club hits,” she says. Chang thinks people are making party play lists with the tracks.