Spotify Wins Over The Pirates

The number of Swedes that pirate music has dropped by 25 percent in the last two years, according to figures just released by the country’s music industry.

Researchers carrying out quarterly surveys among Swedes aged between 15 and 74 appear to indicate that about 9 percent of them have given up piracy in the last 12 months.

The main reason for the decrease is believed to be the growing interest in music streaming services such as Spotify, which the record industry in Sweden has embraced as “an alternative to music piracy.”

People appear to be making the switch because of the wider range of material found on legal services such as Spotify and the fact they’ve become cheaper and simpler to operate.

“The long-term trend is a sharp increase in legal streaming while we see a reduction in illegal file sharing and downloading,” Music Sweden chief exec Elizabet Widlund explained.

“When 800,000 Swedes are willing to pay for streaming music, there is clearly a market for more legal players in the digital music market,” she said.