Having been away from society for a while, I was worried it would have changed in my absence. Climbing back down from the mountaintop and saintly contemplation, I find the games industry populated with barely cerebrate fiends, flinging their feces with gay abandon and calling it digital entertainment, barely a rung above naked shrieking horror and cannibalism. It’s good to be home.

Particularly reassuring of the industry’s inanity was the proud announcement yesterday from media research group The Leading Question and DRM pimp Music Ally that piracy was experiencing a sharp decline in the UK.

The report cites this little nugget:

The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing regularly (i.e. every month) has gone down since the last national survey. In December 2007 22% regularly fileshared tracks, but in January 2009 this was down to 17%, a comparative drop of nearly a quarter.

The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. (In December 2007 42% of 14-18s were filesharing at least once a month. In January2009 this was down to just 26%).

Now statistics are right up there with politics as far as gibberish and horseshit goes, but I am prepared to acknowledge that those folks who are actual Statisticians do include some pretty smart kids. However, whilst not being a media tycoon, I have a very strong suspicion that there are rather a lot of game and music releases running up to December, and a pretty conspicuous decline immediately after the holiday shopping period. I’m going to take a wild guess at this figure and say it’s about a 5% drop off, say from about 22% to 17%.

The survey goes on to identify a marked increase in the number of youngsters using streaming sites such as YouTube and MySpace coinciding with the decrease of piracy. The lesson for the industry here seems clear – if don’t want your product pirated just give it to us for free. Or better yet, just don’t make it in the first place.

Whilst Music Ally and Co might be trying to congratulate the nation for being gripped by an entirely fictional fit of honesty and it being a bold new day for peace and harmony, keep in mind that meanwhile in Sweden pro-file sharing political movement The Pirate Party received 7.13% of the entire national vote, which is amazing when you consider how apathetic your average file leech usually is.

Two days ago Stephen Fry, British National Treasure and Stately Homo, told a London audience that today’s digital entertainment groups were like Big Tobacco in their distribution policies. He went on to say that the Pirate Bay founders had been the victims of a smear campaign, and had himself downloaded seasons of 24 and House. This was as part of a festival sponsored by iTunes, so we can assume someone’s PA forgot to check the guest speaker’s material and is now manning the Genius Bar in Bogota.

Shortly after the performance Fry updated his Twitter page saying: “Hope I’m not misunderstood. Such a pity if I get misrepresented as a”help yourself and be a pirate” advocate”. Perish the thought.”

On behalf of the whole SGC : perish the thought indeed.

Ref: http://musically.com/cgi-bin/content.cgi?page=index

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