You’re hilarious. Cheers!

I’m doing a presentation on friday about the reasons, effects and possible countermeasures of piracy, and of course for that i need industry data. Preferably lots of it. Numbers, charts, and from reliable, referable sources too. That of course first led me to RIAA. If you somehow manage to suppress your sudden urge to throw up reading such horribly phrased, blatant propaganda against piracy (i mean, i know that “piracy is a bad thing”, but couldn’t they at least attempt to conceal their philosophy of “if you copy a song you’re a thief and deserve to die”?), it comes to view that most statistics (except for last year US sales) are not free. This is of course to be expected, but i’d rather not pay if there was data available for free as well. Not to mention that since i live and will do my presentation in Japan, i’d prefer global data instead of US-only.

So i started looking for some global charts, and that’s how i stumbled upon the Recording Industry in Numbers 2013 report by IFPI. This sure sounds like just what i need. But alas: this valuable source of data costs no less than 750 GBP for a single user (and that’s PDF only!). Do they seriously expect this to work in the digital age, when (poor) students are in the biggest need of such data? Of course me, as a “wicked pirate” started looking for free sources of the same data. What if someone summed up the report on their blog? Or maybe ignorantly uploaded the very thing somewhere?

After a mere 10 minutes of searching i now have a PDF copy of the IFPI Recording Industry in Numbers 2013 report. Before anyone would start making accusations, i didn’t get it from any notorious file sharing service, nor some random guy who uploaded it. No. I got it from the Australian Recording Industry Association’s own website, where the whole thing is made available for free on the front page. I downloaded and use the data in good faith of that the ARIA has the required rights to make a report worth £750 free to download for anyone passing by.