Ahoy! Music piracy down. But why?

Steve Jobs is often credited for offering a revolutionary way to curb music piracy. It wasn’t to drag music fans into court, saddling them with crippling debt and legal fees. It wasn’t about convincing ISPs to institute a copyright alert system to hassle users. No, the Apple co-founder had a much simpler solution: Jobs believed you could convince people to obtain legitimate music tracks by competing with piracy and offering a better user experience. Nearly ten years after the iTunes Stores debuted, people are still turning away from piracy to buy music from vendors such as Amazon and Apple. And the trend of obtaining officially sanctioned music from legitimate sources is only increasing, according to the NPD Group’s annual survey of music consumer behavior. Music piracy over peer-to-peer networks declined by 17 percent in 2012 compared to the year previous, based on NPD’s online survey of more than 5,000 U.S. Internet users between December and January. That decline translates into about 12 million fewer American audio pirates between 2011 and 2012. And the number one reason NPD cited for the precipitous drop in music piracy was free, ad-supported streaming services such as Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify (they somehow forgot KSLG). (PC World)