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Right holders call music rips from the Internet "the most aggressive form of musical piracy"





The Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom and the PRS for Music Association, which represents the interests of right holders, are sounding the alarm because of one type of piracy that is gaining momentum - the rip of streams. According to a study of copyright holders, this is the “most aggressive form of musical piracy,” whose popularity has increased by 141% in 2014–2016.



Services that save audio from Spotify, YouTube and other broadcasts to convenient MP3 files are very popular on the Internet. Rights holders are confident that these services operate illegally.



Stream rips produce services of five types:





Reportedly, YouTube remains the most popular source of rips: it is used by 75-80% of services.



The study covered a predominantly British audience. According to the poll, 57% of Britons are aware of the existence of such services, and 15-19% use them. Especially often do men at the age of 16-34 years. According to statistics, online services for rip stream are about 20 times more popular than torrents and almost 5 times more popular than file hosting services as a tool for downloading music.







Rip Stream is a long-standing problem, but it has become especially aggravated in the past two years, with the growing popularity of “mobile ripping” in the age group of 16-24 years, experts state.



Rights holders believe that the problem arose for several reasons. First, the level of computer literacy has increased among a certain part of the population. Secondly, people began to look more and more actively for alternative ways to get music for free when access to traditional pirated sites is limited. Experts from the music industry think that the current generation (not only the post-napster, but also the post-YouTube) does not realize the value of music as paid content. As a result, free platforms like YouTube have become a very popular place to listen to music, and now to download it.



Of particular concern is the "willingness of these mostly young consumers to rip relatively low-quality music recordings." This means that many will not pay for high-quality recordings if they can get free content in a reasonable format in any quantity.



Right holders are worried that mass downloading of music reduces the number of views of music broadcasts on streaming services, if the studios make money on advertising. This is aggravated by a related problem - a significant proportion of music fans (19%) tend to avoid advertising while listening to their favorite music.



Right holders want to increase revenues annually: for example, the average British consumer paid 75 pounds for music last year (68 pounds a year earlier), but if it were not for pirated services, then the revenues would be higher.



Music studios and associations that represent their interests are closely monitoring the situation and trying to suppress the most active violators of intellectual property rights on the Internet. In September 2016, American music studios filed a lawsuit against the German site YouTube-mp3.org , which accounts for "40% of all illegal music rips in the world," as stated in the statement of claim. This service is used by tens of millions of users.







The efforts of American studios have not yet yielded results: YouTube-mp3.org and dozens of other similar services still work fine, allowing you to save entire music albums to disk in MP3 format.



Among the applications for downloading music, the two most popular are YouTube Downloader (among all users of applications for downloading music, 76% used this service at least once) and YouTube MP3 Music Downloader (70%). Tubemate (28%), Shark YouTube Downloader (26%), Dentex YouTube Downloader (25%) and others (15%) are far behind in popularity.



In addition to YouTube-mp3.org (85%), the most popular sites for rip music in the UK are called convert2mp3.net (51%), clipconverter.cc (48%), scdownloader.net (32%) and anything2mp3.com (31% ).



Among those who use the services of YouTube-mp3.org, almost half (42%) do it every week.



Here is a list of the most popular sites for downloading music from a UK study:





The most popular plugins (browser extensions) for rip streams:





The most popular software for rip streams:





Of course, in the study of British copyright holders there are not enough references to the mentioned tools for riping and downloading content, but in general they did a very useful analytical work, and the links can be found on their own.


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