Digital Download Day 2, an event designed to publicise legal internet music downloads in the UK, can only be considered a partial success, according to figures released by Nielsen//NetRatings.
The event, which took place on 18 April, was organised by OD2 and succeeded in attracting 523,000 visitors to the company’s website during the whole month. This made it the fifth most popular music website in the UK. The list was headed by file sharing network Kazaa which had a unique audience of 1.3 million in April, almost double that of the online retailer cd-wow.com.
However, Tom Ewing, European market analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings believes that these statistics are misleading. He commented: “Kazaa actually performs less well in the UK than in most European countries and even then its audience figures don’t represent the full extent of file sharing by any means. Kazaa, WinMX and similar sites allow users to download software which they use to share files without accessing the web.”
Ewing also played down the role of downloads in the music industry recession, claiming that CD retailers are currently attracting higher online audiences than any paid download site. Consequently, the market for buying music online is far greater than the paid download audience.
According to a recent study by Forrester Research, digital music will generate just â‚Ź24 million in Europe this year. However, the rapid growth of broadband deployment and the introduction of official download sites is predicted to ramp up the ante and Forrester claims that the music downloading industry will be worth â‚Ź1.3 billion by 2007 – 13% of the total music market.
Analysts at Nielsen//NetRatings are not convinced and see little evidence that an online cash bonanza is forthcoming.
“Events like Digital Download Day II are a poor indication of demand for paid downloads because they are offering a limited amount of free credit so users don’t actually need to pay anything,” said Ewing. “It remains to be seen whether paid content music sites can become a mass audience proposition, rather than a successful niche, while the file sharing communities are still thriving.”
