Lots of music piracy news these days

In the last few days we've heard that new albums by U2, Eminem, and Snoop Dogg have all been leaked onto P2P sites prior to their release dates. Obviously this can seriously harm sales to people who would've purchased the albums upon their release. In all of the cases above the publishers have pushed up the release dates on the albums. For more on this check out - Yahoo! News - "Bomb" Away: U2 Piracy Nightmare and E! Online News - Eminem's Early "Encore". No amount of security seems to be enough to keep albums from "early releases" on P2P nets these days.

In addition, there's a new study out, "Piracy on the High Cs," compiled by University of Pennsylvania professors Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel in which they find that record sales in the US have fallen because of people using the internet to download albums. Now this may not sound like big news, but in fact the leading study up to this point has said just the oppisite: "The study contradicts a previous report, conducted in 2002, which said swapping songs online had no negative effect on music sales. That report, by Harvard and North Carolina universities, said high levels of file-swapping had an effect that was 'indistinguishable from zero.'"

The newer study, which was commissioned by the US National Bureau of Economic Research, looks at the music-buying habits of 412 college students and found that the US music industry lost one fifth of a sale for each album downloaded from the internet. Learn more about the report here - BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music piracy 'does hit CD sales'