• Reuters, Tuesday, January 20, 2009 1 PM

A new Reuters report claims that the music industry needs to learn about the "dark side of the Internet" if it's ever going to gain the upper hand against piracy. At a conference in Cannes, France, music executives sounded upbeat about the industry's chances. For example, recent partnerships with the likes of Nokia, Amazon and News Corp.'s MySpace represent a step in the right direction.

However, according to Reuters, in 2008, some 95% of the music downloaded from the Internet, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal, leaving the overall music market down around 7% compared to 2007.

Michael Robertson, the head of MP3Tunes, who is engaged in copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, urged the industry to go even further with their online music experiments. "When you sue a new technology, you lose the opportunity to channel that into a positive direction," he said at the conference. "There is innovation happening but it's coming from the dark side of the Internet, from pirates, from the underground. And that is showing where the industry is going to be. You have to look underground, to see what people are doing and then give them commercial outlets that mirror that." Meanwhile, other music industry critics agreed that consumers would only move to legal sites from illegal ones if the proposition for doing so were easier and better to use.

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