Music Piracy-Measuring the Immeasurable

This article reflects the findings from the Herts study, “Measuring Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights”, but focuses on music industry specific piracy research between 2000 and 2013. The study covered a wide range of trade body, government and academic generated research and focused on the methods used to estimate the levels, scale and types of music piracy, especially digital but also including offline infringement principally involving counterfeited goods. The key challenge, as with any illicit activity hidden from plain sight, was that any attempt to accurately measure levels of music piracy is equivalent to estimating the size of an iceberg based on what is visible above the water.