As the music industry has stepped up efforts to charge MP3 users, research shows that more than half of Korea’s Internet users are still downloading MP3 files for free from peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing sites.
 
In a survey conducted by the digital camera website “dcinside.com” on its visitors, 51.4 percent of 4,000 users said they download free MP3 music files from P2P services such as Pruna.

Some 27.8 percent said they still used once-free sites like Soribada which were recently forced to charge for MP3 files under a point system. Another 16.4 percent said they sample CDs.

A minute percentage of users admitted to paying a flat fee or even per download for their music, with 2.9 percent saying they used SK Telecom’s Melon, 0.8 percent LG Telecom’s musicON and 0.7 percent NeoWiz’s JukeOn ? in all no more than 4.3 percent.

The music industry has come down hard on sites like Bugs and Soribada in the hope that forcing them to pay royalties will result in a growth of its market. But Soribada, once viewed as a breeding ground of an MP3 free-for-all, now retains only some 20 percent of users, while more than half of Internet users simply use other P2P sites.

“P2P requires some technical knowledge to use, which gets in the way of greater popularity among ordinary Internet users,” a spokesperson for the premium site JukeOn said. “We therefore want to draw in such average users unfamiliar with P2P.” JukeOn added the hope that there will come a time when “a full-scale transition to a fee-charged system by presently free sites” drives up the market for premium downloads “exponentially.” 

Source: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200504/200504190033.html