I, Me, Myself

Title: Music fans turn up volume of legal downloads
中譯：樂迷合法下載量增多

Music fans worldwide downloaded 420 million songs legally over the Internet in 2005, a 20-fold increase from two years ago, research showed. Record labels reaped a 1.1-billion-dollar harvest from digital downloads, up from 380 million dollars the previous year, with about 40 percent of this revenue earned from music for mobile phones. The research, published by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry,came a day after Apple Computer reported a 95-percent rise in quarterly profits. Apple kickstarts the legal download industry with its sleek iPod music player and its iTunes website, a library of songs that can be downloaded legally. The success of sites such as iTunes has helped the music industry to make money from the Internet, which was previously dominated by illegal file-swapping sites such as Napster and Kazaa.

研究指出，全球音樂迷2005年在網路上合法下載4億2千萬首歌曲，兩年來增加了20倍。唱片業者從數位下載獲得11億美元的收益，前一年則有3億8千萬美元，這項收益約4成是從手機音樂賺來的。國際唱片業交流基金會（IFPI）的這份研究，是在蘋果電腦宣布季獲利成長95%的隔天發表。蘋果以時髦的iPod音樂播放器與可合法下載樂曲的iTunes網站，開創合法下載業。iTunes等網站的成功，有助音樂工業從網路賺錢，過去網路被Napster與Kazaa等違法檔案交換網站主導。