While I take anything the RIAA says with a brick of salt, I am very curious how they know hard drive swapping is a bigger source of piracy than P2P. This boggles my mind. Is there some underground network of hard drives that I'm not aware of?
Would they buy terabytes of music? No, but few people of any income level would. However it should be remembered that once upon a time, college students were a major market for recorded music.
Twenty years ago when I went to college (ugh, that felt weird to type) every dorm room had stacks of CDs in it... maybe an average of a couple hundred dollars worth per head. That music-selling bonanza just doesn't exist today.
I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another about whether this is a good or bad thing.
"Data note: The information in this press release is from NPD’s “Annual Music Study,” which is based on online surveys of U.S. consumers age 13 and older. NPD conducted consumer surveys between December 14, 2011 and January 3, 2012, and the final reporting is based on 5,799 completed surveys. In order to compare music acquisition across formats, NPD uses an equivalency of 10 standalone digital tracks for each CD album."[0]
I would guess they were counting all USB storage devices as "hard drives", so a large percentage is likely just USB sticks.
This type of piracy is pretty prevalent in military bases around the world. Someone has a flash drive or external hard drive full of movies/music/etc and they trade it amongst themselves.
