Music piracy has long been going on and even before the internet, where one could buy a cassette tape and record another copy of a legally purchased album. CD burning then came about and people began to make copies for friends and for profits, and with the introduction of the internet, well file-sharing became a whole lot easier and faster too. This is why we are not surprised that music labels are worried about piracy, although some studies have found that despite piracy, the music industry remains relatively unharmed.
The music labels have also often accused Google for “aiding” the pirates by making searches for pirated material easy, although Google has since blocked websites that link to illegal content, as well as complied with DMCA takedown requests for websites that were found to contain illegal material. As it turns out perhaps the music industry should stop blaming Google for some of their woes, thanks to a new study conducted by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA).
According to the study, they found that only 15% of traffic to websites containing illegal content came from searches, and for torrent websites like The Pirate Bay, only 8% of their traffic came directly from search results, which was also confirmed by The Pirate Bay themselves. All this seems to suggest that people tend to know where to go if they wanted to download songs illegally, instead of blatantly searching for it which seems to be what the music industry is accusing Google of allowing.