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There have been plenty of studies in recent years into whether or not file sharers buy more or less music as a result of having free access to every song ever made via the interweb, some concluding they buy more, some they buy less, none, interestingly, that it's impossible to say and pointless to try and find out. This new survey on the matter is getting more press than most because it's come out so soon after the much reported ruling in The Pirate Bay case in Sweden, and it's written by Norwegian academics - Sweden, Norway, same thing really isn't it? The top line finding from the Norwegian School Of Management is that someone who downloads music illegally is, at the same time, ten times more likely to buy music.
Why sue?
The implication, therefore, is that the record industry, instead of suing the likes of The Pirate Bay out of business, should support the providers of P2P services, because they have direct access to the best music consumers and, possibly, encourage those consumers to discover (for free) and then buy (for a fee) more music. The study questioned over 1900 internet users over 15 years old, examining those users' download habits - both how much music they downloaded illegally and, by checking their accounts with legit digital music providers, how much music they paid to download. They also checked how many CDs each user had bought. There was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a correlation - generally speaking those who download more tracks illegally also bought more music.
Snowball effect
Of course it stands to reason that people who dedicate large amounts of their time to downloading music via P2P are going to be music fans, people who are therefore likely to also spend a considerable amount of their expendable income on music products - whether that be on recordings (as this study suggests) or gig tickets or merchandise or whatever. It may also follow that by being able to experience new or unfamiliar music in a convenient way without financial risk, P2P users may discover artists or songs they wouldn't otherwise know they liked, and then buy that music from an a la carte download store. It has to be said that most studies that claim file-sharers buy more music, including this one, haven't really been able to say whether that's just because the sorts of people who file-share are also the sorts of people who buy music, or whether the discovery of new music via P2P actually leads to extra music sales. Either way, it seems fair to say that the 'file-sharing community' has in it many of the biggest music fans and biggest music consumers (especially within the youth demographic), and that, of course, has always been the biggest challenge for the record industry with regards the file-sharing issue - taking legal action against file-sharing, especially against individual file-sharers directly, invariably means suing some of your best customers.
Time better spent...
Meeting that challenge doesn't necessarily mean turning a blind eye to all illegal file-sharing, nor letting P2P software makers and BitTorrent trackers build their businesses by providing the tools that enable piracy. However, automatically suing all major file-sharers and providers of file-sharing services - which was certainly major label policy for a time, in the US at least - isn't a clever way to meet the challenge either, there must be opportunities for the record industry out there in P2P land, if only someone could figure out what they were and how to capitalise on them. Perhaps some university could try figuring that out, rather than contributing to the pile of reports on the links, or not, between illegal file-sharing and legit digital music consumption. Story credit - CMU Network
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