Pirates buy more music

"The recording industry may loathe users who illegally download free music using peer-to-peer technologies such as BitTorrent, but it turns out that these music thieves are also the industry’s best customers. Per TorrentFreak, a new survey conducted by the American Assembly non-partisan public affairs forum shows that while P2P users do download a lot more free music from the web than non-P2P users, they also buy a lot more music through legitimate venues as well.

The survey asked users to estimate their total music collections and then estimate the number of songs that they had paid for as well as the number that they had downloaded for free or copied from friends and family. The results show that P2P users have much larger collections overall, as American P2P users have an average of 1,979 music files while German P2P users had an average of 3,917 files. For comparison, non-P2P users in the United States had 1,264 files on average while German non-P2P users had an average of 627.

And because P2P users have larger collections than non-P2P users, they also buy more music: American P2P users bought an average of 760 files, versus an average of 582 files for non-P2P American users, while German P2P users bought an average of 1,034 files, versus an average of 376 for non-P2P German users.

And this is the essential paradox that the music industry has to deal with when it tries to crack down on Internet piracy: How can it lower the instances of copyright infringement without angering the same people who send it more money than anyone else?"

I've been saying this for a long time. I used to download a ton of stuff for free but I'd also buy at least 5 albums a week.

Same. I've been buying a ton of albums lately but I am the guy that tries before buying. Could I go on YouTube and check it out? Yeah of course but fuck that, I'll just have my buddy put a ton of shit in an external and buy the albums i really dig.

And on the other side of things, people who don't know how to download don't seem to "get" music in the sense that they seek things beyond the ten songs the radio is shoving at them at any given point in time.

Catalogue orders or post-Y2K loser.

Sorry but this is pure bullshit. If this were true, why has every branch of every record label suffered massive layoffs in the past few years? Music piracy (whatever your opinion on it) does not promote music shopping.

Next time, try using a survey that actually tracks Soundscan numbers and doesn't ask participants to "estimate". Science, people.

Always impressed with the findings of studies where people are asked to admit their criminal behavior. Tends to be some pretty accurate results, and never in the slightest exaggerated.

Do you really want me to answer this? Because piracy is only a tiny fraction of the answer. How many people even give a shit about music at all as much as 20 years ago? How many venues have closed in that time, and how many of those were due to piracy? Clearly it's all piracy's fault, and not just a gigantic shift in the popularity of music among the arts.

Piracy also killed opera, ballet, and people spending fortunes on artwork.

The internet and data delivery in GENERAL, both legal and ILLEGAL, have put a wrench in the industry. The industry's slow response to adapt or take advantage of this sh7ift is the reason the ILLEGAL gained popularity much faster than the legal.

Also, those labels you see dying - how old are they? What's the odd's they started somewhere in the industry boom during the 70's, 80's, and 90's? Industry has waned, no doubt, but it's sad to try and pin it all on the customers, and not the industry itself.

Because major labels are more concerned with signing what they think will sell rather than what they think is good?

Matt, the numbers don't say anything about the music industry as a whole. It says people who steal tend to also pay for music more than people who don't steal. It doesn't claim that record sales are the same as they were.

Sadly, it's the labels you'd consider to have "integrity" that have folded first, not the giant behemoths spoon feeding us pop garbage. Those guys have a bit of life left, because they think like businesses, and not artists.

So it's not downloading that killed the industry, it's a poor product? So poor that no one wants it? Despite the fact that 40 billion songs are illegally downloaded. 40 billion downloads of unwanted garbage?

How did you get that out of what I said?

Completely wrong.

The industry isn't being "killed" at all. It's waning all by itself.

The problem with statistics is context and verification. So where'd you get that figure, how was it arrived at, and what's the comparative figure from a more lucrative era within the industry?

The 40 billion download number comes from the International Federation for Information Processing - a non-profit, non-government affiliated agency who study information technology.

I apologize if I misrepresented what I was saying - not a "poor product" but one that people don't "give a shit about". It's clearly a product that people still want. There were 1.6 billion legal music purchases in 2011 (that's from soundscan) - the vast majority were single songs, not albums. And 40 billion illegal downloads. The concert ticket business is exceeded $4.5 billion in north america in 2009 - quadruple what it was less than 15 years earlier. It's a product people are willing to spend money on. That sounds like people give a shit to me.

Did the record industry play everything correctly? Are they blameless? Hell no. But the "I buy more because of illegal downloading" argument is tired and pointless. Buying some products doesn't justify stealing others. I took a pay cut at my last job (prior to leaving), and my wife recently lost her job because of the state of the industry. And a majority of the blame can be placed on illegal downloading.

Homosexual.

blah blah blah Lars Ulrich blah blah blah Napster blah blah blah soulseek blah blah blah limewire blah blah blah IRC blah blah blah. Fuck music, kill yourself.

Now at the industry's peak in the 80's, how many cassette duplications and recordings from radio were made worldwide?

There's a lot more at play than piracy. People using their purchases to justify piracy are just as oblivious as you are blaming it as the main reason the industry is in decline.

Hint - how's your local book store? Movie theater? Arcade? Basketball court?

The focus and location of entertainment has changed. It's fucked up many industries. Piracy is just a tiny part of that, man, and one the industry loves to place all the blame on.

The reality is that people do not listen to music the same way anymore. They don't consume it the same way anymore. The only thing these stats about downloading prove is that people that LOVE music will do whatever they have to do to find it and acquire it - both legally and illegally. And that fits my experience as well. I have a collection of around 1000 albums. Downloaded (or was given) around 400 of em. Most people, in their lifetimes, don't purchase 600 albums. Before their implosion, the labels made their bread and butter off people like me.

As for "40 billion downloads means..."

No, it doesn't. There's an entire group of people that exists on the internet that will download things just because they're there. Think 16 year olds with copies of Autocad, and tweens tweaking their cell photos with cracked copies of the best version of photoshop available. If actually in the market with their real dollars, you bet these options wouldn't even have been considerations.

You mistakenly seem to assume that every single case of a download was an intent to obtain and own a specific album. More often than not, sadly, kids will download entire albums or discographies only to rip the "hits" and toss the rest. Those stats you're parroting don't account for that.

Those stats also blindly ignore the peak the industry experienced that, in reality, lasted only 20 years or so. If you compare current sales figures and industry stats with those of the 1950's, how do they compare?

Peaks, valleys. The pirates don't create the tide, man. They just ride it.