News some new research in music piracy

Scouse

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Gah, you bitch I was about to post this :)
In my opinion the truth is somewhere in between
Good thing that we have research then - so we don't need opinion. But to be a hypocrite and give mine anyway I've always thought of it like this:

1) Piracy is for people who'd not pay for tracks anyway (confirmed in study).
2) Exposure to music leads to knock-on sales (confirmed by legal free streaming = digital sales in study)

Therefore:

3) Piracy, being "free music" (though not streamed) is actually slightly positive when it comes to sales.


For me, in real life, piracy has worked exactly like this (and I suspect once the emotion of "it's bad and wrong mmmkay" is removed it's probably the same for most):

I know for a fact that I've bought more stuff because I've pirated. Bands I've never heard of I've been to see. Music I'd never have heard? Not so much - but friends have definitely gone out and purchased after hearing it round my house.

Games? Definitely - I've pirated shit I've never intended to buy just out of interest and gone and bought them afterwards to support the developers. Friends have bought games (and got into gaming) by playing them round my house.


And those arguments are just the financial side of it. In my 40th year, I've only ever seen positive things come out of piracy.
 

Scouse

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Actually, FACT:
3) Piracy, being "free music" (though not streamed) is actually slightly positive when it comes to sales.

From the report itself:
European Commission Piracy Report said:
a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchase websites

Woohoo! What we've known all along: PIRACY IS GOOD!!!!! :D


I'm so full of happy-validation-win it hurts :)
 

Cemeterygates

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It was effectively "piracy" that made the likes of Metallica rise to their level of fame, along with many other bands in the 80's....tape trading.

And as for supporting artists, you don't really do much of that by buying their albums from shops anyway as most of it is sucked up by retail/distributors/record labels anyway. Wanna support a band? Go to one of their shows, buy a shirt and an album off them.
 

DaGaffer

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Fucking Hell, soundbite news. Does no-one bother to read the source material? From the introduction to the report:

JRC Technical Report Page 3 said:
There is a rather clear consensus on the negative effects of online piracy on the off-line physical sales of recorded music. Less attention has been paid, however, to the effect of online illegal music consumption on the online legal sales of digital music.

So the report is about a single subset of the retail music market; a subset that hasn't yet replaced the loss in revenue from CD sales (basically iTunes and Amazon don't yet compensate for HMV and Virgin etc.)

Getting into the numbers themselves, a 0.2% rise in visits to legal download sites doesn't correspond to 0.2% rise in sales from legal download sites. In addition, the source data they use across Europe is Nielsen clickstream data, a panel service where the users being surveyed know they're being surveyed, and yet 10% of them are still dumb enough to access illegal music sites. However, if you did analysis of this group of people you'll probably find their behaviour in music sharing and other activities like porn trends below the norm for the internet because of that knowledge of monitoring.

Frankly its a crap study, using crap data, followed by crap reporting.
 

fettoken

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^That. Wasn't music piracy obsolete? But talking about movie/gaming piracy..
 

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