
Here is a story from Giz that doesn’t surprise me much at all. Turns out the same people that pirate music, also buy more of it. I can relate to this, i am not going to go out and buy a CD for $12-$15 to find out that there is only one decent song on the whole thing. Giz:
A study from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download free music from services like BitTorrent are also the biggest legitimate consumers of downloadable music.
In fact, among all 1,901 Norway-based study participants (all of whom were over the age of 15), it was found that those who downloaded ‘free’ music were 10x more likely to download pay music. In other words, music pirates are the music industry’s largest online consumers.
Note: ‘Free’ music obviously implies pirated music, but it also encompasses legitimate free music download services.
The findings also included that, in the 15-20 age range, 50% of participants had bought a CD in the last six months. So that trusty format isn’t dead quite yet.
(Via Gizmodo.)
Buying something you like makes sense but really only works because piracy is illegal (meaning there’s a real threat of prosecution)… There would be no motivation to buy if you could it for *free*.