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Yes, yes, you read that headline right: according to a brand-spanking new study from North Carolina State University, BitTorrent downloads actually boost music album sales. Concluding that there really isn’t a whole lot of evidence that downloads negatively hurt sales, the research finds that more piracy equals more sales.
Of course, whilst suited-and-booted record company executives claim that it hurts them right where it counts, economist and assistant professor Robert Hammond took matters into his own hands and did an investigation of his own. Looking into a bunch of download statistics for new albums between May 2010 and January 2011 on a private music-dedicated BitTorrent tracker, Hammond then compared the data with sales numbers to construct a model that looks at the casual effect of music piracy on the industry. And people really were still buying albums!
The paper also suggests that sales could suffer if these torrent sites go down, as they basically serve a similar purpose to radio and media campaigns by effectively advertising music to fans. The paper itself is an interesting read, touching on many different points relating to BitTorrent piracy, and TorrentFreak’s article on the matter focuses on the main issues touched upon. Many theories could suggest why piracy actually boosts sales, for example, some people liken it to a word of mouth recommendation, and sharing with friends actually promotes artists, enabling more people to hear and potentially purchase albums. What do you all make of it then? Sound off in the comments below. [TorrentFreak]
Image credit: Piracy from Shutterstock
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I love the hypocrisy from the cinemas about this. They say that piracy is hurting the movie industry, then they have ad 2min later saying that Box office is running a record levels and you should buy advertising with us!
I could only take this notion seriously if someone looked at album sales from the at the turn of the century when downloading an album at a decent quality from Napster or Audiogalaxy etc. would take you 3-and-a-half days (and then freeze at 99% and fail) and compared it to now.
Some of the slack may have been taken by iTunes and other legal download services…but I’d donate my left nut to medical science if somebody could prove categorically that illegal File Sharing was GOOD for legal Album Sales.
*remove that “at”. Curse the lack of an edit button again!
read this article
went to thepiratebay
downloaded a film for free
While this might be true, surely it’s likely that it’s only the case because piracy is considered wrong? Someone might torrent some music, like it, and decide to support the artist by buying their albums. That’s dependent on them feeling like they should be paying for the music. If piracy was considered completely acceptable, by society in general, by the law, by the record companies, etc. then would people still feel any incentive to pay for it?
So my theory is that piracy only benefits the record companies if they continue to openly oppose it.
Had a quick look at the abstract, and two things stood out:
Making an album available on file sharing website one month earlier, results in 60 more units sold. This is an absolutely puny amount, and is most likely just noise in the data.
File sharing benefits established artists, but not newer and smaller artists. This seems counter intuitive to me. If it is word-of-mouth effect, I would have thought it would be the smaller artists that would benefit more from the word-of-mouth effect?
Interested to read more about their methods – but don’t have time right now. I very much suspect that they’re flawed, though, as all of their conclusions seem extremely counter-intuitive and illogical.
It’d be interesting to see if it matters what sort of music it is and whether that plays a role in whether piracy boosts sales.
For example, does the fact that an artist is independently recorded/published have any bearing on whether people are more likely to pay for it once its been downloaded?
It would imagine it does, and that people are also less likely to have any sympathy for Simon Cowells (and other large corporate interests) record sales
I knew it! Gone are the days of blindly buying an album from a record shop based on hearing one song from the album and the cover art. This is why music sharing is good.
Surely music sharing can help some lesser known bands. I’ve known people that are really into relatively newer bands that I’d never heard of. If they hadn’t introduced me to the music then I wouldn’t have even thought about buying a copy of my own.