Study Says P2P Downloaders Buy More Music 158
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist posts to his site about a study commissioned by the Canadian government intended to look into the buying habits of music fans. What the study found is that 'there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.' The report is entitled The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada, and it was 'conducted collaboratively by two professors from the University of London, Industry Canada, and Decima Research, who surveyed over 2,000 Canadians on their music downloading and purchasing habits. The authors believe this is the first ever empirical study to employ representative microeconomic data.'"
Living Example (Score:3, Interesting)
Same with downloads. I'll gladly pay $5 for the new Saul Williams when it comes in DRM-free FLAC lossless and with all the album art. Money isn't the issue, neither is motivation. I just don't want to - in any way, shape or form - support the dying record companies.
Re:Bias in the study? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Sony would start making decent hardware again....
Re:Bias in the study? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, this debate is not particularly relevant. It's latched onto by Slashdotters in part, I think, to assuage their guilt for pirating music and prove how the RIAA is composed of nothing but greedy, self-serving bastards.
They aren't wrong. The problem is that the people who are opposed to illegal P2P file sharing of copyrighted music don't care what happens in bulk. They care whether or not an artist is getting paid when you receive that artist's music. The fact that you download, three CDs worth of music and purchase five CDs, for example, doesn't matter to them unless three of those five purchased CDs are the ones you've downloaded.
I'm sure anybody who has pirated music can point to a situation where they did indeed buy the CD (or specific tracks in the days of iTunes and the like) after pirating some or all of the tracks from it. I'm sure, if they are being honest, that they can also admit times when they downloaded songs that they never ended up buying. I think that in most cases, the latter situation would be the more common one.
I'm not meaning to imply that the RIAA is the champion of artists; they're not. They are the champion of record labels who historically have done whatever they can to screw the artists. I'm saying that if somebody opposes illegal downloading, they care whether each artist is compensated for their music and not whether artists as a whole are compensated.
And thus why the debate is really useless. Those people are not going to be swayed by any of these reports, whether they are truly concerned about the artists or using them as distractions for their own financial gain.
The debate worth having, as always, is how "we" get the people who download music and don't pay for it to become paying customers. You'll never get everybody, of course--at least not without giving it away free--but various approaches have their own benefits. The lower the price point, the higher the demand is a fairly obvious one. That site that just popped up with prices that fluctuate based on demand is an interesting experiment, though I think it goes the wrong way (prices increase as demand increases). I think the best experiment was the group that allowed you to name your own price for the CD.
All of these ideas likely need to be refined, but that is the direction we should be focusing our intellectual efforts in. As a nice side effect for the Slashdot crowd, the likelihood is that as systems such as those become more and more successful, the RIAA dies a little more and more. Artists and consumers both stand to win.
I don't think it will be long now.
Re:Conclusion : Don't piss off your best customers (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes we know you **AA hate people who "illegaly steal" your stuff, but those people happen to be those who buy most of your CDs anyway, so be nice with them.
Yep. I'm off shortly to a concert by a band I've seen 3 times before. A band I only went to see the first time because I really liked their CDs. A band whose CDs I only bought because I really liked what I downloaded.
Re:Bias in the study? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bias in the study? (Score:1, Interesting)
In all seriousness, I have to doubt the validity of any study that merely asks people about their relative percentages of legal and illegal activity. Especially people who probably have an agenda. I don't know if there is some way to control for the tendencies people would have to "over report", but it would have to be pretty shaky.
Wrong Order of Operations (Score:4, Interesting)
2. Let us also take it for given that many of these downloads would be sales if they could not be had via p2p. There is not really any evidence for this but its what the RIAA would like to think so we will work with it.
It follows from one and two that their best customers are P2P users. In the RIAA view all p2p is piracy. So RIAA does it makes sense to
A) Relentless go after pirates who are also your best customers creating all sorts of ill will and hostility to your organization. Only after having eliminated piracy (good luck) do you offer your own products to people who now do business with you because you're still the only game in town and will be constantly seeking the next opportunity to shift things to formats you can't control and retun us to the current situaiton all over again.
OR do you
B) Try to offer products the digital customer wants. Downloads at a reasonable price where you can profit without profiteering. The customer having payed you fairly for your wares can then enjoy them how they wish. Their happy to do business with you because you provide a quality, safe, and reputable service they can't get p2p. These people become you best customers. The hold outs are really just the "pirates" who never buy any thing anyway and you then can go after them without alienating your good customers having separated the two groups.
one thing you can't expect to do is
C) Remain in business without offering any new products, especially products people want, know are possible, serve as competition to your own, and can be had at least in part for free elseware.
Re:Bias in the study? (Score:3, Interesting)
All this is very different from the RIAA being fundamentally irrational because, say, they want to dress up like Napoleon and make burble noises with their invisible dog. Thinking you can impose (over)simplification on naturally complex systems, and uniformity on diversity, is something every human is tempted to try now and then.
If today's musicians aren't just propaganda idols, where's the anti-war songs? I see 18 and 20 year olds, at marches and rallies, and overwhelmingly, they are marching and rallying to my generation's war protest songs - Jackson Browne, Jefferson Airplane, etc. I talk to people in their twenties, and they use the songs, (and the films, TV shows, and books) of 30 and 40 years ago whenever they reach for a metaphor about the war, or the war on drugs, or the increasing prison population, or just about anything else political (And that's not just when they are talking to an old fart like me, but each other). There's a few exceptions, mostly in Hip-Hop, but then minorities joining up for the education benefits and then dieing disproportionately in a shooting war is a pretty good explanation why it's there more than in the predominant culture.