Digital pirates buy 10 times more
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Piracy has been no small topic in world news lately. The word brings to mind bandits from Somalia for most people, but there is another side to piracy that has been grabbing its share of headlines. I’m talking about so-called digital “pirates” who download music, software, movies and more. Rights of intellectual property and the nature of who owns a work of art notwithstanding, the law has come down on some of the more visible members of the file sharing community, like The Pirate Bay. They may need personal loans and credit repair by the time they’ve made it out the other end of the legal system.
But perhaps old guard lawmakers and the mainstream media are missing something. Perhaps online file sharing is actually a useful marketing tool that exposes the average online consumer. Perhaps it leads to increased real sales. A recent study may shed some truth on this notion.
Pirates buy more?
Sean Michaels reports for The Guardian that recent research suggests that those who download music through file sharing sites are actually the recording industry’s largest audience for digital sales.
Mainstream media will be slow to buy the research; some go so far as to equate digital piracy with heavily armed Somalian pirates. That’s ludicrous. According to the study by the BI Norwegian School of Management, those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don’t.
Don’t blame the technology
For better or worse, file sharing has typically been blamed for collapsing music sales. I certainly do not advocate any illegal activity, but I do have concerns with the technology itself being blamed for how it is used, as well as the individuals who make the service available (like The Pirate Bay and similar torrent sites). Even Google has torrent services; is the recording industry going to try to shut Google down, too? There are myriad uses for peer-to-peer (P2P) torrent software that do not involve downloading copyrighted materials.
And guess what? Digital music sales have indeed been on the rise, thanks to iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and more. And according to Professor Anne-Britt Gran’s research, the P2P users are primarily responsible.
Driving them away
Gran’s study sampled almost 2,000 online music users, all over age 15. Those who downloaded “free” music (lawfully or not) were found to be 10 times more likely to pay for music. Purchases were confirmed by purchase records to ensure that the “pirates” were indeed shopping as they said they were.
Does the recording industry truly want to turn this audience away? If a Swedish court giving The Pirate Bay’s defendants a year in jail and fining them 30m SEK ($3,634,248) says anything, apparently that’s exactly what they want to do.
Please, Mr. and Mrs. Music Executive, give me your job. I could do better.
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The finding that “pirates” are the people that buy the most music is not exactly a shocking revelation, and those of us who have ever used a P2P network have been saying the same thing for years. You’d likely find that most people who download have usually bought at least one album by the band they download the most, if not most of them. Most of the times when I buy a CD it goes straight on the computer and into my MP3 player – portable CD players are too cumbersome and skip all the time, and no one should have to pay for the same thing twice. A lot of artists are starting to bypass record labels entirely and making their albums purchasable for download only – Nine Inch Nails, Prince, for instance. I think that most people that download and share are perfectly willing to purchase the whole record if they download a couple of songs they really like from an artist. Also, not to mention the fact that when you buy a CD, most of the money goes to the record label, artists get ripped off more often than not, and it was their intellectual product. The traditional recording label and contract is becoming an endangered species.