Study Finds "Pirates" 10 Times More Likely To Buy Music - The Guardian

\r\nAccording to research, those who download ’free’ music are also the industry’s largest audience for digital sales\r\n

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\r\nPiracy\r\nmay be the bane of the music industry but according to a new study, it\r\nmay also be its engine. A report from the BI Norwegian School of\r\nManagement has found that those who download music illegally are also\r\n10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don’t.\r\n

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\r\nEverybody\r\nknows that music sales have continued to fall in recent years, and that\r\nfilesharing is usually blamed. We are made to imagine legions of\r\ninternet criminals, their fingers on track-pads, downloading songs via BitTorrent\r\nand never paying for anything. One of the only bits of good news amid\r\nthis doom and gloom is the steady rise in digital music sales. Millions\r\nof internet do-gooders, their fingers on track-pads, who pay for songs\r\nthey like – purchasing them from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. And yet\r\naccording to Professor Anne-Britt Gran’s new research, these two groups\r\nmay be the same.\r\n

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\r\nThe Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000\r\nonline music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that\r\nthose who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy\r\nsources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would\r\nmake music pirates the industry’s largest audience for digital sales.\r\n

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\r\nWisely,\r\nthe study did not rely on music pirates’ honesty. Researchers asked\r\nmusic buyers to prove that they had proof of purchase.\r\n

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\r\nThe\r\npaper’s conclusions emerge just as Sweden’s Pirate Bay trial comes to a\r\nclose. Pirate Bay’s four defendants, who helped operate the notorious\r\nBitTorrent tracker, were sentenced to a year in jail and fined 30m SEK\r\n(£2,500,000) in damages.\r\n

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\r\nSean Michaels
\r\nguardian.co.uk, \r\nTuesday 21 April 2009 11.03 BST \r\n

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