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Canada No Pirate Nation: Global Leader In Music Download Sales
An anonymous reader writes "The IFPI, the global recording industry association, recently released
its Recording
Industry in Numbers 2012,
which provides detailed sales data from countries around the world.
While CRIA talks
about
'rebuilding the marketplace,' the industry's own data indicates that
Canada already stands among the global leaders in digital music sales.
Michael Geist digs into the
data and finds that Canadians purchased more single track
downloads than Germany or Japan, and more than double the sales in
France, despite the fact that each of those countries has far larger
populations. In fact, Canadian sales were larger than all the sales
from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, the
Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden combined. Not only is the Canadian
digital market far larger than virtually every European
market, it continues to grow faster than the U.S. digital music
market as well. In fact, the Canadian digital music market has grown
faster than the U.S. market for the past six consecutive years."
We have incredibly lax laws compared to many places; the reason that such services don't tend to work here is simple.
Negotiating the licenses and contracts costs some money
Canada has 1/10th the population of the U.S. so it often isn't worth it.
Netflix, for instance, works perfectly well in Canada but has 1/10th the library of the U.S. version.
Piracy = increased sales? Canadians are one of the few who are protected under the law and can download as much pirated product as they like. The studies suggest that piracy leads to more purchases of the same type of material (music, movies, etc) so it can be true that we both pirate and purchase at the same time.