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Survey Suggests P2P Users Buy More Music
elashish14 writes "A new survey commissioned by Google suggests that music listeners who utilize P2P filesharing services buy 30% more music than non-sharers. The survey also probed users' opinions on enforcement practices. Users were strongly against either throttling or disconnecting users' internet services, but the majority suggested also that search engines should block access. 52% of Americans also said that downloading infringing content should be a punishable offense."
Not all people are dumbasses, and some actually prefer to make sure that what they end up blowing their money is not complete garbage. Is that a crime?
This goes to show that more than half of the USian population believes in the tyranny produced by the power elite and believe in punishing people for non-crimes. That the population of the US is so badly educated and brainwashed that they believe these things. It goes to show that the US is not a civilized nation with rational, reasonable laws that make sense in any sense of the word.
Waves hand.
I believe downloading infringing material should be punishable.
I also believe that the current penalties are absurd and way out of proportion with the offense.
And, just for the hell of it, I also think current RIAA anti-piracy efforts are counter productive and they should instead focus on delivering their content in ways that make infringement less appealing, rather than ramping up DRM and suing people.
But hey that's just me supporting the tyranny of the power elite.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Based on the article's writeup of the survey, the survey seems to suggest that everyone is "pirating", with the only difference being where they get their music from. As we'd expect, P2P users had larger libraries with a larger proportion of their library being made up of illicitly acquired music, but in raw numbers, they still purchased more than non-P2P users. Meanwhile, non-P2P users had smaller libraries and were found to be acquiring music through shady means nearly as much, with the distinction being that they were getting it from friends and family as opposed to from the Internet.
Long story short, P2P or not, people are pirating these days, but the P2P folks have a larger appetite for music, and that includes purchasing it in larger quantities. Nothing really earth-shattering for most of us, though hopefully it'll be a wakeup call to the RIAA and their kind.
Well, we can hope, at least.
This is STUPID... I can go over to Spotify for free this very second and listen to nearly anything my heart desires. Then when I hear something I just love, I listen to the whole album, and I find damn that's wonderful and I BUY IT because I want it in high fidelity. Or its a piece of rancid wombat feces and I flush it. I buy tremendously more music this way, try things I would never consider buying then go wow, that's not bad and a sale is made that wasn't ever gonna happen.
So the media moguls don't give a flying fsck about selling content. They care about controlling access and creating artificial scarcity so they can bleed the public. That is all, there is no sane argument to the contrary, no meaningful defense, no "But, what about..." There are only two futures, the Spotifys will inherit the earth or the current Media Moguls will legislate free (as in liberty) access into oblivion.
Converting to digital at CD standard loses nothing you can hear. The frequency range covers all of human hearing, and the quantitisation noise is too small to notice on a properly normalised track. What you hear isn't anything inherent to the CD medium: It's just that the preferred style of mixing has changed in the intervening years, something commonly referred to as the 'loudness wars,' as labels seek to make the music stand out more in a public setting by increasing the average volume at the expense of dynamic range.
With MP3s, you get as good as you allocate bits for. 64kbit music is going to sound like rubbish, but you'd need superhuman hearing to notice anything changed at 384kbit. Better, newer codecs can easily match that quality at a lower bitrate - MP3 is quite dated now, technologically. It achieved such dominance while it was the best around that when better codecs came along it was too entrenched to displace.
And if the co-op had worked with the pirated version? Would you had still purchased the legit copy?