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Study: Piracy Doesn't Harm Digital Media Sales
r5r5 writes "European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies has published a study which concludes that the impact of piracy on the legal sale of music is virtually nonexistent or even slightly positive. The study's results suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute for legal digital music and that a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchase websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (but still small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting a complementary relationship between these two modes of music consumption. According to the results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites leads to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchase websites."
It's worth noting that this study only measured the effect of piracy on online purchases, not on revenue from physical formats.
... as I recall.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Too bad EA didn't get the memo in time.
the recording industries will simply stick their fingers in their ears whilst singing "nanananananana"
. .
Correlation does not imply causation.
I'm not defending MAFIAA in any way, but just want to point out, that the study was conducted under circumstances when file sharing is illegal.
If it becomes legal, it may very well impact the sales in a negative way. Bottom line: interesting study, no practical applications.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
This is known to anyone with at least very simple critical thinking skills -- including big media. Funding a study on it may have been necessary to illustrate just how full of shit RIAA and other groups are, but the results are hardly surprising.
Also: physical media is dead. Again, anyone with a modicum of common sense knows this.
That illegal activities outnumber legal ones by about a factor of 500 to 1?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
shameless integration with the goatse paradigm shift
a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchase websites
uh oh, cue the correlation/causation nazis. ok, i'll go first. just cuz thy measured a 10% increase in pirate clicks and an 0.2% increase in legal purchase clicks doesn't mean there is a connection. Heck, perhaps if there had been fewer pirate clicks then there would have been more legal clicks! Also, what the heck is a click? shouldnt the metric be downloads or purchases?
nanananananana
BATMAN!!!
Didn't you forget Katamari Damacy, or Hey Jude, or Hey Hey Goodbye??
Don't spread the MAFIAA's FUD for them. File sharing is already legal. "File sharing" and "copyright infringement" are not the same thing.
Indeed. And there is a lot of music available which is either in the Public Domain, or under one of the Creative Commons licenses. For instance, excellent recent recordings of classical music were released as 320kbps MP3 and as lossless tracks, and these are explicitly in the Public Domain. Lots more (typically electronic & rock & metal & house, etc.) can be found at the Netlabels collections. MusOpen typically has classical music, and also has some PD or CC sheet music.
Share away, with these files. Upload, download, give away, stream, sell, whatever. And quite legally. Just about the only thing you can't do with Public Domain stuff is claim that you own the copyright, or that you act on behalf of the copyright owner. Either copyright has expired, or it was never copyrighted to begin with.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-wwqW37-gg
I used to get A's in mathematics... What happened?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Music sales may be continuing, but the difference is that people tend to buy bands like Justin Bieber or other pop stuff pushed by the record labels.
In the 1990s, before piracy, one could do well as an independent band, or have a good chance at getting signed and making it big. Back then, if you were good, you had a chance of making it big. Trent Reznor is a good example.
Fast forward to now. Music as a way of making income is dead, just like textiles and meat-packing. You cannot live off of CD sales, nor make money gigging unless you have an established band. Do you hear any new acts on the radio these days? Nope. It doesn't matter how good you are. The only way a record label will look at you is how good an actor/entertainer you are. Not a musician. They want people to -act- like they have a band and sing their already-written songs.
Combine this with the fact that decent musical instruments like DAWs and high-end keyboards like Korg's OASYS and Kurzweil's offerings are history, and essentially, music is dead.
The pirates won; however, there just isn't anything new and good anymore. There won't be another Nine Inch Nails, or other new acts that create genres. The future consists of boy bands and predigested American Idol claptrap.
I'm not for record companies... quite the opposite in fact: I think they are getting their karmic just dues for their disgusting behaviour of this oligarchy over many decades.
However, if you're going to do science it's important to get it right, and this study's conclusions are just plain wrong.
What they are measuring is that when something is more popular, more people pirate it *and* more people buy it. This does not mean that more piracy causes more purchases or vice versa. The connection between the two is the popularity of the music.
In order to show what this study and/or article are trying to show -- that piracy does not harm legitimate sales -- they would need to look at two groups of people: one of which is able to partake in piracy and one of whom is not (easier said than done), and then compare which group has more sales. If the sales in the piracy-able group are not less than the piracy-unable group, then you can conclude that piracy does not harm sales. But this is the only kind of experimental study which can show this correlation. I'm extremely curious about this, and would *love* to see what the actual, truthful answer is to that question!
Come on people help spread this story around no leechers!
This study has been done 100 times and it always reaches the same conclusion. These prosecutions are just serving as a minor revenue stream and a means to legitimize a set of rules that benefit the record companies far more than the consumers or the artists they are purporting to protect.
I can see "piracy" helping CD sales. Basically, it becomes a "try, before you buy" situation and someone wanting the information stored in a nicer way.
I don't see how it helps legal digital sales. If someone pirated X, they already have X, so why would they buy it?
Is it the case that once having pirated X, they buy X+1, not being able to find X+1 on the pirate sites?
And actually, we *have* seen music sales decline dramatically in both number and dollar value over the past decade+, so that in itself is evidence pointing in the direction that piracy does harm music sales...
-- same AC
A bit off-topic, but I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation during my lunch break, and I caught the Samaritan Snare episode, in which some aliens capture a Federation phaser and then proceed to replicate copies of it. Seeing that, I was immediately reminded of all this stuff regarding intellectual property, and it made me wonder: how in the world could a culture like ours survive in a world where even physical goods can be replicated without harm to the original creator of the product? When it's possible to create physical copies of goods as easy as it is to make digital copies now, what then?
All I know is, we need to get our stuff together so we'll be ready.
It started off with a copyright disclaimer saying "Piracy is not a victimless crime".
It got me thinking, yes I feel for the 1% affected by piracy because instead of making $1.4 billion they will only make $1.2 billion this year.
Most of us just cannot relate to the impact losing $200 million has on your life and so we should do more to prevent online piracy and not steal content ourselves.
I for one will no longer steal content because I am such an asshole for taking profit away from the 1%. They have mouths to feed with caviar, yachts to fuel, and dreams to realize, just like the rest of us.
Please, don't make a 1%'er cry by stealing their content.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I browsed the PDF. The study authors conflate legal downloading/streaming with purchases, i.e. if someone who has been illegal downloading music also happens to download free MP3 files from a community or independent band's website, that person apparently counts as a "mixed legal/illegal" downloader in the study's estimation. That seems pretty irrelevant. Of course, what the record industry is claiming is that illegal downloaders are less likely to legally buy music, particularly for those songs that they've already illegally downloaded!
People here seem to forget that the record industry has substantial developmental expenses in establish the international brand of these "household name" artists, including when factoring in the large proportion of duds and dropouts; it's not about pressing a CD for 80 cents a disk or whatever. That's why bands are often introduced as "[major record label] recording artists" at their gigs - it helps validate their worth to the audience.
Everyone understands that it's wrong when a commercial outfit pirates and sells music or films for their own profit. Only they themselves would object to it being illegal.
But non-commercial media sharing is in a very different category to that. The sharing that kids do on the Internet is just today's counterpart to what we used to do as kids back in the day, copy our records onto cassette tape for our friends, and it's certainly not criminal activity.
It was free promotion back then, and it's free promotion now when done on the Internet too. The labels should be overjoyed that promotion is being done for them, for free. Once fans become fans, they will end up buying the official versions too, because that's what fans do. But without the free initial exposure, they won't become fans in the first place.
Yeah. Their data does not support their conclusions.
First, note that their conclusion was that there is "essentially zero" correlation between illegal downloads and legal downloads. The correlation they found (for every 100 people who illegally download, 2 of them will go on to legally download the music) is insignificant (and "essentially zero" is their phrase, not mine.)
What they don't measure, though, is what would have been purchased if pirate downloads had not been available. They do say, however, that 20% of the people who clicked on pirate download sites never went to legal download sites, not ever once. If even one in ten of these people would have bought a legal download if they couldn't get the illegal one, that would wash out their 0.2 percent positive correlation entirely, not even thinking about the remaining 80% who sometimes looked at legal sites but ended up downloading from pirate sites. What fraction would have bought music legally if pirate downloads weren't available? I don't know-- but neither do they.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If a 10% increase in piracy activity correlates with a 0.2% increase in legal activity then we can estimate that a dollar of stolen media corresponds to $0.02 in lost revenue. If the RIAA came after me for 100 pirated songs, I'd be happy to settle the lawsuit for $2.
That is kind of like saying... "Shoplifting does not impact overall volume from Walmart". Its still theft people!!! Now I'm not saying I never download pirated material, but at least I'm honest with myself in saying that it is still theft. It doesn't matter that it doesn't affect sales. Its still theft.
Right. It's all a wash.
So now can we please just stop all the nonsense and have the RIAA leave people alone?
You are welcome on my lawn.
http://youtu.be/0Qkyt1wXNlI
What they don't measure, though, is what would have been purchased if pirate downloads had not been available.
I propose we should establish another world, identical to ours, as a control group. "What if" questions are difficult to measure.
This has been proven over and over and over again in all manner of ways and all manner of areas.
People believe, for example, that homosexuality is somehow learned and that homosexual parents will make gay children. Provably false all over the place. People continue to believe that being cold gives you a cold. This is also provably false and no one ever questions how one gets a cold in the summer time. It's like apples can hit them on the head all day long and they'll NEVER get that apple come from trees because they won't look up!
So the **AA groups believe that people don't buy when they can infringe. That seems logical on the surface, but reality is different.
Give people an efficient and reliable way to download things legally, and they WILL pay for it... but it has to be what they want in the way they want it. FORGET about lacing the video streams with commercial ads like on TV. (But they'll do that anyway... they always do.)
Belief trumps fact all day long. The only way to trump belief is to wait for the believers to die....and hope they don't teach their beliefs to others.
you know why people don't even bother anymore to try buying stuff anymore?
Because the "pirate" download is easier, sometimes faster, and, especially in the case of videos, earlier and better (meaning without all these traillers, fbi screens on the beginning etc).
Besides, the industry only moved their slow butts for two reasons: this piracy they speak of and apple. If they could, they would be selling nicki minaj crap por 30 dollars each song.
Who cares about physical formats except for half a dozen music nerds who wants the "experience" of a physical object? It's pretty obvious that the younger generations just want to hear their music, not accumulate dust.
Car moves too far from your home without you in it - it goes BOOM!
You don't need to worry about police or insurance either.
Mine's packaging is covered in Arabic so it all looks like a terrorist car bomb gone bad.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The sociopaths in suits are too brazen, too stubborn, too consumed with power, wealth and political connections to care what it says in "some study" that they'll snidely dismiss.
It doesn't matter if they're factually proven wrong, these sociopaths have continually demonstrated that they are beyond reason.
When they start losing money because artists are sick of their bullshit? Must be piracy.
Funding through Kick Starter? Yup, piracy.
Alternative distribution methods that earnestly attempt to legitimatize? Piracy.
Licensing with CC or just plain public domain instead? Piracy.
These rabid dogs are beyond curing and can only be PUT DOWN.
That may be true when it comes to games, what with the invasive DRM that publishers seem to favor these days. However, it is most certainly not true with music.
In fact, buying music through Amazon or itunes is much easier. With torrents, you have to worry about seeders - not an issue if your tastes are mainstream and current, but it can be a big problem if you're looking for anything else.
Betas are told to think that government is 'reasonable' and will; act on good advice, if it is available. Nothing could be further from reality.
Those in ultimate charge have 'agendas'. These agendas have nothing to do with the good of the sheeple (Rupert Murdoch's official corporate Christmas cards always portray him, and fellow media barons as 'foxes' and the targets of their 'news' broadcasts as 'sheep'- go google if you don't believe me).
Take piracy on the Internet. Obviously those whose IP is distributed without permission will bear a grudge. However, the censorship framework that is supported by the courts has NOTHING to do with piracy, and everything to do with 'slippery slope' political power-plays.
In Britain, Ireland and other nations, so-called 'cyber bulling' was a constant theme of propaganda broadcasts from the likes of Murdoch and the BBC. On the back of such 'public' concerns, the elites were able to pass new laws restricting the freedom of speech of ordinary people. Now, people who write 'rude' criticism of even the most senior politicians in Ireland or Britain are subject to arrest and prosecution under 'harassment and distress' laws. A women who accused Cameron (Blair's dingle-berry mock PM) of having "blood on his hands" was found guilty of a serious offense (for using these words alone). A man in Ireland who tweeted a critical statement about a politician named 'Rabbett' was arrested for referring to the guy as 'Rabbit' in his post.
Middle East and Asian regimes with vile dictators friendly to Blair and Obama have been arresting thousands of their citizens simply because these people posted criticism of their national regimes online. In each case, these arrests (and convictions) were justified by referring to Britain's 'anti-cyber-bullying' laws.
In the UK, people can now petition the courts to have websites closed down, if these websites 'mostly' concern themselves with DISCUSSION (not hosting) of pirate material. Tony Blair is crafting new laws where ALL UK citizens who express ANY form of opinion online are subject to the most draconian press regulation laws (and penalties) ever seen in the History of the democratic West. Well, there is one exception- if you post to a non-moderated website where you are the ONLY author, you are covered instead by the 'malicious communication bill', which makes it an actual crime to say something like "the British Army are a bunch of murderous war criminals", or "Cameron has blood on his hands".
After Blair activates this new legal power, anyone can petition the court to shut down ANY web-site that allows unregulated opinions that partially originate from the UK. If the site is hosted outside the UK, it will be added to the mandatory IP blocking scheme that is used by most ISPs in the UK.
If you want to know just how this will play out, go research the excuse the British government used to close down PressTV across Europe.
The draconian actions over online piracy (like the mega-fines recently authorised by the US Supreme Court) are merely a means to an end. And we have seen the 'end' in the UK ever since the monster Tony Blair rose to power.
Here's a final example about how this plays, and why. A young British kid, with anti-war beliefs, places a video of a poppy burning online. The end result is that the British government forces him to make pro-war propaganda videos where he has to praise the genocidal butchery in Afghanistan. As a kid, I was subject to endless dramatic propaganda about why the Soviet and Nazi systems were so evil. Show trials, and people forced to make public retractions of their political beliefs were amongst the worst abuses. Today, everything that was rotten in East Germany in some old episode of 'The Saint' is common practice in the UK. Of course, the vile regime in East Germany was supported by a large minority of the population- the exact same type of depravities that will now ensure my post is hidden with '-1'.
Well could you prove that without something like the RIAA that there wouldn't be a 100% illegal download result?
There is evidence that if illegal downloading were to hit the 100% mark then there would be no music made. (well no professional music made) There would be no way to fund it.
What the RIAA is trying to do is create an artificial limit on the supply of copyrighted material. Without the artificial limit, the market for music becomes flooded with practically unlimited supply, which would drive the price down to the illegal download price of nothing. So what the RIAA is trying to combat is the breaking of the current economic model. Which is already broken by the existence of the technology to freely and unlimitedly copy copyrighted digital material.
Couldn't be lower discretionary purchases in a recession. No, must be pirates. Note, the rise of the initial piracy, Napster era, saw an increase in spending, up until the recession.
Learn to love Alaska
From what obviously might be a biased source:
http://www.stopmusictheft.com/music-sales-analysis
From another source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-sales-2011-2
Music sales climbing steadily until Napster, and then falling precipitously afterwards.
Note, I'm no fan of the music industry (musicians YES, the industry NO). And I loved Napster. But I just hate to see bad science. I want to know the truth, and it appears to me that the truth is likely: piracy has hurt the music industry... which totally deserved it for Behaving Badly.
The extra sales do not have to come from the same person who downloaded the track. If he liked it, he might have exposed his friends to it. If any of those pay for it, but would not have discovered the track otherwise, then the download would have increased sales. Think of it as free adverstising.
"There is evidence that if illegal downloading were to hit the 100% mark then there would be no music made. (well no professional music made) There would be no way to fund it."
That's such an awfully stupid comment. If no music was paid for due to 100% illegal downloading there'd be no professional music made - no shit, professional by definition requires payment. Professional is the key qualifier though, there'd still be music made, I know any number of people who have made their own bands for the sheer enjoyment of making music rather than any inherent interest in making a profit.
I'm not sure if you read a completely different paper or something, but what you say doesn't tally with what's said in the actual paper.
You said:
"I don't know-- but neither do they."
They said:
"All of these results suggest that the vast majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been legally purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them."
Maybe you should stick to calculus or whatever you do at NASA, obviously stats isn't your thing, because the explanations and summary data are all there in the paper.
It's not a substitute, it's a replacement.
What part of "the data doesn't support their conclusion" do you need me to repeat?
That is, indeed, what they said. However, the data does not support their conclusion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com