Study: P2P thieves buy more music
While the music industry desperately searches for ways to stem the tide of piracy that threatens to engulf it, new data from the BI Norwegian School of Management suggests that music pirates actually buy more music than others. A lot more.
When it comes to P2P, it seems that those who wave the pirate flag are the most click-happy on services like the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. BI said that those who said they download illegal music for "free" bought 10 times as much legal music as those who never download music illegally.
How can this be explained?
I've written before that piracy is a great way to help the music industry gauge the tastes of its prospective customers and that there are a host of new adoption-based business models lurking in this rampant piracy.
But these perhaps explain solutions to the piracy problem. They don't explain why music thieves may purchase more music than others do.
One way to explain it is simply to acknowledge that piracy may precede purchase. People may be downloading songs in anticipation of buying those worth their 99 cents. In this way, most of the downloaded songs will never be followed by a click-to-purchase.
For me, the frequency of downloading songs off peer-to-peer service LimeWire has trickled to a halt over the years as Apple's iTunes library has expanded. At 99 cents, I can afford to squander money on songs that I may delete a few days later. But I'd prefer to listen to a full song before I buy it, if that were an option.
Yes, I know I can use services like Pandora and Last.fm (operated by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive), and, yes, I know that iTunes and Amazon.com offer brief preview clips, but this latter option is almost never a great way to evaluate music. It's too brief.
I doubt that many people deliberately want to steal music. They simply don't want to buy in inconvenient formats (who wants a physical CD?), or they don't want to pay for casual listening to music that they really don't like enough to buy. So the download becomes the equivalent of listening to music over the radio.
There are ways to monetize this casual interest, as I link to above. But the music industry is going to have to experiment to discover them. Ultimately, it's going to have to grapple with piracy as an opportunity, not a threat.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
My point is, is that companies are far too reactionary about piracy, and often times piracy leads customers to pay for products and services they otherwise would not have gotten in the first place. I wasn't going to study design before I got Photoshop, but it was my interaction with the tool that allowed me to extend my relationship with adobe.
Another misunderstanding that this article contains is the fact that no one wants to buy CDs anymore. Actually, I do! There is nothing like buying an album or a record (if I can find one) and listening to it for the very first time while flipping through the lyrics that come with the CD. I love my CD collection. I do not purchase or download music online. I feel that downloading music is killing what we love ? the music itself. I don?t really know anyone who buys music these days. I actually have noticed that every time I go to best buy to pick up a new CD, there are less and less CDs available. It saddens me that some of my favorite bands have given up on selling their music because it will just be illegally downloaded.
I think that the freedom of the internet has somewhat handicapped certain industries. It makes many things free that should be paid for. I am a strong believer that if someone works to create a product, they should be rewarded with a profit, so long as the product is worthwhile. Another negative thing about file-sharing programs such as Limewire is that they not only share the good files, but also the bad ones. Just last year, my computer died because I intercepted a virus through illegal downloading. As you can see, it?s not a good idea technologically, ethically, or economically. I stopped stealing music a long time ago, and I hope that other people can do it to. If you like it, it?s worth your money. Kapish?
"I think that the freedom of the internet has somewhat handicapped certain industries. It makes many things free that should be paid for. I am a strong believer that if someone works to create a product, they should be rewarded with a profit, so long as the product is worthwhile"
Followed up by:
"Just last year, my computer died because I intercepted a virus through illegal downloading"
As for physical CD's...
Personally I like having a physical copy of what I buy. The only reason that I buy music online is that it is usually far cheaper than buying the CD. In addition, every song I own goes on a CD in case of computer malfunction or something similar (as iTunes won't allow second downloads of purchased songs. <- [This is one of the big things that I love about the Zune Marketplace over the iTunes store.]).
Sure all of this is just my word (I suppose I could post the receipt from Amazon) but it shows that it does work. I have bought several CDs or downloads from Amazon/iTunes after a solid listen.
Oh yea, and I didn't need a torrent file at any point of the way.
And if you don't like it, you feel that you just got robbed?
Spend more money on anti-piracy (software type) and win a free bailout if you fail! *wink*
My contribution has been 62 download albums from Amazon and 45 from iTunes. 80% of these purchases would have not have happened if I hadn't received the full album from an artist to get to know and enjoy them.
Our group takes seriously the livelihood of our artists - we love them and we want them to benefit so they are able to bring us their gifts. We support them beyond our group via word of mouth and when they are in town, we catch their gigs (thanks for coming to Seattle - Lucinda, Ziggy, Brandi, Toots, Blues Traveler, Willie, Kenny Wayne, Kelly Richey, and many others?.)
some people always pay, some people sometimes pay, some people never pay. why doesn't the industry focus it's time and money on the people who do pay, rather than wasting time and money on those that don't?
you can't force someone to pay you, not when your products can be duplicated and distributed effortlessly, and the DRM fiasco has demonstrated time and time again that you cannot stop the copying of digital media. so why bother with it? why waste so much time and money fighting the inevitable?
These musicians are greedy suckers. Created just a few songs and want to feed for generations to come? That's plain greed. Simple and clear.
Do you know how much work and money has to go in to creating a CD or a film? How many people work for months to put it together?
Seriously?!
They all agree...they don't mind paying for music, but it just doesn't make sense to pay for so much of it.
I think the main reason for piracy, is that music is too expensive.
How much is an album, maybe $15 these days. A person deeply into music will want at minimum a hundred of albums and probably desire thousands. This adds up into a huge price that college students and school kids can't afford, which I think is where most piracy comes from. So piracy is the only option they can take.
The solution would be a DRM-free subscription service. With a generous amount of songs per month to make it competitive with piracy.
On the note about Amazon, I recently came across an interesting table mentioned by PC World. It details the discounts on Amazon at http://www.uberi.com
Maybe others will find it useful too (or perhaps mildly amusing)...
Flood the internet with free, lo-fi, drm-limiting (not for sale only free redistribution) files, and people will buy the hifi ones once they know which songs they really want.
the industry needs to give up on the idea of selling downloads. it's never going to work. you can't get the food coloring out of the pool water now that it's been put in.
the industry should instead give all digital media away for free and use the marketing data gathered from those free and legal downloads to sell non-digital merchandise like posters, tshirts, books, and the like. this includes events with the performers (concerts, parties, etc.). that is the stuff that dedicated fans will buy, not bits.
The RIAA are the thieves. They allow the musicians only pennies on the dollar on a CD sale AFTER they take back the recording and marketing costs. If that isn't theft, what is?
The RIAA is obsolete.
"BI said that those who said they download illegal music for "free" bought 10 times as much legal music as those who never download music illegally." You must compare those who download on peer to peer but still purchase online music to those who do not use peer to peer but purchase on line music. Of course people who use a computer will download anything more then those of the general public. Such a waste of an article!
- by dracoaffectus April 21, 2009 4:04 PM PDT
- I just had an idea, I'm not sure if it's necessarily a good idea...but it's an idea.
- Reply to this comment
-
-
- by drohnwerks April 22, 2009 1:02 AM PDT
- emusic already does this, slightly more expensive, but you get to keep the music... I think Rhapsody does it also, but I can't get that in the UK...
-
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (37 Comments)Why can't we have a music download service that is similar to Netflix? I mean, pay a monthly fee in order to keep a certain amount of music on your computer/mp3 player, if you want to get new songs, you have to give up old songs, so you'd always have a maximum # of songs, based on how much you pay. But this way you'd be free to download and delete songs for a reasonable price. I thought of this because I don't really bother keeping tons of music on my iPod, it usually has around 200 songs (even though my nano could hold at least 100 more). I would be willing to pay say... $5/month to have those 200 songs legally, if I were free to change the songs at will. I know there would be problems with people transferring their mp3 files to a different folder on their computer, and this would really cheat the system...but the same could be said about DVDs from Netflix and that problem doesn't seem to have effected Netflix too badly. I'm basically talking about a music rental service.
The way I see it, I have no reason to keep thousands, or even hundreds, of songs on my computer since I'm not going to listen to most of them, there's really only 100-200 that I would actually listen to. If a service let me pay a reasonable monthly fee to keep that many songs, and gave me the ability to swap out my songs for new ones freely, I'd definitely pay up.
Like I said...I don't know if it's a good idea, I'm just throwing it out there...