The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIAA) recently released a study of illegal filesharing and left some interesting findings in its report. For a breakdown and relevant links, check out Michael Geist’s blog post on the matter. For those suffering from link laziness, however, the most important finding is that only 25 percent of illegal filesharers buy less music as a result of their behavior. That means 75 percent either buy the same amount or more music.
I am sure the RIAA is singing “Blame Canada!” now.
odd that your reffering people to a blog, and not the actuall info, i started reading the reply by polara, and it seems the blog is being misleadingly selective about what it says. id expect more from a statistics guy who claims to need 3 sources to verify info.
to be fair though, i do agree that the survey was asking the wrong questions, the do have specific graph though that shows people who download illegally buy less cds. Which, if it has to do with trying before you buy, and deciding you dont like it i think thats very good for consumers. I remember buying cds when they were released and not liking them much. Now i only buy cds i know i like.
You can find the full report off that blog post. I referred people to the blog post so they could read a short version (the post) or a long version (the report).
Buying CDs is a poor measure for music purchases and, I think, is one way the music industry tries to make the piracy threat sound worse than it is. For example, let us assume no piracy existed and neither did the real threat which is competition from other entertainment forms (e.g., movies, video games, and the Internet). In such a world, CD sales would probably still decline because of some people see file-based audio files (i.e., music downloads) as a preferred format. Therefore, CDs are a terrible measure for sales.
If you examine the numbers on music downloads, then you’ll see that the revenue from such sales. I think Sony BMG numbers are at around 7 percent (although I could have the wrong company and be one or two percentage points off); that’s a significant amount.
Also, in reading releases from the music industry, they all either bury or do not include sales from digital music because it is not such a bad situation they are in.
The point is that they need to wake up and address (1) competition issues, as mentioned above, and (2) switching to a new distribution model that better incorporates the Internet.
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