Piracy Can Boost Digital Music Sales, Research Shows

[Batu69]

A new academic paper published by the Economics Department of Queen's University examines the link between BitTorrent downloads and music album sales. The study shows that depending on the circumstances, piracy can hurt sales or give it a boost through free promotion.

 

For more than a decade researchers have been looking into the effects of online music piracy on the revenues of the record industry, with mixed results.

By now it’s clear that there’s no universal positive or negative effect of piracy on sales. The results depend on the type of artist, music genre and media, among other variables.

 

A newly published study by Jonathan Lee, researcher at Queen’s University Department of Economics, sheds an interesting light on these differences and unravels another piece of the puzzle.

 

In a working paper titled Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing on Album Sales, he examined the effect of BitTorrent piracy on both digital and physical music sales.

 

The goal of the study is to find out whether piracy’s sales displacement (piracy hurts sales) or the promotion component (piracy boosts sales) has a stronger effect.

“In theory, piracy could crowd out legitimate sales by building file sharing capacity, but could also increase sales through word-of-mouth,” Lee explains.

 

Drawing on a data set of 250,000 albums and 4.8 million downloads from a popular private BitTorrent tracker, he found some interesting effects. The overall results show a modest negative impact on album sales, as music industry executives would expect.

 

“From the results, I conclude that file sharing activity has a statistically significant but economically modest negative effect on legitimate music sales,” Lee writes.

Interestingly, however, this negative result is largely driven by physical sales. For many artists, piracy actually boosts digital sales, presumably because it serves as free advertising.

 

“This relationship varies by medium: file sharing decreases sales of physical copies but boosts sales of digital ones for top-tier artists, suggesting that the word-of-mouth effect is most relevant for the digital market.”

 

In addition, the popularity of the artists is an important factor too. More popular artists do relatively well as the boost in digital album sales compensates for the loss on the physical side.

 

“Top-tier artists lose sales, but the loss is partially offset by an increase in digital sales and the overall effect is small,” Lee writes.

 

Links between piracy and sales across various artists tiers

 

For their part, artists who are somewhat popular actually benefit from piracy while lesser knows musicians are hurt the most. The latter may be explained by the fact that these artists simply aren’t good enough for people to buy their work.

 

“Mid-tier artists are helped slightly and bottom-tier artists are significantly hurt by file sharing, which could indicate that file sharing helps lesser-known artists only if they are actually talented,” Lee notes.

 

The study adds to the never-ending debate on the effect of piracy on sales. It’s a good illustration that file-sharing can have both a positive and a negative impact.

One of the downsides is that the data itself is relatively old, from 2008, and the music industry has changed a lot since then. This means that the results may have been different today.

 

Also, it’s worth noting that the download numbers come from a BitTorrent tracker that counts a relatively high share of music aficionados. They may also act differently than the general file-sharer.

 

That said, the paper offers a unique and unprecedented analysis of BitTorrent piracy on music sales. It clearly disputes the general argument that music piracy exclusively hurts album sales, and suggests that BitTorrent piracy can act as promotion under certain circumstances.

 

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[Pequi]

I've got over that phase when I'd buy a music CD because I liked the band or the song. Bought too much trash that way. So now I download the MP3s, listen to them, and if I really like them, THEN I buy it. If I don't, deletia. I have dozens of legally purchased CDs. Just looking at some of them makes me angry. Nice pretty wrappers, but rubbish inside.

[steven36]

18 minutes ago, Pequi said:

I've got over that phase when I'd buy a music CD because I liked the band or the song. Bought too much trash that way. So now I download the MP3s, listen to them, and if I really like them, THEN I buy it. If I don't, deletia. I have dozens of legally purchased CDs. Just looking at some of them makes me angry. Nice pretty wrappers, but rubbish inside.

In this day and age we can simply go to YouTube download songs we like and extract the audio   and even convert them to other formats . I stopped buying music back when they started suing artist for singing there own songs and i have a big box of CDs  I bought   and before CDs I bought tons of cassette tapes . but never no more id listen to the radio and deal with commercials before i buy anything from the RIAA

[Pequi]

3 minutes ago, steven36 said:

In this day and age we can simply go to YouTube download songs we like and extract the audio   and even convert them to other formats . I stopped buying music back when they started suing artist for sining there own songs and i have a big box of CDs  I bought   and before CDs I bought tons of cassette tapes . but never no more id listen to the radio and deal with commercials before i buy anything from the RIAA

I still buy stuff, but think "n" times before I do. The artist deserves his share, but I suspect political lobbies and bribes consume over 90% of what you pay.

Youtube stuff is usually quite low quality. It sometimes says 160 Kbps but if you drop it into Spek you might find it's a 96 Kbps that's been artificially "inflated".

 

Spek homepage

[steven36]

28 minutes ago, Pequi said:

I still buy stuff, but think "n" times before I do. The artist deserves his share, but I suspect political lobbies and bribes consume over 90% of what you pay.

Youtube stuff is usually quite low quality. It sometimes says 160 Kbps but if you drop it into Spek you might find it's a 96 Kbps that's been artificially "inflated".

 

Spek homepage

You can extract up to 254 Kbps aac m4a  from many YouTube songs using 3d YouTube downloader  witch is good as Itunes

But you can record up to 320 Kbps mp3  with stream ripper from internet raido . Now if you buy CDS  they can be ripped to pure Flac  so i would still buy CDS  and convert them to  itunes rips too 448 Kbps aac m4a   if i were going to buy music because most of what they sell are  not the high quality like  you get from a CD

 

Another way is  to extract music  is download the video in 1080p  and extract it with YAMB to mp4 and Remux it with Tac  to make m4a this the hard way 3d YouTube downloader is the easy way

 

 

 

 

[VileTouch]

if i like an artist enough to buy their albums, i might as well buy the whole discography (metallica, pink floyd, queen, u2, enigma, just to name a few). the fact that is is available for free online has nothing to do whether i choose to buy it or not. and i don't buy it to support them either, i buy it because i like it and i bloody want to!. no amount of pressure from labels would make me buy something i don't want to buy, and even when i download a torrent i would still buy the discs. because...again, it's not about being able to listen to a certain song, it's about owning a... token from your favorite artist, a little treasure... like the panties of OP's mom.

[steven36]

29 minutes ago, VileTouch said:

if i like an artist enough to buy their albums, i might as well buy the whole discography (metallica, pink floyd, queen, u2, enigma, just to name a few). the fact that is is available for free online has nothing to do whether i choose to buy it or not. and i don't buy it to support them either, i buy it because i like it and i bloody want to!. no amount of pressure from labels would make me buy something i don't want to buy, and even when i download a torrent i would still buy the discs. because...again, it's not about being able to listen to a certain song, it's about owning a... token from your favorite artist, a little treasure... like the panties of OP's mom.

I done bought all these groups  music once back in the 90s i supported  them .I see no need to buy  it over and over when no good music comes out much anymore  for my generation  ..LOL

 

I think them saying that piracy increases music sales  is a load of bull  , Just like them saying it hurts music sales is a load of bull  chances are people who are going to buy it is going to  buy it anyways  . Ans those of of us  that dont care  are not going buy it no matter what.  After all its free legally lots of places. 

 

One thing is for sure  Music piracy has been around since 8 tracks  on the black market . And every since the internet its got 10 times worse  and the only thing that slowed it down was give it away free  . No free  music = High piracy rates