Downloading music illegally does not harm the music industry – in some cases it even helps it – according to a new study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
The results have been published in a paper entitled ‘Digital
Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data’,
which can be found online. The study took a sample of some
16,000 Europeans and had as its main objective to find a link
between music piracy and subsequent visits to legal digital music
stores. It concludes that piracy can actually provide a boost to
music revenues online, irrespective of the genre, and that it
should not be viewed as a pressing issue by the industry at
all.
“It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed
illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been
purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to
them”, according researchers at The Institute for Prospective
Technological Studies, which is part of the EC Joint Research
Centre.
There has been a widely held belief that free and legal streaming
websites were another part of the problem, but they were also in
the scope of the study and likewise were found not to have a
detrimental effect on online music purchasing habits. “The
complementary effect of online streaming is found to be somewhat
larger, suggesting a stimulating effect of this activity on the
sales of digital music”, researchers concluded.
Those involved conducted the stuffy by first determining a person’s
interest in music. It was then a case of finding a spike in online
purchases and whether it followed a visit to a pirate website. The
results showed a positive link. The scientists claim that “if
this estimate is given a causal interpretation, it means that
clicks on legal purchase websites would have been 2 percent lower
in the absence of illegal downloading websites.”
Compared to those 2 per cent, a much larger 7 per cent increase was
found when correlating visits to legal streaming services with
subsequent visits to music purchasing websites and stores.
Although, admittedly, there can be a multitude of other factors
affecting consumer behavior, the researchers emphasize the fact
that at least no negative effects were witnessed on music revenues
in the course of the study. In fact, in Europe the relationship
between piracy and music sales has only been a positive one.
Hammering the point home, the researchers concluded that “taken
at face value, our findings indicate that digital music piracy does
not displace legal music purchases in digital format. This means
that although there is trespassing of private property rights,
there is unlikely to be much harm done on digital music
revenues”.
Although the researchers stated that they don’t wish to involve
themselves in a policy discussion, at least now, the growing number
of people opposed to increased government surveillance will have
some argument to fall back on, while, predictably, the anti-piracy
lobby is likely to feel threatened.
And this is already evident in the backlash from the international music industry body, the IFPI, who are quite critical of the study. A statement of theirs points to the fact that the body conducting the research was heavily relying on "conclusions based on approximations and estimates of music activity" and that transactions aren't studied in detail, providing a very limited scope of consumer behavior.