Study: File-Sharing Increases Music Sales

Source:torrentfreak

This comes after both Canadian and Swedish studies have filed similar findings.


It seems to me that all studies not done by either the MPAA or the RIAA show that file-sharing has little to no negative effect on the recording industry and often times increases sales and profit. Why they haven't caught on, I've no idea.

 

People have been saying this same thing for years. Unfortunately, the RIAA, MPAA and other organizations in charge of these things are never going to concede to the fact that file-sharing helps album sales. They'll also never concede to the fact that music is way too fucking expensive anyway. In no way, shape or form should anyone ever pay more than, say, $12 for an album, unless it's a box set and has a million songs on it.

 

You don't just pick a car off of the lot and buy it. You have to test-drive.

 

I'm really curious as to how they actually concluded this.

I'm not a fan of the RIAA or MPAA, but the whole "Sharing makes people spend more!" argument always sounded like total bullshit to me. I'm totally behind the idea that leaking and torrents aren't going to kill an album people already wanted, Eminem and Adele are proof enough of that, but the argument that file sharing was really a super convenient preview mechanism is farfetched as hell.

 

Hang on. Let me go get my surprised face.

 

The industry isn't going to just give up an old model that raked in boatloads of money for a new, realistic model that rakes in a mediocre amount of money. Of course they're going to deny that piracy has any benefit at all, especially when there are still congressmen to lobby and change the laws to give them an edge.

It would be beneficial to read the studies, then.

You're also oversimplifying the argument. Anyone who says piracy has no ill effects is talking out of their ass, and I really doubt anyone actually holds that position besides strawmen. Usually it's the RIAA and MPAA are doing the ass-talking with their exaggerations on how bad it is, but no doubt, the digitization of music is a game changer.

 

Reading, finding not a thing about any "increase" in sales. That it's not a deathblow, of course, but an increase I'm seeing no evidence for.

And I don't exactly see how that's a strawman argument, either, since the 4 posts before mine had said exactly that.

 

Granted, I haven't read ALL the studies, but I wrote a similar ten page paper to this last year. And while I was certainly "pro file-sharing," the idea that "file-sharing increases music sales" is a bit misleading on the surface.


Mark said it best, file-sharing increases *promotion* of music. It allows more people to hear more stuff. But the title of this thread is very oversimplified. There is not more music being purchased today than there was before file-sharing was prominent, that's the bottom line.

The problem then becomes the music industry. They think they can take on the internet and win, and I really don't think they can. Quite frankly, it would be a lot easier to embrace file-sharing than to fight it. That's their biggest problem. But claiming file-sharing hurts music sales isn't wrong.

 

This is old, but it's still hilarious. Lol RIAA.

RIAA Thinks LimeWire Owes $75 Trillion in Damages


And there is no way to know if pirating hurts music sales. We don't know what sales would have been like without pirating. Sales could have gone down regardless.

 

That's kind of a silly way to think. That's like saying "Your Honor, it doesn't matter that the defendant may have killed the victim. Who's to say they wouldn't have died a different death a week later?" You can't honestly expect the music industry to think that way.

 

It's a somewhat smart way to go. I stopped buying records without listening to them a long while ago (unless it's Linkin Park or The Rasmus). It also gives the artist the opportunity to reach a wider audience and at some point you could say it does increase sale, I mean, being on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, how could I end up buying a CD from a Greek artist? (I have to admit I'm not a frequent case) If it wasn't for online sharing I wouldn't have discovered him at all and I wouldn't have splashed the cash to actually buy his album legally.

There are many artists whose music is hard for reach for some fans, and if they get lucky, some will buy their stuff legally. However there will always be people who download stuff without the intention of spending a penny on it later.

 

That's not a good comparison.

But I'm not talking from a legality standpoint. Realistically, there's no way to determine whether pirating hurt music sales or not. It's just all speculation. Yes, you can prove sales went down, but you can't attribute it to any variable that was around when the decrease in sales was happening. It could be pirating. It could be the falling economy. It could be worse music being made. It could be people simply not caring about music as much. It could be a lot of things. For all we know, pirating could be greatly increasing music sales compared to a world without pirating. There's no way to know unless we went back in time and completely prevented it.

 

I understand. But the music industry is only interested in the legal standpoint.

Right, because correlation does not equal causation. But with that being said, assuming that file-sharing DID lead to the major decline in music sales over the past decade, is a very safe assumption to make.

 

I don't think it's a very safe assumption. It could go either way, really. Without pirating, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, etc., I find it hard to believe music sales in the last 10 years would have been better. I'd imagine if you took those things away now sales would drop astronomically. But I don't know. Maybe people would have kept listening to the radio and watching MTV and record sales would have kept on soaring if those things were never invented.

 

I understand the whole "Well, I found out through ____ through file sharing and started buying their stuff, therefore file sharing = sales!" thing, but it's like nobody realizes the whole "Buy it, burn it, leave it in your car/on ripped to iTunes and forget about where it came from, just that you have it" dynamic. Yeah, people can and routinely do discover new bands through file sharing, but I find the whole "Well of course they're going to then spend the money after the fact!" thing unreasonably optimistic, especially since I guarantee everyone here has friends that have burned and been satisfied with CDs without ever bothering to then buy a physical copy or redownload it through iTunes or some other for profit mechanism. And probably themselves got a couple of albums without paying and never felt compelled to, either.

Done properly a decade ago, file sharing, p2p, all this shit could have been a monumental money magnet for the labels and the bands. It isn't, though, and while nobody's going to claim that it doesn't have a ton of benefits and that the labels don't grossly overreact to the practice, it's incredibly naive to assume that the entire thing was actually entirely beneficial to everyone involved.

 

Consumers don't cater to the producer, though. It's their job, literally, to cater to the consumer. We're not going to stop p2p and file sharing. If they want more of our money, they have to figure out a way to better meet our demands. Right now, there's virtually a no-risk, free way of getting all of the music and TV shows/movies we want and 99% of the software we want. There's plenty of business models that would make them more money than they are now. That's how markets work. Adapt or die. If they aren't brainstorming for new ideas now, or don't start soon, somebody else will come around and make bank on our demands. All these lawsuits are costing them tons of money and aren't doing any good. Not to mention all the money they are dumping to the government to try to regulate the internet.

 

RIAA wonders why sales are down...

Did they even bother watching the Billboard Music Awards last night?

No wonder LP got a standing ovation, because compared to everything else that took the stage it wasn't a bunch of label pushed mediocre top 40 radio garbage.