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Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.
Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We haven’t. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that there’s a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD.
Yesterday the music industry lobby group IFPI presented its 2009 figures, again putting the blame for decreased physical sales on file-sharers. Unfortunately, most mainstream media outlets simply reposted the IFPI press release and their flawed analysis. In general, no effort is made to actually balance out or check the message being sent out to millions of readers.
In their annual Digital Music Report, IFPI states that file-sharers are half as likely to buy physical CDs than the average music buyer. Although the report is about digital music, they carefully avoid saying anything about file-sharers and digital sales. That would actually show a completely different picture as we will explain below.
The music group made this statement based on an IFPI-commissioned study that was executed by Jupiter research. Although IFPI refused to share the entire research report with TorrentFreak, we can conclude the following from the two pages that were published online.
Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…
* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.
These figures (as reported by the music industry) clearly show that file-sharers buy more digital music than the average music buyer. In fact, the group that makes up the music buyers category actually includes the buying file-sharers, so the difference between music sharers and non-sharing music buyers would be even more pronounced.
How can this be true and why was there no mention of this in the Digital Music Report? They must be spending less on digital music then, right? But again, this is not the case at all. On average, file-sharers actually spend more than non-sharing music buyers. At least that’s what Mark Mulligan, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research who conducted the study for IFPI told us.
Source
I think the reason most pirates eventually buy music is because they like the song and album which they listen to, so they buy it on iTunes, Amazon, or at a physical store.
I bet Game, Movie, and Video pirated also eventually buy their favourite games, movies, and video if they like what they play or saw.
Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We haven’t. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that there’s a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD.
Yesterday the music industry lobby group IFPI presented its 2009 figures, again putting the blame for decreased physical sales on file-sharers. Unfortunately, most mainstream media outlets simply reposted the IFPI press release and their flawed analysis. In general, no effort is made to actually balance out or check the message being sent out to millions of readers.
In their annual Digital Music Report, IFPI states that file-sharers are half as likely to buy physical CDs than the average music buyer. Although the report is about digital music, they carefully avoid saying anything about file-sharers and digital sales. That would actually show a completely different picture as we will explain below.
The music group made this statement based on an IFPI-commissioned study that was executed by Jupiter research. Although IFPI refused to share the entire research report with TorrentFreak, we can conclude the following from the two pages that were published online.
Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…
* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.
These figures (as reported by the music industry) clearly show that file-sharers buy more digital music than the average music buyer. In fact, the group that makes up the music buyers category actually includes the buying file-sharers, so the difference between music sharers and non-sharing music buyers would be even more pronounced.
How can this be true and why was there no mention of this in the Digital Music Report? They must be spending less on digital music then, right? But again, this is not the case at all. On average, file-sharers actually spend more than non-sharing music buyers. At least that’s what Mark Mulligan, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research who conducted the study for IFPI told us.
Source
I think the reason most pirates eventually buy music is because they like the song and album which they listen to, so they buy it on iTunes, Amazon, or at a physical store.
I bet Game, Movie, and Video pirated also eventually buy their favourite games, movies, and video if they like what they play or saw.
