P2P Downloaders Buy More Music
Another study revealing the obvious: downloads are what TV is to DVD: a free teaser that actually increases sales in the long run. This one from the Canadian government:
• When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was “a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. […] The study estimates that 12 additional P2P downloads per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.
• When viewed in the aggreggate (ie. the entire Canadian population) […] we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.”
Why? Simple: people who download love music, and they will buy CDs for artists who make a real effort in making the object appealing (the only context in which it makes sense, because in an iPod world a CD is an obstacle to my wish to listen to my music), reward their favorite bands with “donations” (I bought CDs I had downloaded a large number of times) and gifts to others. A tune is a teaser, and a teaser is an occasion to get in touch. In our economy of attention this is all that matters. Music has a bright future. It simply needs to change.
December 20th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I wrote a comment earlier today on that topic :
http://vibrationsmusic.com/2007/12/20/niggytardust/#comment-690
For those who don’t read French, I basically said that I paid $5 to get The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! because:
- I don’t care about CDs
- it took me 10 sec with Paypal and it’s cheap
- I got the music in FLAC and the booklet in pdf
- and of course, I like Saul Williams and Trent Reznor
You could also get the medium quality mp3 for free.