BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales-study-finds-120517/

by mrsebastian • 14 years ago

71 35 14 years ago

jstanley• 14 years ago

I find it more likely that good songs are both pirated more and bought more, rather than that the piracy increases the sales. Correlation, not causation.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

From the paper, which apparently nobody here actually bothered to skim:

> To study this phenomenon, I must overcome the fact that ﬁle sharing is endogenous in its determination of an album’s sales because an album that is popular in ﬁle-sharing networks will also be popular in retail markets. This occurs because ﬁle-sharing and retail demand are both driven by unobserved album quality. To address this endogeneity, I exploit exogenous variation inhow widely available an album was prior to its oﬃcial release date. An album’s ease of availability in ﬁle-sharing networks is positively correlated with the number of times that it is downloaded because availability determines the supply of the album in ﬁle-sharing networks. Availability is not independently correlated with an album’s popularity in retail markets because pre-release ﬁlesharing is driven by leaks, which are “crimes of opportunity” that occur at some stage of the production or album marketing process (Williams, 2009).

Mahh• 14 years ago

This reads like a post that exists just so that people pirating music can give themselves an excuse to keep doing so.

I'd be interested in seeing the process that Hammond took to establish this relationship between pre release piracy and album sales. It says causal, but it seems like you can't truly control for all of the variables when you're dealing with phenomena in society.

One thing that sort of makes me itch is that the reported benefit of a one month in advance leak is a value rather than a ratio. It seems like a figure like that lets weight ruin the measure -- an album that was popular anyway will weight heavily when it comes down to the expected value.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

Two problems I see with this are that he only uses one source for pirate figures - a private tracker specializing in sharing music - and focuses on pre-release leaks. These would both imply a link with music fans and not the piracy market as a whole.

mohsen2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about this study, but there are cases where 'illegal' downloads have actually helped the producer of the product have better sales. When Radiohead came out Kid A the reviews considered the album "Just Awful"[1]. And I think that they never had any music videos or singles for the album, but a leak before the official release of the album gave people a chance to give the album a real shot. They liked it and they bought it. Kid A was Radioheads first release that became number one in the US and it also went platinum in the UK.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,,371289,00.h...

res0nat0r3• 14 years ago

The reason it went number one is because it was a new album from Radiohead. Also people wouldn't have given it a real shot after the official release date?

Rudism• 14 years ago

I sometimes wonder if this whole thing isn't sort of a catch-22 for the record labels. It seems somewhat intuitive that greater piracy/sharing would lead to more exposure and more sales, but how many of those sales are driven by people who use file sharing as a means of music discovery, then purchase their favorites out of guilt? If the record labels acquiesce and begin to embrace file sharing as another method of exposure, that guilt-factor would evaporate because now torrenting isn't "wrong" anymore, thus eliminating those increased sales.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

I don't buy things after torrenting because I feel guilty for torrenting. I buy things after torrenting because I like those things. If I dislike those things I delete them and don't buy them.

tripzilch2• 14 years ago

Additionally I make sure that the money I pay goes as directly as possible to the record label and/or artist.

Usually the music I find worth buying is from smaller labels or independent artists, and I really wonder how any money I could pay to, say, Spotify would hypothetically find its way to them.

res0nat0r3• 14 years ago

And you also just screwed the artists you didn't like out of cash. Note: before you say you wouldn't have bought them anyway...that's how it works. You either listen to it on the radio / youtube etc for free. Then get to own the whole pristine mp3 version of it after you pay for it, not before.

runn1ng2• 14 years ago

It is on torrentfreak.

Expecting this site to be fair and balanced is like expecting the same from RIAA website.

cnbeuiwx• 14 years ago

Nothing is fair and balanced. Isnt that a Fox News expression by the way? They are mocking the viewers but they dont even understand it. :)

runn1ng2• 14 years ago

yeah, but a news on riaa website won't get to the frontpage of hackernews.

paulhauggis2• 14 years ago

You also can't discount the fact that when Napster came out, music sales as a whole dropped like a rock. I don't think I knew anyone that bought music after this.

Anything digital (like movies, music, or software) is only as valuable as what people are willing to pay. Look at the iPhone apps market. Because most apps are under $10, you will have a hard time selling an app above this price point.

The same thing will happen if the record industry embraces piracy. People will just expect to get it for free from then on. It will be very difficult to convince them otherwise.

It's difficult for me to respect a community that feels entitled to someone else's hard work (and without their permission).

If they really want to make a difference, compete with the record labels. Create a record label with signed artists that gives their music out for free on the torrent networks.

I know this will never happen because it takes too much discipline and hard work. The community also doesn't really care about the artist. If they did, they would have come up with some sort of solution for artists to make a living in the past 12 years (Napster launched in '99).

Until They can show me otherwise, I feel that the entire point of the community is so they can get things for free.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

You also can't discount the fact that when Napster came out, music sales as a whole dropped like a rock.

By "dropping like a rock", you mean the 5% and 6.9% in 2000 and 2001, respectively?

If they really want to make a difference, compete with the record labels. Create a record label with signed artists that gives their music out for free on the torrent networks.

I know this will never happen because it takes too much discipline and hard work.

Yes, record labels that give music out for free "will never happen": http://creativecommons.org/record-labels

The community also doesn't really care about the artist. If they did, they would have come up with some sort of solution for artists to make a living in the past 12 years (Napster launched in '99).

It already exists. In the UK, for example, artists revenue has been rising steadily: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1PEuVy75dqs/Txt6vy4ZlmI/AAAAAAAAAD...

Album sales are not the only way they make money.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> Album sales are not the only way they make money.

Album sales are, in fact, a pretty minor way to make money for most musical artists: unless you can reliably sell tends to hundreds of thousands of albums live gigs (and merch sold at live gigs) are much more profitable.

paulhauggis2• 14 years ago

"By "dropping like a rock", you mean the 5% and 6.9% in 2000 and 2001, respectively?"

hmm..what happened to all of the independent music stores? Between 2000 and now..they pretty much all went out of business...because...people aren't buying music anymore.

"Yes, record labels that give music out for free "will never happen""

Did you even read what I wrote?

"Album sales are not the only way they make money."

This is the entitlement I was talking about. This isn't for you to say. If you don't like their music, don't buy it (or download it). If the artist wants to give it out for free, they can.

The same people that hate the record industry because they think it's somehow propping up a dying business model..love the unions..when they are doing the exact same thing.

We could have automated many of the assembly line jobs in the US auto industry (like Japan), but the Unions are preventing it and forcing companies to pay ridiculous wages (which is why they pretty much went bankrupt). If you want me to feel sorry for the jobs lost, I don't.

Nobody feels sorry for the jobs lost when software, music, and or movies are pirated.

tripzilch2• 14 years ago

> It's difficult for me to respect a community that feels entitled to someone else's hard work (and without their permission).

Are you talking about pirates or the media lobby / "watchdog" organisations?

While I can't speak for the US based organisations--though it would surprise me if it were any different--the Dutch organisations such as BREIN and BUMA are well-known for being unaccountable money black holes, most of it not ending up at the producing artists, but .. well .. I can only guess that there must be quite a bunch of quasi-non-government-employees living very comfortably.

Other examples, the BUMA feels entitled to be compensated for the hard work of artists paid by Stichting Gastvrij ("Hospitality Foundation"), hotels and restaurant chains that commissioned uncopyrighted ambient/background music for use in hospitality settings (classical, italian, japanese, elevator, etc) free for use by all in the hospitality business. Normally they have to pay some monthly fee for the right to play any music, which, supposedly, in some mysterious sense finds it way back to the proper artists. But the restaurants, especially the smaller ones that could not afford lawyers, of course got threatening letters when they stopped paying this fee, because even though the music they were now playing was rights-free, the BUMA still felt entitled to be compensated for other people's hard work.

And then there's Stichting BREIN, the chairman of which feels entitled to other people's hard work in the form of police-confiscated laptops.

I'm pretty sure that the actual music industry and artists would be much better off without these criminal types ensuring their "protection".

henrikschroder• 14 years ago

> The same thing will happen if the record industry embraces piracy. People will just expect to get it for free from then on.

But you can get most mainstream artists for free already. Check out the VEVO channels on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/VEVO

Hell, Justin Bieber now has 2,5 BILLION views on his VEVO channel. If that isn't giving away your music for free, then I don't know what is. And apparently he and his record company is making money anyway.

The industry actually moved on, music is free, as long as you listen to it online in a way that you get occasional ads. It's radio, effectively. If you want to be able to listen to it on any device, offline, without ads, well, then it's 0,99$ a song.

J3L2404• 14 years ago

I would like to thank pg for inviting the barrage of these stories and the type of users it brings to HN. Kill Hollywood? You might as well have Henry Ford saying 'Kill Horses'. When a viable alternative exists it will gradually replace the labels. Just like every other industry.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

I'm not quite sure I understand the statistics here, seems to me that they are basically saying "stuff that is popular with pirates pre-release is also popular for purchase post-release" which is not exactly a revelation.

It also doesn't seem to account for total revenue rather than just total sales.

Tycho• 14 years ago

Hmm, but did they get bigger sales because they were leaked? Or did they get leaked because they were in more demand in the first place?

Also it doesn't really matter because the core of the argument will always be individual rights and control of intellectual property.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

>Also it doesn't really matter because the core of the argument will always be individual rights and control of intellectual property.

Not really. That may be the core of the argument for the idealists, but the core of the argument for the pragmatic is "harm to the economy", and the core of the argument for the politicians is "appeasing those wealthy campaign donors". Individual rights have very little to do with modern American government.

taylorlb• 14 years ago

The headline is a bit misleading for what is actually a somewhat interesting study on the effect of leaks on album sales (rather than post-release piracy on music sales in general). I've long believed that a leak of a great album can help generate buzz and ultimately sales for a new record since the people who would be most likely to evangelize the record would also be the same people who would be most excited to download it pre-release. It goes both ways though, a leak that exposes a record as being sub-par pre-release can have a devastating effect.

BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds

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