Online piracy is bad. We all now know this after the Swedish courts sentenced/made an example of the owners of Pirate Bay just last week.
A new study, however, goes against the grain of piracy negativity and has uncovered some interesting statistics.
According to the BI Norwegian School of Management, those who download 'free' music are actually also 10 times more likely to pay for music downloads than those who don't BitTorrent.
Original pirate material
Nearly 2,000 people participated in the study, which was conducted by Professor Anne-Britt Gran and his research team at the Department of Communication - Culture and language, and it seems that those who are au fait with free music on the web (both legal and illegal) are much more likely to dip into their pockets when it comes to purchasing the latest MP3s.
The study also found that 50 per cent of those asked in the 15-20 age range have bought a CD recently.
Free ad-funded services like Spotify were not included in the study, but Gran hopes to include them in his next look at online music, which will be out in May.
Via Gizmodo
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funkedup
April 21st
1. totally agree with this... I am probably like many other users mentioned in this article however I have spent loads of money on records. No not cd's or mp3's but records. Most of these have been undegrround dance type records that support smalltime artists. If it wasn't for the music discovery I get through mp3s I wouldnt go to the record shop to listen to them or to then buy them. I have no sympathy for the large record labels.
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