Survey Indicates Music Pirates Are Biggest Music Buyers

[mykalwane]

Its a simple deal of if you are allow to try more things, you might buy more things. Take for example with anime. If it was for the ability to download the episodes for free, I wouldn't of bought manga or anime. Wither it is something you agree with as right or wrong, it does give people a chance to try. There will be people who will abuse it, but the thing is it also allows for the possibility of purchase.

Now take for example I couldn't find to purchase Megas XLR, so I downloaded the show. In there was a song called "Push the Button" by the Teapacks. Now I would not of been exposed to this band by any other means. Because it was for purchase at the time, I went out and paid for this song. Since I had downloaded and enjoyed it. This wouldn't of been possible if I didn't download the show.

I think that is all this proves. Not that it is right or wrong, not if they will or not pay for it. It rather proves that some will pay for the product if given the opportunity to try it first. Which is why people who were downloading stuff, bought stuff.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Oh dear this old argument.

For me it boils down to this. Piracy is theft, plain and simple, and any attempts to rationalize it are rationalizing criminal behavior.

Actually, Piracy is Copyright Infringement, and not a crime. It's a civil matter.

Also, this survey didn't seem to account for Social Desirability Bias [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias]

 

[Monsterfurby]

Oh dear this old argument.

For me it boils down to this. Piracy is theft, plain and simple, and any attempts to rationalize it are rationalizing criminal behavior.

Theft of entertainment, a luxury good is intrinsically different then theft of food so you don't starve, so don't pull that one out of your butts either.

That's all fine, but surely you don't think that helps resolve the problem? The truth is this: "casual piracy" is here to stay, and the industry does well in incorporating people's rituals of "hear song-download from web" into their business strategies. Apple pioneered that with great success. Business must follow culture, not the other way around - only that way it can hope to shape culture.

That is not to say that piracy is inherently right (it is not). The question is, however, how one can allow artists and publishers (record labels) to regain ground. The answer to that is yet unknown, but it surely does not involve a 1980s approach to music distribution.

 

[Reaper195]

Just throwing my few cents in....I tend to download a few songs, or an entire album from a band. If I life it, I usually end up buying all their stuff. Except now, we're I currently have no job or no money, and refuse to sit on my arse and stare at a wall doing fuck all.

 

[Rook takes Knight]

the one (well someone else asked this too but I can cover it in one post) person with an intelligent counter.

You mean the one you can actually 'counter'?
Plunk is right,piracy is not theft it's copyright infringement because the original is not lost

I like how you ignored him and the others that states you're wrong because you think your statement was '100% truth'
You're just condescending,really

 

[TechNoFear]

Generally, as it turns out, there's a lost sale for every 1000 downloads.

Can you link me to this data (that shows the ratio of lost sales to downloads) please?

 

[incal11]

Crime is the response to an untapped market or an unjust society. If folks spent more time addressing the issues positively instead of bitching about them it would get better. [Drug war is a beautiful example of where angry knee jerking leads].

We could also ask ourselves whether "crime" as defined by unfair laws is crime at all. And he did not hit everything.

It seems like I should've been a bit clearer, as there appears to have been a misunderstanding. "The effect of piracy on the entertainment industry" is meant in a purely financial way.
Also, the larger part of the argument concerned that this study, along with its peers, should not be taken as proof of anything more than what they specifically research. It means we are reasonably sure piracy is not the death knell, and possibly even beneficial to the entertainment industry's bottom line, but we can't fully explain how - only speculate.

Then we have drawn the same conclusion from the same sources. Nowhere did I say that the goal of these studies is to explain exactly how the two factors are related. Only that they most probably are. It shouldn't have been so hard to say, even if these studies are based mostly on anecdotal evidence.

What we originally disagreed on is that anecdotal evidence cannot hold statistical significance. I say it does when it comes from thousands of persons, and is consistent over many unbiased studies. That is called anecdotal value.

 

[Kargathia]

Generally, as it turns out, there's a lost sale for every 1000 downloads.

Can you link me to this data (that shows the ratio of lost sales to downloads) please?

Number crunching by Reflexive a few years back [http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350]

Admittedly this is a single study, so results should be taken as nothing more than a rough ballpark estimate - but apart from this there's quite the dearth in actual research into this, as producers are more than happy to assume it's a 1-on-1 conversion.

 

[Raesvelg]

The problem here is that you've set the bar way too high for any reasonable amount of accommodation. The only way to show full data would be to bury the reader in a pile of statistics and paperwork.

Frankly, I don't trust any study that simply presents their findings and does not attach at least a reasonable amount of raw data to it. Such studies are, much like this one, prone to bias, since providing readers with a reasonable amount of data would typically undermine their position.

Most importantly, the data has been presented. It is now up to the opposition to provide evidence that contradicts the data presented, or offers an explanation of the data that can rationally fit within the data presented. Until then, the data given is true. This is how debate and science both work.

The problem is that we're not being given data, really. We're being given carefully arranged and massaged demographics.

If the authors were trying to say "Younger people both spend more on digital music and pirate at a higher rate than older people", I'd grant them a valid position based on the data they've presented. I'd also say that they successfully wasted their time and the time of everyone who took their survey, since that statement is common knowledge.

But if they're trying to prove that pirates spend more money on media, they're going to have to try a lot harder, since their data, while loosely suggesting a possible correlation between piracy and spending, isn't anywhere near proof.

It's scarcely even relevant when you start lumping the entirety of an age group or peer group together, then toss in facts like a relatively small sample size, and that it was conducted by a survey, rather than something a wee bit more accurate and less prone to distortion.

Hell, if you get right down to it, the point they set out to prove is of dubious utility; they're not actually tracking absolute spending on music. They're tracking who spends the most on music files, ie who is spending more on iTunes or Amazon's MP3 store.

In short, as I've said before, the "study" was pretty obviously conducted with the purpose of proving their preconceived bias. They didn't set out to collect data to discover the truth, they set out to prove their own beliefs and oddly enough, it's not terribly hard to succeed at that if you work hard enough at it.

And that may be how debate works, but it sure as shit isn't how science works. It's not "true" until it passes scrutiny; this study does not.