BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds

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

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.

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

It is on torrentfreak.<p>Expecting this site to be fair and balanced is like expecting the same from RIAA website.

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.

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.

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's difficult for me to respect a community that feels entitled to someone else's hard work (and without their permission).<p>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.<p>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).<p>Until They can show me otherwise, I feel that the entire point of the community is so they can get things for free.

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.