Well…..What A Surprise!!

Piracy Really Helps Music Sales

Everyone knows that the entertainment industry has always blamed piracy for job loses, as well as for the economic crisis in whole. At the same time, the industry was trying to force down anti-piracy legislation within and beyond borders of the United States – laws that come into conflict with every fundamental human right that exists now. However, the latest study proves that the things are about to change.
Aside from the fact that the entertainment industry has never brought into the court of law any evidence of the supposed damage related to illegal file-sharing, they have always relied on statutory damages, claiming that it is actually impossible to quantify this damage.

However, if you take a closer look at their revenues, you may come to a conclusion that they are not at all in a tight financial situation – it is in fact the opposite! Moreover, a great part of the file-sharing studies revealed that sharing files doesn’t have much effect on sales. This is true for music, film, and video games – for example, you may remember how Call of Duty’s series sales broke all the records recently.

One of the recent independent studies was carried out by Robert Hammond (Assistant Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University) and is titled “Profit Leak? Pre-Release File Sharing and the Music Industry”. The results of his research state that piracy really helps with increasing the sales of music albums.

Along with that, Robert Hammond points out that this study is more accurate than the earlier ones, because the sample size is larger: 1095 albums from 1075 musicians on the largest private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to music. His research was focused on albums that were leaked before being released, and showed that on average this had brought around 60% additional sales.