European study: pirates wouldn't purchase the music they download

A new study conducted by the European Commission on online music piracy seems to contradict the common music industry mantra that illegal downloads hurt music purchases.

The study is based on Nielsen data from five European countries and analysed Nielsen NetView data showing the clicks of more than 16,000 Internet users in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The final result is that clicks on legal music purchase sites would have been 2% higher in the absence of visits to illegal downloading sites in those countries: it's a surprising conclusion, even if the study did not track actual downloads or purchases, but only visits to websites... it was assumed that visits to legal download sites could be considered a good proxy for purchases - but that may not be the most correct approach, since it ignores consumers' price sensitivities.

Another interesting finding is that Illegal downloaders of the sample were more likely to purchase legal tracks (10% more clicks) and stream legal music (40% more clicks); on the other hand, those who streamed music were 90% more likely to click on illegal downloading websites than people who did not use streaming music services or platforms. According to the study, then, there could be a radical change of perspective in the music industry notion that free streaming services are a good, "legal alternative to piracy", while they actually seem to boost it... judging from Nielsen's data, streaming services are a complement to, rather than an alternative to, piracy for many people.

The real finding of this study, by the way, is concerning music discovery. After finding evidence of a positive relationship between purchases and illegal downloading and illegal streaming, indeed the authors stated: "The results suggest that the vast majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been legally purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them". So the myth of illegal downloaders as music industry enemies seems to be totally overturned, since - according to the sample - the downloaded files would not have been legally purchased in any way, so there's no real loss of potential profits for the industry.