Study Claims Illegal Downloads Doesn’t Hurt Music Industry

A new study out of the European Commission Joint Research Centre has released findings that indicate that illegal music downloads do not have any significant effect on the number of legal music downloads.

Luis Aguiar and Bertin Martins conducted the study, which used clickstream data in its research. The researchers studied data based on country, which showed that attitides and prevalence of piracy differs depending on home country. But one consistent result was that while piracy does affect physical music sales, it doesn’t seem to change the number of legal digital music sales.

“Perhaps surprisingly, our results present no evidence of digital music sales displacement. While we find important cross country differences in the effects of downloading on music purchases, our findings suggest a rather small complementarity between these two music consumption channels. It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them.”

The study continued, siting that “The complementarity effect of online streaming is found to be somewhat larger, suggesting a stimulating effect of this activity on the sales of digital music.”

In other words, digital sales would be negatively affected if illegal downloading sites weren’t also available. This lead the researchers to determine that most of the music that was downloaded illegally was done so for music that wouldn’t have been purchased anyway. Additionally, it appears that those users who were most actively downloading music illegally were also responsible for nearly twice as much legal streaming and downloads as those who didn’t participate in illegal downloads.

Illegal music downloads remain frustrating to those in the music industry, however, for a number of reasons. Many people do illegally download music they might have bough otherwise, and it’s hard to measure that. Outside the realm of music, too, there is are ethical and copyright complications that arise when music is downloaded illegally. The music industry as a whole might be doing alright, but there can be no question that illegal downloads hurt individual artists—especially independent artists who really do need the money—and that’s not okay.