Don't blame lost sales on P2P! They wouldn't buy it anyways...

This article pretty much proves what I have believed all along - you download for free the stuff you wouldn't have bought anyways. The albums you REALLY want, you purchase (artwork, support of band, etc), so don't blame lost sales on P2P networks - it does not tell the full story about consumer behaviour.

P2P Music CD Sales Effect Virtually Zero
Excerpted from Bit-Tech Report

Has everyone noticed that the first thing the RIAA goes for when it discusses copyright infringement is lost sales? Often, those who infringe argue that if they didn’t do it, they wouldn’t buy the music anyway. Apparently, they aren’t lying. A new study takes a look at empirical sales data over two quarters in 2002, following over 1.75 million songs through both sales and unauthorized downloads.

The findings? P2P network activity has a whopping 0.7% negative effect on sales - well less than the margin of error for the study. Even taking the most negative figures (counting the margin of error in favor of the RIAA’s claims), the study can only account for 6 million out of the 80 million units of lost sales the RIAA blames on infringement in 2002. This means 74 million units just plain didn’t sell, and that had nothing to do with infringement - even if everything that could have gone wrong with the study did.


According to the study, much of the loss of sales has to do with how the RIAA chooses to account for units in the first place. Rather than counting units sold to consumers, it counts units shipped to retailers. Therefore, since many retailers have reduced how much they order as stock to sit on shelves, the RIAA says “sales are down” and blames the numbers on rampant copyright infringement.


Before online shopping became such a big thing, stores that carried music would order a plethora of stock and let it sit - since there was nowhere else to conveniently buy it, it would eventually move. Nowadays, in order to keep prices down and competition high, most stores just don’t keep as large of an inventory at one time.


Of course, this will all likely end up as every other study on the issue does - buried ten feet deep on some desk somewhere while the execs keep spouting off about lost revenue. However, at least there is an empirical study now to back up the claim everyone has been saying for years - the people who infringe either weren’t going to buy the music anyway, or go and buy it afterwards.