First, about 40% of the 1.2 million downloader actually paid an average of 6 USD. That totals to almost 3 million USD. Without excessive distribution costs, without a multitude of middlehands…

Add to that that the big bucks are generated on concerts these days.

If only we could all make that kind of failures, don’t you agree?

Having free samples of monty python on YouTube is not the same as being able to download their entire collection for free; one can boost sales, the other will be a perfect substitute for a sale.

The “radiohead experiment” was a failure. Read this article: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1883 Basically most people freeloaded and paid either nothing or next to nothing for the music. Radiohead still made some money out of it, but way less than they could have via normal commercial channels. Here’s a telling quote:

“I am surprised by the number of freeloaders,” said Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and well-known music aficionado. “The stories to date about the In Rainbows ‘pick your price’ download offer have been much more optimistic. I paid $5 U.S. and had no reluctance whatsoever to take out my card and pay. It’s a fantastic record, the best thing they’ve done in years. But, this shows pretty conclusively that the majority of music consumers feel that digital recorded music should be free and is not worth paying for. That’s a large group that can’t be ignored and its time to come up with new business models to serve the freeloader market.”

Free music doesn’t necessarily lead to more sales, in fact it can result in the exact opposite. It’s just a spin that people put on this to justify piracy. It’s up to you if you want to buy that spin, I certainly don’t.

Also, how can you disprove or prove the accuracy of piracy statistics? Unless you watch every single person in the world and record their every activity, you can’t possibly know what the true scale and effects of piracy are. There is no accurate method to measure piracy right now, which is why it leaves room for so much garbage to be generated on this topic.

I can ignore a study when it says that it is based on surveys. I don’t need to disprove it because the underlying methodology is known to be too faulty and biased for usage. Of course pirates don’t particularly care, they’re happy to use anything to support their freeloading.

I suggest you read that original Canadian study and see for yourself, and I also suggest that you think a bit more deeply on this topic.

Anyway, if something is inaccurate there’s plenty of ways to disprove it rather than ignoring it. Ignoring studies like this usually isn’t done if you can come up with proof of what you claim here. In fact, being able to disprove the study would be extremely good for the music industry… instead there’s nothing solid, only claims of lost income of this or that many billions.

Looking at the hard numbers, you can clearly see an increase in album sales that is very tightly coupled with the number of users on Napster, back in the day. At the time, there was still talk about how Napster was killing the record industry. Those two facts don’t mesh, and that’s also ignored.

So… if having access to free music makes people buy less music, how do you explain that people bought tons of the free music from NIN, Radiohead and Monty Python?

I can’t read the second report as it’s in Dutch, but I suspect based on the description that it too is based on similar types of surveys and false deductions.

Suffice it to say that the conclusions drawn from such studies are not only inconclusive, they are being very generously and often deliberately interpreted in support of piracy.

Consider for example the concept that the age group and type of people who download entertainment media are, by virtue of their very demographic, more likely to purchase entertainment media in the first place, regardless of piracy. Consider then that piracy only reduces the amount this group would have purchased. The net result might still be positive, but it will be a lower positive than in the absence of piracy.