You know how some studies on the same topic seem to contradict one another from time to time? Is it good to have a glass of wine each day, or a cup of coffee? Well, here is one for the ages – a new study which was published by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre discovered something that illegal music downloaders have been saying all this while – it does not hurt the music industry. After checking out the browsing habits of over 16,000 Europeans, the research concluded on the contrary, that a positive link existed between online piracy and visits to legal music stores. The bottomline is, music sales will actually benefit from piracy. Sounds strange, doesn’t it?
In the words of the researchers themselves, “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.” Not only that, the study also mentioned that music streaming websites like Pandora (P) and Spotify do not cannibalize music purchases, but rather complements it. This is one topic that divides down the middle, and folks can argue till the cows come home. What do you think?