Piracy can drive digital music sales.

For over a decade, researchers have been exploring how online piracy affects the profits of the music industry. Representatives of the latter complain that they are losing billions of dollars and are calling for tough measures. But now it seems that everything is not so simple: the result depends on the musician, the genre and channel of music sales, among other factors. In certain situations, piracy may even drive sales!

An interesting study on this topic was conducted by Jonathan Lee from the Queens University School of Economics: "Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing on Album Sales" was published online. He investigated the effect of distributing files through BitTorrent and music sales in digital form and on physical media.

Jonathan Lee analyzed on the basis of 250,000 albums on statistics 4.8 million downloads through one of the popular torrent trackers - and found some interesting effects.

It turned out that piracy has a negative effect, mainly only on sales of physical media. For many musicians, sales of digital music, on the contrary, have grown, since torrents have become for them free advertising.
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The popularity of the musician also matters. More popular artists especially win because their sales growth in digital music offsets the decline in album sales on discs.



Musicians of average popularity also benefit from piracy, while lesser-known musicians suffer the most.

This study contradicts the unambiguous statements of record companies about the dangers of illegal distribution of music. In fact, for many authors, torrent trackers are an opportunity to unwind and reach a new audience.