Survey Suggests P2P Users Buy More Music 186
elashish14 writes "A new survey commissioned by Google suggests that music listeners who utilize P2P filesharing services buy 30% more music than non-sharers. The survey also probed users' opinions on enforcement practices. Users were strongly against either throttling or disconnecting users' internet services, but the majority suggested also that search engines should block access. 52% of Americans also said that downloading infringing content should be a punishable offense."
Big Shock (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all people are dumbasses, and some actually prefer to make sure that what they end up blowing their money is not complete garbage. Is that a crime?
Re:e.g. 52% of Americans believe in thought crime. (Score:5, Insightful)
This goes to show that more than half of the USian population believes in the tyranny produced by the power elite and believe in punishing people for non-crimes. That the population of the US is so badly educated and brainwashed that they believe these things. It goes to show that the US is not a civilized nation with rational, reasonable laws that make sense in any sense of the word.
Waves hand.
I believe downloading infringing material should be punishable.
I also believe that the current penalties are absurd and way out of proportion with the offense.
And, just for the hell of it, I also think current RIAA anti-piracy efforts are counter productive and they should instead focus on delivering their content in ways that make infringement less appealing, rather than ramping up DRM and suing people.
But hey that's just me supporting the tyranny of the power elite.
Survey says: everyone pirates but pirates buy more (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on the article's writeup of the survey, the survey seems to suggest that everyone is "pirating", with the only difference being where they get their music from. As we'd expect, P2P users had larger libraries with a larger proportion of their library being made up of illicitly acquired music, but in raw numbers, they still purchased more than non-P2P users. Meanwhile, non-P2P users had smaller libraries and were found to be acquiring music through shady means nearly as much, with the distinction being that they were getting it from friends and family as opposed to from the Internet.
Long story short, P2P or not, people are pirating these days, but the P2P folks have a larger appetite for music, and that includes purchasing it in larger quantities. Nothing really earth-shattering for most of us, though hopefully it'll be a wakeup call to the RIAA and their kind.
Well, we can hope, at least.
Re:Big Shock (Score:3, Insightful)
People who put forth the effort to download music are more likly to have an interested in music.
Re:Far cry 3 (Score:4, Insightful)
You missed something, what part of they still want the $25 for the pirated copy plus damages for circumventing their business model is unclear. In the eyes of purveyors in this society today... you are an end-looser. A guy in China ate a bowl of spicy soup that burned a hole though his stomach because the restaurant was able to shave a few pennies off of the more expensive chili paste by buying a cheap chemical substitute, that just turned out to be lethal. To the modern corporation you are simply a resource to be bled dry and discarded (at both ends of the buy and sell equation.) Your labor is bought wholesale, and sold to users by the corporation at retail. You buy other services and products from corporations at retail prices for which they buy or manufacture for wholesale or less. Labor is a commodity, they buy life insurance policies on you hoping you'll die and make them a windfall. When profit supersedes humanity, the final use of human beings is predictably inhumane.
Re:e.g. 52% of Americans believe in thought crime. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is STUPID... I can go over to Spotify for free this very second and listen to nearly anything my heart desires. Then when I hear something I just love, I listen to the whole album, and I find damn that's wonderful and I BUY IT because I want it in high fidelity. Or its a piece of rancid wombat feces and I flush it. I buy tremendously more music this way, try things I would never consider buying then go wow, that's not bad and a sale is made that wasn't ever gonna happen.
So the media moguls don't give a flying fsck about selling content. They care about controlling access and creating artificial scarcity so they can bleed the public. That is all, there is no sane argument to the contrary, no meaningful defense, no "But, what about..." There are only two futures, the Spotifys will inherit the earth or the current Media Moguls will legislate free (as in liberty) access into oblivion.
Re:Old technology was awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Converting to digital at CD standard loses nothing you can hear. The frequency range covers all of human hearing, and the quantitisation noise is too small to notice on a properly normalised track. What you hear isn't anything inherent to the CD medium: It's just that the preferred style of mixing has changed in the intervening years, something commonly referred to as the 'loudness wars,' as labels seek to make the music stand out more in a public setting by increasing the average volume at the expense of dynamic range.
With MP3s, you get as good as you allocate bits for. 64kbit music is going to sound like rubbish, but you'd need superhuman hearing to notice anything changed at 384kbit. Better, newer codecs can easily match that quality at a lower bitrate - MP3 is quite dated now, technologically. It achieved such dominance while it was the best around that when better codecs came along it was too entrenched to displace.
Re:Big Shock (Score:2, Insightful)
So while most people (52%) just regurgitate the stupid they're spoon fed
The problem is, this happens for 100% of people, just in different categories of stupid.
Show me the man who understands why the *AA are wrong and copyright law needs reform, and I'll find you something else he's merely parroting about.
Re:Big Shock (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody will listen to studies like this, because the producers with a deathgrip on the market don't care about profits. They care about control of the market.
Which is why they get all whiny and bitchy at TWO things:
1. piracy
2. artists bypassing them and going directly to customers
As far as they are concerned, it doesn't matter if money is dodging their own pockets by fair means or foul.
They don't just want to succeed. They also want everyone else to fail.
Re:Far cry 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
And if the co-op had worked with the pirated version? Would you had still purchased the legit copy?