14 DAY TRIAL // File sharers are reviled by the music industry, the movie industry, the video game industry and everyone else that constantly sees their work, or the work of artists they exploit, posted all over the web for free.
But, and this is hardly surprising to anyone who wants to see it, it's the pirates that are often the biggest fans or, even better for these companies, the biggest consumers of the brand of entertainment they provide.
That is to say, people that don't pirate music, for example, don't necessarily do it because "it's wrong," but because they don't really like music all that much, certainly not enough to spur them to want to "own" any piece of music.
They get their fill from the radio, TV, YouTube, so, even though they're not pirates, they don't buy any music either. To the music industry, they are "worth" nothing, the fact that they don't pirate music should be of little consolation.
Alternatively, people who do pirate music are the ones that are interested in it. They want to listen to as much of it as possible and have it on their computer at their disposal.
These are the people that enjoy music and, yes, these are the people that buy music too, not to mention go to concert, buy the merch and so on.
So the fact that pirates are more likely to buy music and that they buy 30 percent more than their non-pirate counterparts, should be of little surprise.
Those are the findings of a study by the American Assembly, a group affiliated with Columbia University. They looked at American and German music fans and how they acquired their collections.
The results are very interesting. In Germany in particular, P2P users have much larger collections than the people who don't pirate, six times bigger. But the pirates bought more music than the entire music collections of non-pirates.
The study does say that the German data has a small sample size. The US data shows the same trend, though the numbers are closer together.
The average American pirate has 1,979 songs in their collection, 760 of which they bought. The average American non-pirate has 1,264 songs, 582 of which they bought. The rest they ripped from CDs or got from their friends, but not from P2P sites.