Another study has concluded what we sort of suspected about people who really like to get new music. Those who download illegally via P2P also buy more music – in fact, they are 10 times as likely to buy tunes as those who stay legal, according to BI Norwegian School of Management.
“Those who state that they download for free actually are the greatest consumers of paid music online,” BI’s Audun Molde told Aftenposten.no (via MusicAlly), though the same paper quotes a sceptical Bjørn Rogstad of EMI Norway: “There is one thing we are not going away – the consumption of music is increasing while revenue is declining. It cannot be explained in any way other than illegal downloading instead of the legal sale of music.”
Earlier this month, a Forrester study found social music site users, although nearly three times as likely to share their files, are also more likely to buy music. While just six percent of European internet users generally buys digital downloads, that rises to 17 percent of social music site users.