Music Sales Not Hurt By Piracy, EU Says Its All Nonsense

A pair of researchers from the European Commission won’t be getting a Christmas card from the major record labels this year that’s for sure, especially since they’ve just come out saying that digital music piracy has no impact on music makers. Luis Aguiar and Bertin Martens from the EU’s Information Society Unit claim that areas such as online streaming do in fact positively affect copyrights owners, literally the opposite of what Big Content has been claiming for years.

“Although there is trespassing of private property rights (copyrights), there is unlikely to be much harm done on digital music revenues,” Aguiar and Martens claim.

The research shows a direct correlation between the number of clicks toward piracy sites to download content reflects on how easy it would have been to obtain a legal copy of that same content in the that country. Data used from Nielsen NetView of 5,000 users in Europe show that if there is a lack for the legal alternative, piracy increases.

It’s a tough area to discuss, piracy is a crime and that much is a fact, albeit one that can be a little grey in some areas, but there is certainly a turning trend in terms of digital purchases vs illegal downloads as more and more publishers take up more modern approaches to distribution, although clearly they still have a long way to go.