Results of the study: piracy helps to improve the sales of works of many artists.

Right holders of all kinds for many years fighting the so-called "pirates" - those who distribute licensed content without any rights to do so. Copyright advocates believe that film producers, music and books authors suffer huge losses due to piracy. In cases where rights holders manage to launch a demonstrative trial of a “pirate”, the fines are awarded to the millions.

But in fact, voices have long been heard about the positive or at least neutral role of piracy in the media sphere. Now there is a new study published in the journal Economics and Policy. According to this study, piracy helps many artists sell more pieces, especially musical compositions. Moreover, the increase in sales, as far as can be judged, is very substantial - both for large recording studios and for the average hand of performers.

True, in this barrel of honey there is also a fly in the ointment. The fact is that top artists because of pirates sell just fewer singles, clips and other materials. But here everything depends not only on the fame of the artist, but also on the musical genre in which he creates and the types of media.

The study was conducted by Jonathan Lee, a UK scientist. His work is called Buy, Piracy, Publish: Distribute Music in Networks and Sell Albums. As it turned out, the influence of piracy, in particular, BitTorrent trackers, is strong both in the digital sphere and in the sphere of physical media - that is, disks.

Lee's work is quite voluminous. The scientist began to implement his project a few years ago, although sometimes he published preliminary results. Now the results of the study show much more interesting numbers and trends, so you can already begin to judge the work itself.

All of it is based on data about downloading various music tracks taken from the administration of a private BitTorrent tracker. This database contains information about 250,000 albums downloaded over five million times. This information correlates well with those that were presented earlier by Nielsen SoundScan.

After analyzing all the available information, it turned out that it is piracy that increases the sales of artists of the so-called mid-tier class, which is related both to works in digital form and to physical ones. “I also found that the artists from the top of the charts are really losing money, while their less well-known colleagues get only positive dynamics in terms of sales of their work,” said the study leader. “All this shows that people are closer to the idea of ​​changing piracy to legal purchases of works than the idea of ​​choosing piracy and physical drives.” It is probably about the fact that the owners of trading poppies will rather abandon the network in favor of issuing physical drives.

Whatever it was, it was traced that piracy in the media sphere only benefits with a little bit of harm. But the problem is that the same research shows that it is not easy to fight against piracy, and this struggle cannot be carried out successfully using 1-2 different methods.

The most interesting thing is that the head of the project itself is a supporter of legal music. He believes that you need to buy it, if you want to listen, and in no way steal.

“It’s not too good to say that now, since I belong to that part of music lovers who are abhorred by the illegal distribution of music files, ” musician Ed Sheeran once said. “However, it is the illegal distribution of music that made me famous. I was a student at the university, and my songs were sent to the listeners to each other.


True, Sheeran now takes a different position. And it can be understood, because according to a new study, top artists suffer in the first place from piracy.

Nevertheless, the authors of the study itself believe that the closure of pirated sites is not always the best way to combat piracy. On the contrary, even close them is not worth it, because the file services may be useful to artists as advertising.

According to Lee, the head of the study, music’s fragmentation of the market causes far more harm to musicians. The fact is that the musicians of the last few years have learned how to sign contracts with various media companies. As a result, the compositions of certain musicians are available on one service, and on all others they are missing. This makes the very scope of copyright protection vulnerable and problematic.