The latest opportunity for the BitTerrorists to get all all high and mighty comes from Norway, where a business school has released a study claiming that people who download music without paying for it are in fact more likely to pay money for legit music than their non-downloading counterparts. The Bi Norwegian School of Management came to this conclusion after studying the music-consumption habits of some 1,900 people around the country. Naturally, this study is being heralded by techie types out there as proof that their open ports will, in fact, save the music industry. But there’s something about all the hubbub that doesn’t sit well with me! I hunkered down in an IM window with Idolator’s resident academic adviser Eric Harvey to figure out why.
mauraatidolator: i feel like this study is flawed but I’m wondering if there is an academic reason, ie this study fails to point out that ‘pirates’ are probably more engaged in music in general and thus would buy more music than the gen pop if the pirate bay et al were taken out of the equation
mauraatidolator: or if you think i’m full of crap you can tell me, haha
Professoreric: is there a link to the actual study anywhere, in English? because this is really thin logic, obv., but it’s hard to tell if it’s the researchers’ claims or the Ars Technica writer making it sound different
mauraatidolator: good question
Professoreric: so there’s a discrepancy in either claim from either side that lies in causality
Professoreric: like, one thing is responsible for the other, and it’s hard both to argue with that, and agree with that, because research like this is so easy to cherry-pick for what you want
Professoreric: and easy to bash for being stiff and quantitative — like, how do they know people are “pirates”?
Professoreric: did they wear an eyepatch while filling out the survey? did their parrot shit on the form?
Professoreric: relying on the researchers’ definitions of “piracy” to resonate 1:1 with the survey respondents’ is a huge stretch
mauraatidolator: here’s the story Ars seems to be referencing
Professoreric: of course, we have to account for “Increased betalingsvilje.”
Professoreric: as that article tells us
mauraatidolator: Danish, betalingsvilje: willingness to pay.
Professoreric: one of the key things that quantitative researchers have to always watch out for is the phrasing of their questions. there’s always the chance of there being a HUGE gap between institutional/academic understandings of a term and a 15 year-old kid’s
Professoreric: qualitative research is always the best way to go toward actually understanding human everyday behavior. extensive observations, interviews, etc.
Professoreric: but then again, that sort of research is NEVER used in newspaper articles. anyone in class know why? anyone?
mauraatidolator: ooh, ooh! me!
mauraatidolator: because there aren’t stats and claims that are easily transportable to headline format?
Professoreric: correct.
Professoreric: so i have to be clear that i’m not saying this research is WRONG (mostly because i haven’t read it), but i think that certain questions lend themselves better toward more lengthy observation and less scantron-sponsored bean-counting
mauraatidolator: and the conclusions are probably not as cut and dried as the ars technica/gizmodo types want to believe they are
Professoreric: that too. but are they the only venues running with that lede?
Professoreric: keep in mind that colleges have PR departments, and they put out press releases framed in ways that journalistic outlets run with unquestioningly
Professoreric: SHOCKER
mauraatidolator: do you think the study is flawed because it didn’t ask people to chart their music-consumption habits over time? because i mean i feel like not asking that question (or publicizing it) allows the gizmodo/ars types to trumpet the findings that are in their interests
Professoreric: hmmmm, no, not really
Professoreric: i don’t know if it’s an issue of the length of the research, as much as it is the type of the research. If that makes sense
mauraatidolator: i guess what i mean is do you think the reception to the study is flawed because it just sort of makes music exist in a bubble where the pay / don’t pay option always existed
Professoreric: see i think that’s closer. but again, without being able to look at the paper itself, that’s hard.
mauraatidolator: i’m really talking about the takeaway now — even if the study didn’t mention it, the people championing it not mentioning it results in this weird thing where it’s like… not paying for music was always an option and always how people who listened to ‘more music’ got into what they got into
mauraatidolator: “-Based on the results from the survey you might think that the free download stimulates paid download, but here is to keep the tongue straight in your mouth. Hvorvidt de som laster ned musikk gratis ellers ville kjøpt den samme musikken, det er og blir et rent hypotetisk spørsmål. Whether those who download music for free would buy the same music, it is, and is a purely hypothetical question.”
mauraatidolator: whoa weird
mauraatidolator: it was in english when i copied it
Professoreric: okay
Professoreric: “here is to keep the tongue straight in your mouth” — i mean, they’re trying to hedge their bets there, which is smart.
Professoreric: the thing for me is
Professoreric: sure, there’s a reason to be pissed about the way copyright laws stand, in the same ways that it’s okay to be pissed about pot laws. but the main people protesting are also the douchiest, least-productive contributors to the debate, you know?
Professoreric: Pirate Bay dudes are like guys in drug-legalization rallies with huge Cat In The Hat hats on — no one takes them seriously, and everyone associates them with everyone else involved with the movement.
Professoreric: people think that Lawrence Lessig is a Pirate
Professoreric: but i get what you’re saying — here’s how i phrase it
Professoreric: By presenting the results of the research in this way (or, it could be argued, even conducting the research in this way from the beginning), we limit the respondents’ voices to a binary discourse of ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’, when in reality, our behaviors rarely ever do the same.
Professoreric: i mean, i think much more interesting insight could be gleaned by talking to people about their practices, and observing their practices over time. i think we’d find out a lot about the ways in which everyday behavior w/r/t music doesn’t always align with market-based discourses.
mauraatidolator: and that allows the whole ‘how has the %age of individual music acquisition gone from paid to unpaid’ question to be answered better
mauraatidolator: because you have the time-lapse
mauraatidolator: and the introduction of broadband, etc
mauraatidolator: i mean this is obviously still a new phenomenon!
Professoreric: yeah, and you have the voices of the people, much-less mediated, and not turned into numbers
Professoreric: either form of research can take place over time: you can do periodic surveys over decades, you can also do ethnographic research over the same time. but it’s the quality of the data that i think is the most important, which is where stuff gets messy and chaotic
Pirates are the best customers [Afrenposten; HT Ars Technica]
“not paying for music was always an option and always how people who listened to ‘more music’ got into what they got into” isn’t as false as you think. Pre-internet we taped our friends’ records, we taped songs off the radio and off MTV, we had a lot more used record stores (where we paid someone but nothing went to artists). Music enthusiasts will always want more music than they can afford to purchase new.
“i feel like not asking that question (or publicizing it) allows the gizmodo/ars types to trumpet the findings that are in their interests”
OK I will bite. I read both gizmodo and ars – thus I must be one of those ‘types’. Which of these findings is in my interest(s)?
I’m not trying to be too snarky, but I’m not sure I understand your objection to this study. In the first msg, are you stating that pirates are probably more engaged in music and would buy more if they couldn’t pirate? Do you have any academic research to back that up? Or was that a question to the professor? I can’t tell…
I think stormtown makes a valid point. I ‘pirated’ a ton of music before the internet made it EASY for kids.
sure, in the pre-p2p era, music enthusiasts (including this one!) taped records from pals. but i don’t think i’m being overly cautious when i say that someone out there should figure out more precisely whether or not the ratio of paid to unpaid music owned by enthusiasts has stayed constant throughout the years — after all, even with high-speed dubbing, copying records from your friends took a fair amount of time back in the day. now it just takes a click and maybe a few minutes.
there’s a lot of ‘look, i’m SUPPORTING THE ARTISTS’ rhetoric that goes on with pirates, and i think if you did an actual analysis of how much money people were spending per capita on music, you would see why i feel like so much of it is bankrupt. (i actually saw some peanut-gallery members snickering over how music companies’ problems weren’t the fault of their downloading habits at all; they did not produce comparative receipts of their music purchases in 1997 and now, so to these ears they just sounded kind of like dumbasses. (plus they couldn’t spell to save their lives.)) is this another example of more-precise metrics being one of the underheralded internet-occasioned problems for cultural producers? sure. but to say that this study is more evidence that pirates aren’t at all responsible for the music industry’s current woes — which both gizmodo and ars tried to do, i felt — is dishonest, and yet another example of the noxious rhetoric employed by people who position themselves as the tech elite.
I’m not sure I found THE article, but the only one that fits in the topic, the school and is indexed by Google Scholar is “Trust in the development of new channels in the music industry” (Crosnoa, Nygaardb&Dahlstrom, 2007, and it’s available through SinceDirect if you’re subscribed) and it stands on much safer ground. What they say is that “institutional trust” positively affects actual CD sales. The statement might be translated into plain english in sooo many ways as “institutional trust” is something opaque and hardly measurable. I think that even the study cited in the article is not this one (most likely since the quantity of data is different), it’s more of bold translation of some research into plain english.
On the other hand, as stated above, ‘piracy’ was always here. And there’s probably no other way to stay tuned, not only because you can’t afford it, but also because they don’t have ‘trial period’ for the CD’s. Once you buy it, your money’s gone no matter whether you liked a record or not.
I just think the study is a load BS based on the fact that every single person I know who engages in “piracy” (as defined as illegal downloading) doesn’t buy jack crap and hasn’t for years. That’s my qualitative study.
@Lucas Jensen It’s also ludicrous to compare the home taping habits of music fans of, say, 15 yrs ago with a new crop that feels the music of “greedy rock stars” should be free, anyway.
@KikoJones: Well, it’s just kinda weird to try and compare home taping to mass file sharing, both for reasons of scope and the fact that home taping didn’t produce an exact reproduction in digital-level quality.
@KingofPantsMy bigger problem with the comparison is that I don’t remember feeling so self-righteous about taping an album, and I don’t think anyone passing around their 4th generation tape of Appetite for Destruction thought of themselves as a rights advocate or a ‘freedom fighter’. Also, I fully expected to buy that taped album once I could afford it, whereas a lot of downloaders don’t think that acquiting music involves some sort of consumer choice, of tradeoff. I think that this is something that iTunes, as successful as it has been, has not done successfully – make paying for music a rational decision for people who do not personally know struggling musicians hoping to survive on their art – and a large part of this is that there is absolutely nothing tangible to be gained for the listener in downloading from iTunes instead of from Rapidshare or Megaupload. In fact you are probably getting your file at a worse sampling rate.
@Thierry: QFT. See, for me, iTunes really is a rational alternative, but even when I was downloading illegally a lot more than I do now, I never tried to convince myself I was somehow sticking it to the Man. And this is why, ever since the invention of Napster, I’ve never been able to comprehend that line of thought, because it seem really simple, and it always has:
Getting something for free will always beat paying for it.
So you know that boomer canard about Gen X, that they didn’t have a Vietnam to rebel against? (Anyone else remember the really tepid anti-war movement about Gulf War I?) Ok, so if that’s true, then think about the generation after. If they’re sitting there in a suburban bedroom with a fat pipe and BitTorrent…I mean, it’s all Hot Topic-y angst, really. It’s what the Internet enables: the motions of actual action (like, say, rebellion) without having to lift your ass from the computer desk.
What really pisses me off are the Ars Technica/Wired/BoingBoing cheerleaders, because they are, without a doubt, the most boring fucking people on the planet. And yet they have somehow positioned themselves as (well-compensated) cheerleaders for some sort of “revolutionary” stance. ‘Course, the checks stop rolling in if you make the dilemma as essential as “people like free shit”, so they have to tart it up because it obviously can’t be that simple. It’s precisely like the pro-marijuana argument. “People want to get high.” Simple, no?
Lucas otm. Besides an overall lack of causality and no indications wrt the volume of music downloaded vs. purchased and how that has changed over the years, the other thing that jumped out at me about this survey when I saw it the other day is: How have the buying habits of non-downloaders changed? It’s all well and good to say downloaders are 10x more likely to buy than non-downloaders or whatever the results were, but record sales and other Lucas Jensen-style empirical evidence* would strongly suggest that the non-downloaded purchase numbers have fallen through the basement this decade, which would of course impact on any conclusions drawn from numbers suggesting that one group is x times more likely to buy than another. The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.
*dwindling shelf space given to music at big boxes, the number of indie or chain record stores closing, the relative amount and variety of music on U.S. TV/MTV/radio vs a decade or two ago (and I think this is, again through personal experience, not as bad off in western europe, where they seem more engaged culturally with pop music than Americans do), plus the factual and quite striking shrinking record sales blah blah blah strongly suggest that non-downloaders are buying– even being exposed to– much less music now than they once were, and I would gather piracy and its impact on the overall health of the music industry can be attributed to that in some ways. People who don’t file trade simply don’t have anywhere close to the same access to music they once did. And, alas, don’t even seem to be making much of a fuss about that.
oops, “non-downloaders’ purchase numbers” not “non-downloaded”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say people stopped giving a shit about music. Rather, you also need to consider packaging as well. iTunes and digital sales brought a shift from selling the album to selling the single. If a good portion of people went from buying the album to buying the single, this alone could account for a significant revenue loss as sales went from $15/album to $1-$2 per single.
@KingofPants “Well, it’s just kinda weird to try and compare home taping to mass file sharing, both for reasons of scope and the fact that home taping didn’t produce an exact reproduction in digital-level quality.”
Reproduction quality is irrelevant if it’s still good enough to keep someone from buying the album. I think we could all agree that the lowest common denominator for acceptable music quality is pretty low, otherwise 4th gen tapes or 128bit mp3s would never have been used.
“My bigger problem with the comparison is that I don’t remember feeling so self-righteous about taping an album, and I don’t think anyone passing around their 4th generation tape of Appetite for Destruction thought of themselves as a rights advocate or a ‘freedom fighter’.”
And back then the RIAA hadn’t gone through several years of a fear campaign of directly suing individuals for tens (hundreds?) of thousands dollars. Reality has changed, music publishers are much more adversarial these days, which would IMHO cause an equal but opposite reaction from the other side.
Sorry that second quote should be attributed as @Thierry
@scottpl “Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether.”
I think this is the heart of the matter. Music is losing its relevancy as a form of identification for the Web 2.0 generation. Kids used to be defined by the band logo on their shirts/cars. Now kids are defined by their social network more than anything else.
@Maura
Thanks for expanding on your thoughts. I would be interested to see a comparison of paid v. unpaid music collections – however those metrics are only one part of this issue.
@thierry –
i think you should also note that for home taping, someone had to have an original! i remember that if I wanted an album, I’d ask around the 4 or 5 people at school who liked that kind of music, and if no-one had it, then at least one of us was going to have to go and buy it! Which obviously we don’t have now – hop on soulseek and get it off some dude in Peru or wherever….