As far as music piracy is concerned, the common perception is that people who download don’t buy music. After all, if you can get it for free, why fork out money for essentially the same product, right? Well as it turns out in a public policy study recently conducted by the American Assembly, it seems that they have arrived at the conclusion that on average, file-sharers actually buy 30% more music than their non-file sharing counterparts which we guess pretty much invalidates quite a few arguments against file sharing. This survey was conducted based on thousands on in-depth phone interviews held all over the US, and it seems that while online piracy could be thought of as a problem for record labels, the survey has also revealed that offline copying of music takes place more often compared to online music piracy.
While the survey could be thought of as rather comprehensive, it is far from conclusive as there is probably still room for a margin of error, but it is still a pretty interesting revelation nonetheless. For those interested, you can head on over to the American Assembly website for a more in-depth look into the survey, but in the meantime what do you guys make of this? Are you, or do you know of someone who actually downloads music sometimes illegally, but only for sampling before buying the legal copy?