This bit of news is no news at all if one looks all the way back to vinyl records. The people most likely to download from free P2P services are also the very same people most likely to pay for new music. People who enjoy music... enjoy music! People will pay for what they feel is worth paying.
I can remember the days of vinyl records and cassette tapes. Friends would each buy a record and then make copies for each other. The simple fact is that we couldn't individually afford to buy the whole collection. Without the tapes we would probably each have the same number of records. Both mediums were lossy, in that records got scratched and tape quality deteriorated over time. Those same people paid to upgrade to CD when they became available - Dark Side of the Moon being the most famous example. Now those same people have the same music downloaded to their MP3 player. How many times must one pay for the same song?
The research now says exactly the same thing as it did back in those analogue days. Music lovers will have a mixture of paid and copied content. Remove the copied content and they will not necessarily pay for it. The real problem globally is in those countries where apparently genuine products are actually themselves copies. But why go for the real targets when music corporations can try to make individuals feel like criminals?
And by doing so they alienate their fans even further. Music lovers enjoy the music, they don't really care what the record label is. There is further research showing that online sales are growing especially in the direct channels with musicians and fans enjoying a closer relationship and therefore bypassing the music industry channels.
As technology increases the distribution of the creative arts so corporations always try to grab back control to further their profits. Nobody will remember this, but there was a time when there was no recorded music - everything was live, or silence ruled. Enjoy the music!
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