Illegal File Sharers Buy The Most Legal Media

A new survey suggests that, contrary to popular belief, illegal file sharers are actually the type of people that spend the most money on traditional media and entertainment.

Our survey shows that the P2P user attends 34% more movies in theaters, purchases 34% more DVDs and rents 24% more movies than the average internet user. The P2P user owns more HDTVs and is more likely to own a high-def-DVD player, too.

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"Sure is cold in Hell today..."

I believe it. P2P users are more likely to be interested in media in the first place.

Don't worry, companies will spin it to imply that filesharing is hurting their bottom line by letting these P2P users spend less money than they normally would.

I can understand why...

people love to download first and try it out, if its that good, they will buy it for collections..

at least I know several people who does that....:S

This isn't about facts, this is about the perception of losing money using a failed business model.

Well at least Itunes gives brief snippets of songs, I think one day they wont be able to do that unless they pay for it.

SonicTron said:

I believe it. P2P users are more likely to be interested in media in the first place.

Don't worry, companies will spin it to imply that filesharing is hurting their bottom line by letting these P2P users spend less money than they normally would.

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kirbyrj said:

This isn't about facts, this is about the perception of losing money using a failed business model.

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exactly.

if you can't force them to buy garbage, sue them for not buying it or wanting it, because they don't have the right to say no to you, duh

its true
i DL about 2-3tb/mo
i own 3 55" 1080p lcd's
two psp's and 2 360's
i see a couple movies a month in the theater
and buy anything i really like in BR

I believe it completely. Obviously if you download a lot of media you are very very into it and probably dedicated to the producers, show, whatever. For example, I downloaded all the Battlestar Galactica stuff I could get my hands on while waiting for the boxset. Now that it's out I amd going to buy the blu-ray set to both support the studio for putting out a great show and also for everything extra that is included with it. I am going to vote with my pocket book. That are certain other movies I have downloaded mainly because it wasn't in my area but you can bet your ass I will be buying district 9 on blu-ray the day it comes out as well as some posters because I enjoy the artwork. I got the Dark Knight and some figurines because I liked the artwork. Yes, I did pirate it at first and if I hadn't had been able to I can't say I wouldn't have been as interested and maybe even turned off at the thought of strict RIAA bullshit. All of my favorite albums I have purchased. Every last one. I may have downloaded them because I didn't want to dig them out of my 200 disc changer but I own them. Windows XP - bought a while ago but have downloaded due to their policy on switching hardware. I have been the only person to use my computer, I'm not buying another copy because I upgraded. Right now I am using Win7 on the trial basis. I think prices are going to be acceptable, if they are I will buy it. Sure, I could pirate it but I appreciate all the though put into it and all the little changes. I jumped from xp to win7 on my computer that I use for work. If something went wrong I could lose days of work and potentially cost my company thousands. Perhaps not a good idea... BUT IT WORKED. Everything. It is worth my money, as long as it is priced fairly.

Those consumers should give the industry what they want and just stop... The entertainment industry has made it quite clear that they don't want that type of consumer... The evil "thief"... So, the evil thief should simply stop DL'ing "and" buying their products all together for a few months... Give the entertainment industry EXACTLY what they're asking for. haha.

I wouldn't want to spend $$$ on a program to find out I didn't like it. Office 2007 for example. I heard of the the new GUI so I wanted my wife and I to try it out. We liked it, and I purchased it.

Honestly this sounds like it came from the "common sense shit that everyone already knew anyway" department. I mean, seriously, people who copy shit to steal it are not lost revenue...they were going to fucking steal it anyway. This whole "we lost $500 trillion dollars last month to piracy" is bullshit. People who are technologically savvy and want to try out all kinds of stuff to see what is worth it and what isn't, will often buy shit they want and like because they either want to support quality innovation, have quality copies/versions of the stuff they really like, etc.

Antonius said:

Honestly this sounds like it came from the "common sense shit that everyone already knew anyway" department. I mean, seriously, people who copy shit to steal it are not lost revenue...they were going to fucking steal it anyway. This whole "we lost $500 trillion dollars last month to piracy" is bullshit. People who are technologically savvy and want to try out all kinds of stuff to see what is worth it and what isn't, will often buy shit they want and like because they either want to support quality innovation, have quality copies/versions of the stuff they really like, etc.

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well technically piracy is not stealing, so...

I'm too paranoid to dl that stuff anymore. When they went from targeting just the uploaders, to targeting anyone, I lost the nerve to take that chance.

I used to spend about $500/year on dvd/cd/movie tickets. I got tired of supporting this bs. Now I have a 2.5TB of total dvr storage & hbo/starz, I only listen to music I get for free from off fm, and occasionally I'll redbox a movie or two, always getting them back in a single day's rental. My income has gone up since then, too. If they weren't such assholes, I'd probably be spending $1000/year on media.

I've cut the money they get from me down to almost nothing, I've done it all with legal methods (well, maybe one or two redbox dvds accidentally fell into the duplicator), and I think I still get enough entertainment. I figure, if somebody tries to fuck you, the best thing to do is fuck'em right back, although they're still making something off me one way or another, through redbox and the movie channels, I still choose to think I'm fucking them, just not very good.

this is so true. my family spends so much for high end home theater gear. not to mention the movie collection, getting out of hand, lol.

hasn't this been common knowledge since about the time of Napster. I download a ton of stuff and I buy what I really like. Frankly without "illegal" downloads I'd probably end up buying far fewer cds, dvds, games, etc.

I mean yeah, I will admit I bootleg the crap out of FPS games like Call of Duty 4 to check out the single player and if I like it (I did) I will wait for a sale and buy it for the multiplayer.

Only games I never bootleg are Valve games because they are always on point with what I like... HL2, TF2, CS:S, L4D all first zero-day buys! Also, World of Warcraft... because it's un-piratable (mostly) but is always worth every penny.

Movies are the same way, I love HD and since P2P movies aren't in HD then the worthy ones are the one I would love to get on Blu-ray... but that won't happen until prices come down but it will happen. I can watch Dark Knight a hundred times over and still never get bored, I would love to buy it on Blu-ray if it was 10 bux.

Xaero_toast said:

I used to spend about $500/year on dvd/cd/movie tickets. I got tired of supporting this bs. Now I have a 2.5TB of total dvr storage & hbo/starz, I only listen to music I get for free from off fm, and occasionally I'll redbox a movie or two, always getting them back in a single day's rental. My income has gone up since then, too. If they weren't such assholes, I'd probably be spending $1000/year on media.

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I own close to 200 DVD's that I purchased over the last 15 years or so but since this insensate drive of the MPAA/RIAA I have drastically cut down in money spent on anything related to the movie or music industry. I own all of 6 BR movies yet have owned a PS3 for over a year and a half, if these jackoffs had not driven people like me away well they would likely be making more money.

1 52" HDTV
1 42" HDTV
1 PS3
1 PS2
1 Xbox
1 Wii
5 computers

Um nope no interest in tech or entertainment.

Oh and there is one other thing that has taken me by storm recently...

Netflix on Xbox 360 (with old or obscure films, animation, documentaries, and shows you could not even find in stores). Honestly, now I can really see the writing on the wall. Too bad the MPAA and RIAA can't. Their lost... their major, MAJOR lost.

Now all we need is Netflix to become its own production studio and pump out its own content ala HBO and Xbox LIVE Arcade.

yeah this goes into the 'no shit' category.

the companies who have problems with the 'try before buy' consumers are just greedy capitalistic pigs.


YOU WILL NOT GET OUR MONEY FOR YOUR GARBAGE!!!!!!!

try before you buy, i will buy something if i believe they deserve my money!

I honestly wish this survey was financed by someone other than a company that makes BitTorrent clients.

I used to both download and buy a lot of music on CD.

Now I usually just listen to it on Spotify and neither download, nor buy. I'm just so sick of the CD format - it's outdated. Browsing through a collection of physical CD cases is tedious and you can't take the whole collection with you. The final straw was when they began adding copy protection to CD's, making it harder to rip them to the hard drive. That made CD's way too inflexible. Before that I could rip them to lossless for local storage and to mp3, wmv or ogg for mobile devices. When those options disappeared, I stopped buying CDs completely.

With Spotify, your playlists follow you no matter which computer you log in from, and soon it will be available for the iPhone, too.

Wow you mean there are others like me, who are sick of forking out money for shit and found that downloading it first encouraged me to buy stuff that was good instead of just ceasing buying all together? Say it Ain't So!

Not that the MPAA/RIAA and their ilk will ever admit this. That said I no longer care about them anyhow. They aren't doing anything more then lining their own pockets while the courts let them get away with it. The artist's are not receiving a damn thing out of all of these settlements.

JimmiG said:

The final straw was when they began adding copy protection to CD's, making it harder to rip them to the hard drive. That made CD's way too inflexible. Before that I could rip them to lossless for local storage and to mp3, wmv or ogg for mobile devices. When those options disappeared, I stopped buying CDs completely.

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Yeah, because its very tiring and cumbersome to hold down SHIFT when inserting a CD

I guess I'd believe that.

People want to be able to "test out, listen to and watch part of" media before buying it, That way they feel assured they're buying a quality item.

But nowadays, iTunes, UnBox and game companies all give demos of some sort of their products.

Remember the floppy disc days with Shareware and companies that would let you test out their media software before you bought it?

That stuff HAD to have worked, or else we wouldn't be here... this far online, right?

I don't buy any kind of media unless I can watch it or hands on interface with it first.


Flashy boxes and cool trailers dont trick everyone into buying trash any more.

Yep, I'm the collecting type so I absolutely must buy everything I enjoy. It's kinda funny though because half the time they go unwatched and serve more as pretty things to have on the shelf on reserve times I have guests.

Before the advent of torrents my media collection used to have a lot more terrible products, now it has a lot more great ones that I never would have wanted or heard of if I didn't download on a whim.

There's zero data or methods listed in the article and it's based on an open survey format. Even if it weren't paid for by a BT company, this has no credibility.

But what the hell, this is [H] so lets just ignore this^ minor detail and jump on the movie industry bashing bandwagon.

oh no. not another bandwagon. we already got more bandwagons then we've got bands around here, what's another going to be good for?

Yep, I download more than my friends, but I also buy hoards more than they do concerning CDs, DVDs, Blurays. I prefer hardcopies, but I really would like to abolish the ever-increasing length of FBI/copyright warnings when I fire up a movie. Hell--I'd pay more money if I could have better quality on a couple hardcopy discs...lossless compression or no compression would be nice. I don't buy DRM-protected music because it's a PITA and I get poor quality (eg: itunes)...if I buy the disc myself, I have a hardcopy for my home and car, can choose whether or not to compress it for a portable device, and if I do compress it, I can choose which method to use.

pssh, not me i didnt buy shit, but i dont DL or buy anything anymore, so, there are only so many movies i can watch, same with music. Games i did buy more or at least the same amount when i was DLing

I have not bought a music CD in probably....5-7 years.

When it sucks, why spend your money on it. Its the same regurgitated shit over and over again. FM Radio sucks horribly too, its the same Top 40 songs, which are actually the same Top 10 songs, its worthless crap and thats why it too is dying on the vine.

Satellite radio should have been the savior to this, but XM/Sirius fucked up a wet dream, if it wasn't for O & A I wouldn't subscribe here either.

I went to see Inglorious Basterds, that was the first movie I've paid to see since Batman. Its the only movie thats come out recently that made me want to see it on the big screen. Otherwise its the same Pixar animated cute movie for kids, horrible guy and girl cute romantic comedy, shove the worthless shit down my throat over and over again crap and drivel.

If I wanted to throw my money away on bad entertainment, I'd go put $1 bills in the g-string of an overweight "college student / going to nursing school student ".

Good gods, this appears to be such a wildly popular topic to flame on (? from both sides ?) that nobody here appears to realize that this is simply a grossly mistaken correlation=causation comparison?

I mean, seriously, forget the "people who steal were never going to buy it anyway" or "I only download it because I want to try it first" or any of that - all that is BS noise and totally beside the point.

The ISSUE is that the study is relating two things together in a cause/effect way that ARE BOTH EFFECTS OF THE SAME CAUSE.
IE., think of this comparison. "If we categorize beer consumers into people who home brew and people who do not, we may find that the people who home brew buy more beers than those who do not home brew"

You see the logical fallacy, there? It's simply "If A and B are true, than A must be the cause of B" or "B must be the cause of A". Not considering that the ACTUAL correct statement (in this case) might be "If C is true (say, beer and brewing is a person's hobby that they have interest in every aspect of), than A (they home brew) and B (they buy more local microbrew beer) will both be effects".

To take this to the extreme in this argument - I may be a conscientious supporter of the music industry, and try to buy every single CD or digital file copy I have. But I do HAVE over 10 million files, and maybe 1/10 of 1% of these have had their license I acquired them under expire, or maybe they were tracks some friend lent to me to give a try I never got around to deleting or something...point is that 99.9% of my library is legit (even by the RIAA's standards), I ASSUME that all my files are legit (those that aren't I've just lost track of), and I'd still have 10,000 illegal files. Now, compare that to Johhny Q Gameboy who doesn't actually listen to much music. He's a lazy, dirty, thief, and steals everything he has in his library. But it's a small library of only 2,000 files or so. So does the fact that I have a 5 TIMES larger set of illegal files have anything to do with our character? No! The two facts are COMPLETELY unrelated - the number of illegally downloaded files we each have has absolutely nothing at all to do with our tendency to buy music. They are both EFFECTS of the same CAUSE: our interest level in music (in my case, 'high' - I have a lot of purchased files, but I have a lot of illegally downloaded files which had no influence on what I did or did not purchase because I am not even aware I HAVE them; vs our alternate example whose interest in music is simply very low and so has a much smaller set of illegal music...but he also has a much smaller set of music overall, so nothing can be derived from these numbers)

Which, given how the rest of the thread has gone, I should qualify my above post to indicate I am not taking a side in this argument - I'm not saying there is or is not any correlation. Merely that the data presented, in the way it was presented, was completely meaningless gibberish from which no actual conclusions could be drawn to either side of the argument.

Guys, you are totally missing how awsome this is for RIAA and MPAA. This goes back to before some of you were around, where the RIAA convinced the goverment that ALL CD's and Cassettes should have a tax on them because OBVIOUSLY the only reason you would buy these is to take part in copyright infrignment. This pacified the RIAA for many years. So now here is "proof" that new media as well as ummm, maybe your electronics need to be taxed again.

This is why there were "audio" CD-R's and stuff, these cost more becuase they had a tax built into them. The computer industry wouldn't let the RIAA tax all CD-R's so the special music ones were made. And then some of the home audio cd recorders were forced to only allow those type of CD-R's to be used.

Provide music to purchase in a lossless format to download and I'll consider it. Until then, the better option remains the freely available files, regardless of price.

sounds like me, big media guy and p2pirate'er!

obobski said:

if you can't force them to buy garbage, sue them for not buying it or wanting it, because they don't have the right to say no to you, duh

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Antonius said:

This whole "we lost $500 trillion dollars last month to piracy" is bullshit.

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Hahahahaha

I'm the guy who pirates things and waits for it to go on clearance sale to legally own it. So I have tons of shit that's unopened because I just use the pirated copy I already had.