The Biggest P2P Music Trafficers = The Biggest Music Spenders

It's been a busy one here at NO, but this bit of news rings true with us. From arstechnica:

A new study published today claims that users who share and download music files online also buy four and a half times more music online than your average music listener, at least in the UK. Instead of magically costing the industry money, these users are apparently interacting with more music, and as a result, buying more music from legitimate channels. The study stems from a survey conducted by The Leading Question, a digital music research company who surveyed 600 self-styled music fans.

In other words, people who are nuts about music, like us, both buy it and share it and listen to it and download it and... well, you see the point. We have piles and piles of CDs and a hard drive full of mp3s and we're always prowling for more. And so do most of you. Why? Because people who enjoy music enjoy sifting through the enormous library of mediocrity that the world's musicians have produced to find those few awe-inspiring, earth-shaking pieces of music that we never knew we wanted.

You didn't go looking for a guy with a thin voice and twangy guitar accompaniment singing about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers--or at least we didn't--rather, you heard it out of some pile of old records somewhere and said, "Damn, this is good shit." And so you keep listening to piles and piles of as-yet-unheard records, CDs, mp3s, etc, compulsively, whether you bought, borrowed, or downloaded them, looking for more rewards like that one.

That is to say, all music is made for listeners, and while we don't have a problem with record companies making money in the process, we find their attempts to keep the music away from the listeners ABSO-FREAKIN-LUTELY INSANE.