A recent study by the Canadian Government suggested that people who actively download music using P2P networks were more likely to buy music.

OK, that’s wonderful news, and a glowing testament to the BitTorrent community. But that’s not really the point. Reading the discussion thread on Digg, there was the suggestion that:

Pirates=Music Fanatics
Others=Mainstream radio listeners

But is that really true? I’m not so sure.

From having spoken to a number of people who use file sharing for music, TV shows and movies, many pirates download gigabytes of material simply because they can. You can download a band’s entire discography in one night, but if you add to that a couple of other bands, your favourite TV shows and a smattering of movies, you’ll have a massive library of digital goodies.

But will you have the time to listen to and watch all that material? Unless you’ve got no life at all, probably not.

It’s easy to take studies at face value. And the kind of statistics that the Internet makes available are very compelling. I just wonder if anyone’s ever studied the usage of all this digital media. How many items are downloaded but never used? How many are downloaded, listened to once or twice and then forgotten about?

Look at this comment from colincattral, for example:

However, I think that the pirates that do buy music are offset by by the ones that decide on a whim that they like a certain artist, and then proceed to download their whole discography. I’m sure everyone on digg can think of a friend or relative that owns three or four cds, but has 25,000+ songs in their music library. It’s kind of disgusting.

How many people have the time to listen to 25,000 songs? Get real!

The Internet logs everything, and the statistics we read about the number of illegal downloads are pretty compelling. However, without some kind of usage analysis, those figures are fairly meaningless.

Personally, I think that unless you consume the downloaded material repeatedly, you’re not doing anything wrong. Record companies allow people to sample music via mediums like MySpace, radio and television shows. And they recognise that these things drive sales. The difference with P2P is that it can’t be controlled by the record company and they can’t use it as a revenue stream.

Frankly, it’s time that the critics of file sharing accepted that downloading doesn’t equal using, and with digital media it the consumption of that media that counts. Not the number of downloads.