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It doesn't matter! Business-wise, the key metric is if profits are up for the artists. Imagine two customer scenarios:

1. Pirate 100 albums in a year, buy 5 albums, yielding $7.50ish collectively for the 5 albums.

2. Listen to everything on Spotify, play 2000 tracks, each paying 0.2 cents per play. $4 is spread amongst everyone.

A fall in "piracy" doesn't necessarily cause (or even correlate with) overall earnings to go up.



Since Sweden adopted anti P2P laws (IPRED) in 2009 Spotify usage has grown. In 2009 France adopted an anti P2P law (HADOPI). Since then music sales in France declined at a lesser rate than global sales and therefore artist earnings declining less than on global level (http://www.fortherechord.com/hadopi-and-cartes-musique-franc...). This would point to a correlation between "piracy" and music sales.




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