Music Week brings news from Canada and Denmark

Music Week reports on a couple of surveys about unlicensed music:

The debate around P2P and its impact on music sales is never short of controversy and now two new studies have been published which reveal the extreme ends of thinking.

Eamonn Forde's piece doesn't quite live up to this eyecatching opening. Not much is "revealed" at all - indeed, one of the surveys is little more than a crunching of other survey findings.

This is done by the Canadian copyright farming industry, which looks at other surveys from between 2005 and 2008, and concludes that people who use peer to peer networks would spend an extra £110 a year on music if p2p didn't exist.

As Forde points out, looking at a survey about the internet in 2008 to draw conclusions about 2011 is flawed from the very start, and even if you can get round that problem, and except their rather elaborate extrapolation, you're still left with the basic problem that this is all "so what?"

If there weren't p2p networks, people would spend £110 more on music. Maybe. If there were no proper shoes, I would wear flipflops. If there wasn't rain, people would spend less on umbrellas. Perhaps the Canadian Intellectual Property Council might like to conduct a survey into what would happen if there were really unicorns?

The second survey is also a bit "so what":

Meanwhile, TorrentFreak is running details of a study into P2P user behaviour and ethical stances by the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Denmark. It found that 70% of those polled said that it was “acceptable” to source music illicitly from the web. Three-quarters, however, said they had moral objections to anyone then selling that illegally acquired music for profit.

People who use peer to peer networks don't have a problem using things like peer to peer networks to obtain music without proper licences. Excuse me while I frantically recolour my worldview.

[via @buzzsonic]