January 22, 2013 22:41

New survey finds that file sharers buy 30% more music

8 out of 10 US citizens also think it's alright to share copyrighted content with family

A new survey by the American Assembly - a research centre at Columbia University – via Ars Technica, has found that users of peer-to-peer file sharing software buy 30% more music than those who don't file share.

The survey, which was commissioned by Google, found that the average US citizen on a peer-to-peer network has 2,000 songs in their library, of which approximately 38% have been legitimately bought.

Digital music library owners not on a peer-to-peer network have an average collection of 1,300 songs and of these 45% were legally acquired, whilst others were ripped from CDs or copied.

So even though a larger percentage of music from the non-peer-to-peer users' collections was purchased legally, a greater amount of music overall is purchased by peer-to-peer users.

13% of US citizens use file sharing software. However, this increases to 20% when only looking at people under the age of 30.

The survey also found that 8 out of 10 US citizens think that it's alright to share copyrighted content with family. 6 in 10 think it's acceptable to share the same content with friends. However, only between four and 15% thought that it was reasonable to upload copyrighted content online.

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