Downloading pirated music from the Internet has had almost no effect on real world sales, say researchers from Harvard Business School and the the University of North Carolina.

Their recent report effectively discredits record executives who claimed that the progressive slump in music sales can be linked to the rise in online piracy.

The researchers studied the most heavily downloaded songs to determine if there was a measurable drop in legitimate sales. They discovered that filesharing actually increases sales for popular albums - those that sell more than 600,000 copies. They found that for every 150 illegal downloads, legitimate CD sales of that album are increased by one copy.

One of the researchers, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School said, "From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales."

For less popular albums, the researchers explained that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed pirate music downloads caused two million fewer CD sales in 2002 - totally at odds with the decline of 139 million CDs that the record industry attributes to filesharing.

The RIAA\'s Amy Weiss disagreed with the researchers\' findings. She said, "Countless well respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs".

Originally posted by jocelyn
Statistics tend to be meaningless in the majority of arguments if you consider how easily statistics can be manipulated to make a point...