Despite the fact that independent musicians and small labels are largely thriving, the major label music industry sales has been deteriorating for a while. Instead of looking for the real cause behind their sales slump, major labels preferred to blame it all on piracy.
A new study indicates that those pirates might be the biggest legitimate music buyers.
The study, conducted by researchers Demos, polled 1008 people in the UK. Almost 10% of the respondents admitted to downloading music illegally through peer to peer networks. File sharers estimated their average spending on music, vinyl and MP3s to be around 77 GBP while none file sharers had an average of 44 GBP only.
The aforementioned numbers mean that file sharers are responsible for 16% of the music industry's total revenue.