From the Guardian’s Victor Keegan’s “Why piracy isn’t such a bad thing for music”:

The industry claims there are 20 illegal downloads for every legal one, yet it is clearly not affecting the real world on that scale. If a teenager downloads 20,000 tracks, what does he or she do with them? Sell them to others, who could download them for free anyway, or play them sequentially or randomly? Better to listen to the radio which repeatedly pumps out all the current hits. The point is that it may be wrong to download, but it is not affecting sales proportionately; and for sales lost, there are others gained from people like me who have hugely increased their purchases because there is now an easy, affordable way to do it through the likes of iTunes and mobile phones (but beware of unlimited data charges).

Read the whole column here.

Music piracy is estimated to cost the music industry $4.5 billion.