Piracy Boost From Summer Music Festivals

by Gordon Platt

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Piracy soars immediately after summer music festivals, according to a study conducting by Spotify. Streaming and digital sales remain steady after festivals, but there is a spike in piracy. That’s a surprising observation since the study shows that legal streaming has significantly decreased piracy. Keep in mind it is in Spotify’s interest to reach this conclusion.

So what’s causing the festival spike? Concert goers may want to own the music as opposed to just listening to it. That may account for their preference over streaming. But why are illegal rips preferable to legal downloads? My theory is that concertgoers figure that they have just spent a boatload of money attending the festival. They believe that it’s now within their rights to get the music for free. They think of it like a souvenir.

For the bands it is, at least in aggregate, a costly souvenir. The study, “Adventures in the Netherlands,” was conducted last summer in the Netherlands, where Spotify is quite popular. Researchers found that around the Stoppelhaene festival of 2012, BitTorrent downloads for the artists Racoon and Gers Pardoel took off, steeply. Granted, the sample size is small, but the lesson may be that bands should limit their exposure in festivals.

The study also showed that bands that shrink the window between the initial release of an album and its release on Spotify suffer less from piracy. Again, that’s in Spotify’s interest. But it does make sense. If it’s a choice between buying music legally and ripping it, many will choose the illegal though less costly route. If there’s a option to stream it legally, many fans will take advantage of it.

The study offered several examples: One Direction and Robbie Williams, who released early on Spotify, experienced one illegal download for each four sold. Rihanna and Taylor Swift, who released late on Spotify, sold only one copy for each illegal download. Spotify also found that there was no correlation between a release on its platform and sales.

Spotify is saying directly that there is no correlation between streaming and declines in music sales. Quite the contrary, it’s saying that exposure on Spotify might actually promote sales. The same argument was made initially about airplay and sales on radio. For artists, there might not really be much of a choice. It may be debatable whether exposure on Spotify promotes sales. It does seem quite clear that exposure on Spotify deters piracy.