We have been saying so for years now, the whole community had clearly identified that no real hurt was being made to the big recording companies and here's another conclusive report on that behaviour. Researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina concluded that CD sales should be unaffected by illegal file sharing. The study is unlikely to be the last word on the issue. Previous studies have been released showing that file sharing had both positive and negative effects on music sales.

Even in the most pessimistic version of their model, they found that it would take about 5,000 downloads to displace sales of just one physical CD, the authors wrote. Despite the huge scale of downloading worldwide, that would be only a tiny contribution to the overall slide in album sales over the past several years, they said.