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.

I think one of the main things that affect's CD sales due to filesharing is that we can easily sample a new artist's music or a new CD out by an existing artist. A lot of people find that they only like 1 or 2 song's on that CD and they aren't going to buy it. Usually if I listen to a band's music for more than a week I will buy their album because if it hasn't gotten old in a week then I'll be listening to it for a long time.

I completely agree with this study. I personally stopped buying music long before I ever downloaded my first mp3. Maybe I'm getting older, maybe I'm not the target audience but I cetainly did not stop buying music because I could just download it on the web for free.

downloading mp3's exposed me to lots of music I had never heard before, and the result is that 4 years later I own over 70 legally acquired CD's vs. 3 or 4 I had before I downloaded music. Downloading has caused me to buy CD's

erickdj, same here...

After I used AudioGalaxy way back, my audio cd purchases went through the roof compared to what it was before. I suddenly started buying albums and not only one or two compilations pr year.

But now I'm mostly listening to radio, as it's cheaper