Bandcamp, the music and merchandise sales platform, have published a blog claiming that they've seen sales resulting from users searching for illicit copies of digital music. Basically, they're tracking the starting points of Bandcamp sales, and they've found a significant number of those are coming from web searches for illicit downloads, or sites where illicit downloads are found.
On a related note, the company notes that they sold $1 million in music for musicians in December.
The following is a key excerpt from the blog post:
'For example, just this morning someone paid $10 for an album after Googling "lelia broussard torrent." A bit later, a fan plunked down $17 after searching for "murder by death, skeletons in the closet, mediafire." Then a $15 sale came in from the search "maimouna youssef the blooming hulkshare." Then a fan made a $12 purchase after clicking a link on music torrent tracker What.CD. Then someone spent $10 after following a link on The Pirate Bay, next to the plea "They sell their album as a download on their website. You can even choose your format (mp3, ogg, flac, etc). Cmon, support this awesome band!"'
No information is given suggesting what proportion of Bandcamp facilitated sales this phenomenon might represent, but the complete blog post suggests that Bandcamp are keeping a keen eye on their data. Given the nature of the data set they're dealing with, necessarily a miss of qualitative and quantitative data, some variables will be easier to conduct meaningful large scale analysis on than others. Either way, they seem to be keen to make at least some of their findings available to the public, and, presumably, musicians and labels, both existing and prospective. A particular pair of sentences in the closing paragraph would appear to be telling on that front:
'When we first launched Bandcamp, the conventional wisdom was that music retail was moribund, and that artistsâ futures were all about those terrifically lucrative tours you guys go on, supplemented perhaps by trickle-down advertising revenue generated by millions of listeners enjoying your tunes while doing their best to ignore ads for toothpaste. Fortunately, it appears thereâs still a thriving community of fans who understand that the best way to support the artists they love is by handing them money.'
You can check out the full post here.