Why do pirates buy music online? An empirical analysis on a sample of college students

Despite a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research in industrial organisation literature on the relationship between piracy, music sales and their antecedents, a significant gap exists for what concerns the linkage between digital music piracy and the recent success of online music stores (OMS). Our aim is to investigate the motivations behind digital music purchases on a population of college students who are music pirates. In doing so, we rely upon an original dataset from a survey carried out in 2010 on a population of university students, who are pirates. The results show that the likelihood that pirates buy digital music from an OMS is positively related to the level of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) skills of the respondents, including the experience in online purchases, and to the individual interest in music.