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A new report has found that illegal download has no detrimental effect on legal purchases, and in fact boosts them slightly.
The report, published by the European Commssion Joint Research Centre, examined the online habits of 16,000 Europeans over the course of a year.
The study found that although there was obvious copyright infringement, it appeared that music obtained illegally would not have been legally purchased if the illegal option hadn't been available.
"A 10% increase in clicks on illegal music downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchases websites," the report claims.
"Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (but still small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting complementarities between these two modes of music consumption," it continues.
"According to our results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites."
The effects of both legal and illegal free music consumption are admittedly small, but what impact they do have appears to be a positive one, according to the report.
Essentially, the report suggests that the increased exposure afford to music by online availability - whether legal or otherwise - means listeners are more likely to buy the record legally.
If they hadn't been able to access the record illegally, they simply wouldn't have listened to it at all.
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The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has been highly critcial of the report, saying the research is fundamentally "flawed and misleading".
"The findings seem disconnected from commercial reality," a statement from the IFPI says.
"If a large proportion of illegal downloaders do not buy any music (and yet consume, in some cases, lareg amounts of it), it cannot be logical that illegal behaviour stimulates legal download sales and inflicts no harm."
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