New academic research suggests that neither social norms nor the threat of lawsuits are enough to keep college students from illegally downloading music. The study, which appeared in the most recent issue of Cyberpsychology & Behavior, provides no answers to a music industry that is desperately seeking ways to put the brakes on file-sharing. It does suggest that such sharing doesn't hurt the music business, though; according to the authors, "downloading intentions also had no direct relationship to either compact disc purchases or to subscriptions to online paid music services."

"Share, Steal, or Buy? A Social Cognitive Perspective of Music Downloading" was authored by Professors Robert LaRose and Junghyun Kim (and highlighted by the superb Chronicle of Higher Education), and it examined the motivations of 134 students at a Midwestern university. All of the students had downloaded music illegally in the past, and their answers to the survey questions indicated that most intended to continue downloading in the future. It turns out not to matter whether the university or a student's parents believe that such music downloads are wrong; these norms were simply not absorbed by the students.

Two things did affect student behavior. One was a sense of moral justification; students who believed that downloading music was an ethical behavior were likely to download more of it. That's a fairly predictable result, but more surprising was the finding that students were more likely to download music if they believed that their classmates were downloading more than they were. As the researchers put it, "the less excessive one's downloading was perceived to be compared to others, the more deficient was self-regulation [of downloading]." This is "keeping up with the Joneses," college style.

It turns out that many students simply care more about downloading music than they do about rightness, wrongness, or consequences. The researchers have two theories for this, one of which is that file-sharing is more of a social phenomenon than an economic one. "That is," say the researchers, "downloaders of free, so-called 'pirate' music seemed to be more motivated by the social aspect of trading and sharing music with other music enthusiasts rather than the proposition of saving money on music purchases." This certainly seems to be the case for the students who run darknet servers for no profit, even as their school cracks down on the practice.

There's also a darker explanation: addiction. How else to explain the fact that some students persist in their behavior even after repeated disciplinary action and suspensions? A personal story recounted by one of the authors provides a useful example:

"In the first author's class a student reported that he was among those caught up in the most recent dragnet of the Recording Industry Association of America and as a consequence had been subjected to an escalating series of punishments by the university, ending in his disenrollment from the university. This individual expressed a casual attitude towards the actions of his university, rationalizing that in the end he could just move on to university in the next state and begin downloading again!"

With few effective ways to convince students to stop swapping music, should the music industry be worried about its survival? According to the students surveyed (keep in mind that the survey measured future "intentions" rather than actions), downloading music had no negative effect on their plans to purchase CDs or sign up for online music services. This fits with other recent research, but don't expect the RIAA to buy the argument. According to the trade group, the music business loses more than $4 billion a year to piracy. If recent academic studies are correct, however, none of this loss is due to P2P swapping.