I haven't been a P2P user for nearly a decade now, but there was a shining moment back in graduate school when Napster's bounty of music looked shiny and irresistible. Though discovery tools were primitive, Napster made it simple enough to find bands that one liked, then to browse the music collection of those who also liked said band. In this way I discovered The Jayhawks and dove deeper into Radiohead—which at the time I knew only as the band who had done "Creep" some years before.

Those downloads made no money for the artists, but that exposure turned me into a huge fan of both groups and it wasn't long before I spent my afternoons scavenging the used CD shops of Chapel Hill to find more of the incredible music I was discovering. Used CDs didn't generate money for the artists, either, but they at least had the twin advantages of legality and sound quality.

When The Jawyhawks came to town a year later, I bought two tickets to the show (sadly canceled due to some sort of heart problem with lead singer Gary Louris). As money became less of an issue in the following years, I began buying CDs and then digital downloads at online shops. Currently, I've purchased five Jayhawks albums and six Radiohead albums—and the same could be said of 50 other artists.

In fact, it was Napster that turned me into something more than a casual listener of music, and I've happily spent a few thousand dollars over the years on just about every genre of music—much of it on albums I would never have heard about in my pre-Napster days. And then there were the concerts, the music magazine subscriptions, the band posters

Pirates say they'll pay

But is this experience anything more than an anecdote? We've seen several studies over the last decade that say music "pirates" buy the same amount of music or even more but we've also seen research that suggests a net loss to the music industry (or to the recording industry, which is not the same thing). New research out of the UK suggests that my story isn't archetypal, but it's not uncommon, either.

Think tank Demos commissioned the survey (PowerPoint) from Ipsos MediaCT, and Ipsos went out and surveyed 1,008 Internet-using UK adults aged 16 to 50. A third of them admitted to using "unofficial" sources to find music, though only 10 percent said that they actually downloaded copyrighted content without permission. (This may be one of those results that comes from a response bias against admitting to perceived negative acts.)

Ipsos then narrowed in on those who admitted to scouring the unofficial channels of music and asked them about their music buying. The results were split, but most people said that the file-sharing had either no effect or a positive effect on their music purchasing.

Data source: Ipsos

The survey was conducted over the Internet, and this particular question relies on notoriously inaccurate consumer recall, so it's hard to know just how seriously to take the results. It does fit with past research, like that commissioned by the Canadian government which found a strong correlation between downloading songs from P2P networks and buying more CDs. But even that research found no such correlation between downloading and purchasing music online.

Critics have long contended that these findings are true, and that the decline in worldwide record industry revenues is due not to piracy but to the return of the single (thanks in large part to iTunes). This argument was recently advanced in the excellent book Appetite for Self-Destruction, for instance, which we reviewed earlier this year.

In any event, the Ipsos research also showed high interest in a subscription music download service. Seventy-two percent of those who admitted to illicit downloading said they would be willing to pay for such a scheme; among all respondents, the number was still high at 47 percent. Ipsos suggests, though, that such a service would need to be priced at ?5 a month in order to maximize profits, and we've seen little evidence that the major labels are interested in offering DRM-free downloads for a price that low.

But the Isle of Man is going ahead with such a scheme anyway, and for only ?1 a month (though it is mandatory on all ISP connections). Perhaps such experiments will pave the way for the sorts of new business model that can end the hostility between the music business and music fans.