P2P leads to more Music CD sales?

It seems that there is a clear link between P2P music sharing and the increase of music CD sales. Well, at least in Canada. A study (available here) shows that the use of P2P applications to share music, helps users get access to new music, which ultimately leads to an increase of CD sales.

The study concluded that about half of all P2P downloads were done because users wanted to hear an album before purchasing, or because they did not want all of the songs of an album.

Even though I may relate to that (because the 30 seconds available for each song on iTunes are just not enough), I hardly believe that this is the behavior of the common P2P downloader. It may be the case for the Canadian P2P file-sharing community, but then again maybe that's why Canada is such a great place :-)

Source: Michael Geist