The BI Norwegian School of Management yesterday released a report stating that teenagers who use P2P "unpaid downloading" services actually pay for ten times as much music as those who have not used P2P services. "This confirms that, even with declining CD sales, people do understand that copyrighted music recordings cost money," says assistant professor Audun Molde.

"The study was conducted amongst 1,901 participants over the age of 15," writes Geek.com's John Brownlee. "Not only were the music pirates of the bunch ten times more likely to download to pay music, but half the participants in the range of the ages of between fifteen and twenty had bought a CD in the last six months. Conclusion: music pirates are actually the music industry's largest source of legitimate online customers."

"BI's report corroborates data that the Canadian branch of the RIAA, the Canadian Recording Industry Association, released in 2006," notes Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng. "At that time, the organization acknowledged that P2P users do indeed buy more music than the industry wants to admit, and that P2P isn't the primary reason why other people aren't buying music. 73 percent of of respondents to the CRIA's survey said that they bought music after they downloaded it illegally, while the primary reason from the non-P2P camp for not buying music was attributed to plain old apathy."

More here from CNET ... more here from CrunchGear ... more here from Electronista ... more here from the Guardian ... and the press release is here.