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This I'm guessing: https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...

There's certainly truth in that for some pirates. Some folks are just supper passionate about things, and it's natural that they'd be hitting up the internet for early releases, versions only released overseas, demos, etc while also grabbing as much as they can available to them through retail channels.

Speaking personally, in the early days of napster I found so much amazing music I'd never been exposed to from bands I'd never heard of or had given a chance to, that I found myself spending far more money on music than I ever had before. I wasn't obsessive about it like some fans, I just had so much more I wanted than I ever did previously. I had stacks of binders full of CDs, CDs slotted into tall plastic towers, and CDs stacked on bookshelves.

Since then they've all been ripped into FLAC and MP3 and given to friends or stored away somewhere, or lost in moves and the RIAA became so deplorable to me that I vowed to never buy another CD from an RIAA affiliated label ever again and that was the last they ever saw a dime from me from retail sales, although I have imported a few CDs from Australia and Japan which I'm sure had their equivalents to the RIAA. Still, my first steps into music piracy (I don't count the MOD or MIDI files) coincided with the peak of my spending on music.