[soldarnal]

It's not as bad as you make it sound. There is no way for your "shocking fact" to be true, since definitionally people who have never downloaded anything have never paid to download anything either (people that pay for a download and for some reason never complete it notwithstanding). The ratio, therefore, would really be undefined, rather than 10:1.

The real inference, given what you say about the original article, is that people who obtain music online, whether by means of purchase or not, are ten times more likely to obtain music by means of purchase than those who never obtain music online. Certainly not as perhaps interesting a finding as the title, but neither as vapid as your summary.

[tptacek]

You think maybe you could track down and read the original before making inferences based on my vapid summary? I'm interested in whether you still think I'm off base here.

[soldarnal]

I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention to refer to your summary as vapid; and I certainly see now how you read it that way. I would ammend my post to add "makes it to be" to the end of the last sentence. I meant that your summary represents the "finding" as completely vapid.

I do trust that the detail from the article you point out, that "the survey used deliberately avoided wording that suggested 'illegal' downloading", is true. (Though, I'd still be grateful if you wanted to provide a link to the original.) What I find to be off base is the logic of your interpretation ("In other words..."), which makes their finding out to be a mere tautology. If what you say in the first paragraph is true (which I believe it to be), I don't think what you said in the second paragraph follows from that for the reason I gave above.