Musicians stop bitching about Spotify and stop complaining about the fact that the streaming service is basically stealing money from you. A new study by NPD (National Purchase Diary, a leading North American market research company) was based on a music-focused survey on Americans over the age of 13, conducted since 2001.

And the results are in:

– '38% of Spotify users report buying a song download in the past 3 months, compared to 17% for non-users.

– 36% of the tracks that Spotify users acquire are from paid download stores, a 'reasonably steady' number.  (The rest is CDs, borrowing and burning/ripping, BitTorrent, etc.) '

NPD group analyst Russ Crupnick even declared:

‘I can tell you that we see Spotify (I'm talking free) users more than twice as likely to be buying digital downloads compared to non-users, and that ratio has not changed since the introduction in Q3 '11.'

Spotify was indeed introduced in the US in July 2011, and according to the same article by Digital Music News, paid downloads are indeed up again.

I don’t really understand, why would people buy a track they can listen to for free whenever they want? If it is true, there is no logic, could it be because people who pay for Spotify are music lovers, still nostalgic about owning it? Spotify has only been there for a year, and it may change soon with the future generations, who will not even know what it is to own music.

I can only talk for myself, but I haven’t bought any album I have checked on Spotify, I just bought music by artists I like and that I was planning to buy anyway, but Spotify didn't make me buy more music.

Is there any chance this study was sponsored by Spotify?