All of the stories that bother to look at numbers seem to look something like this: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.gamas

All of the stories that bother to look at numbers seem to look something like this: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/stardock-88-per/ http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/stardock-88-per/ In games, pirates seem to outnumber legitimate customers roughly 9:1, but pirates convert to legitimate customers (in the face of DRM or other obstruction of the pirated form) at a rough rate of 1 customer per 1000 defrayed pirates. Musically? Looking at Radiohead's In Rainbows, 'most customers' paid nothing, but the album still netted more money in two months than their previous album had in four years. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/In_Rainbows#Sales_and_chart_placings https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/In_Rainbows#S...) Saul Williams had a relatively contemporary offering of a free/$5 album that in two months (and with producer Trent Reznor's extra exposure) sold as many copies as his previous album had sold in four years while garnering four times as many free downloads. He's had two albums since, but I don't know what the sales are like for either of them. It's also worth noting that there were a fair number of torrented downloads of both albums, which should shift numbers closer to the observed game piracy numbers.