I recently read a dissertation on music circulation in India, and there was an insightful ethnographic chapter on everyday considerations of music’s value. It taught me a lot about how people *use* music in their everyday lives, in ways that don’t have anything to do with market value. The other thing: it also doesn’t really come to a clear point–more like several points, and points that can’t easily be summarized. The researcher spread around surveys, but bounced those answers off his own observations.

Of course, that could also mean “bouncing one set of (quanitative) biases off another set of (qualitative) biases.” So yeah.

But I see what you mean about quantitative research produced sound-bite-sized statistics, i.e. that articles about studies are never about qualitative studies.

A little pickier: I don’t see why a researcher couldn’t settle on some operational definition of “piracy” as a set of behaviors and administer survey items about those behaviors. I do think that the best way to settle on what those behaviors should be would be to use qualitative methods. Once you’ve gotten a finger on the pulse though, you can quantify away.

A very good study of people’s downloading habits, whether “legal,” “illegal,” “paid,” or “pirated,” would probably require both qualitative and quantitative methods (like most great studies of poorly understood phenomena).