Swedish music sales boosted in wake of Pirate Bay closure

Music sales in Sweden are up 18% (well, revenues from them are) in the wake of the closure of torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay and with the popularity of legal services such as Spotify.

Naturally the music industry are being bullish about the news, with the IFPI's John Kennedy saying:

"The increase in sales in Sweden, set against the backdrop of innovative new digital services and tighter copyright laws, is encouraging. It is too early to say if Sweden has permanently turned a corner, but we hope that users there will permanently switch from unlicensed filesharing networks that give nothing back to the music community to great value legal services whose operators recognise continuous investment is needed to discover and promote the talent of tomorrow."

Whether similar results are being seen elsewhere is currently not known.