Sharing Music Does Not Hurt

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS of music sales compared to music downloads concludes file sharing "has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album," according to a peer-reviewed study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf in the Journal of Political Economy. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero." This is the point made by Life Without Toast, the Dublin southsiders who offer up quality tracks available through free iTunes subscription. [Taste it: 56.9 MB 96 kbps MP3 file]

---

Journal of Political Economy  ISSN: 0022-3808 Volume 115, No. 1.
Ken Fisher -- "Study: P2P effect on legal music sales not statistically distinguishable from zero"
Image from Engadget.

Comments

[Buru]

I download a lot, but still buy lots of albums, so I agree!

They're going to be powerless to stop file-sharing though, as a new breed of encrypted file-sharing apps are already exploding across Europe; I use GigaTribe for instance ( http://www.gigatribe.com ) since no ISP can trace or see what I'm exchanging...once these types of apps catch on, it's only a matter of weeks before the RIAA lawsuits are a thing of the past.

[Matt]

Hi, I happened across your article through Technorati.

I wouldn't necessarily condone out-and-out widespread file-sharing, as if used by everyone in an uncontrolled manner it could indeed spell trouble for artists trying to eke out a living in the music industry. Indeed, I have worked in the music industry for many years, and would hate to see myself as being seen to condone people I know having their music and work spread throughout the world with no repayment to them.

Rather, in our podcast, I see us using these tracks as us providing entertainment through FAIR USE of copyrighted material. Namely, we do not make any money from the podcast, it would be fairly difficult for someone to extract an individual track from the podcast without some considerable effort on their part, and we would hope that anyone that likes any tracks we play on our show would go on to purchase an album by the respective artist, either on disk or download via legitimate (ie iTunes) sources.

That said, I do indeed look forward to the day when we can buy legitimate, DRM-free mp3's online for a reasonable price, as the current situation regarding restricted files being sold through online cannot work for very much longer.

Also, if you are to link to an mp3 of one of our podcasts, linking to the source would be preferable. Our bandwidth is pretty good for it. :-)