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]

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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.