Contrary to the claims of the music industry and the RIAA, illegal music downloads have no noticeable effect on the legal sales of music, according to a new study in the ‘Journal of Political Economy’, titled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis.”
The studey correlated statistics on music downloads to music sales data to determine whether there was any statistically determinable causality (positive or negative) between illegal downloads and legal album sales. Specifically looking at the data from the last 4 months of 2002, the researchers estimated the effect of illegal downloads to be no more than 0.7% of album sales in the same time period.
The study reports that 803 million CDs were sold in 2002, which was a decrease of about 80 million from the previous year. The RIAA has blamed the majority of the decrease on piracy, and has maintained that argument in recent years as music sales have faltered. Yet according to the study, the impact from file sharing could not have been more than 6 million albums total in 2002, leaving 74 million unsold CDs without an excuse for sitting on shelves.
The great folks at Ars have more.
Originally posted on February 12, 2007 @ 7:08 pm
Great advisory.
It’s disgusting how Sony BMG and all the other bandits of the music industry pretend to be so surprised that their karma has caught up with them.
The prices they’ve charged for CD’s that cost so little to produce were and are unconscionable.
Good riddance to their evil business model.
Ok, first of all, CDs don’t cost ‘so little to produce’. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And many times the artist is given an advance to complete the album. More times than not, this advance is rarely paid back to the record label. Before you criticize the music industry, maybe you should join in on all the fun. If not that, at least go take a class or two. I recommend the classes offered at Belmont University, where I currently am a Music Business Major. =).
buy music instead of illegally downloading them, people lose billions of dollars off of illegally downloaded singles and albums, if you want free music, download mixtapes on legal sites, its free!!!