Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales
From the Washington Post article:
Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry’s assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line.
Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.
Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina’s Koleman Strumpf, also said that their “most pessimistic” statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.
From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales,” said Oberholzer-Gee.
[A] 2002 Jupiter study showed that people who traded files for more than six months were 75 percent more likely than average online music fans to spend more money on music.
The RIAA has cited other sources that say the opposite — downloading adversely affects music sales. They concede that music downloading might increase the popularity of some music, but they contend that the overall effect is still negative. The RIAA points out that “CD sales fell from a high of more than $13.2 billion in 2000 to $11.2 billion in 2003 — a period that matches the growth of various online music piracy services.” However, that period of time was also when this country was recovering from a recession. Teens or other demographics that historically purchase music might not have as much disposable income as previously. As jimsnider_99 on the Yahoo message board for this article says:
Subject: sales vs other luxury items
by: jimsnider_99 03/30/04 04:52 pm
Msg: 17 of 20
2 recommendations
I would like to see the recording industry’s stats on declining CD sales mapped against declines or increases in gross dollar sales of other luxury items
purchased by young people, such as clothes, video games, concert tickets, and so on.
I have the feeling that they would all be trending downward as young people have less disposable income. It costs more to fill up a tank of gas these days,
that’s for sure, and the costs of college tuition and textbooks has skyrocketed. The last thing a cash-strapped 21-year-old is going to spend his or her money on
is CDs, especially when it’s so easy (albeit technically illegal) to get the music online for free.
The music industry needs to make CDs worth buying. One way they’ve succeeded in doing that is giving CD purchasers exclusie passwords to presale concert
tickets and sweepstakes entries and such. Another way would be to make a CD a more encompassing experience of the artist and the music. It sucks to spend a
half-day’s wages on a CD and it has two good songs on it and a bunch of crappy filler, along with a crummy four-panel fold-out insert that doesn’t even have the
song lyrics on it or any info about the band.
Make them cheaper, make them not suck so much, and kids will buy them.
But you can’t tell a record company executive anything. Frank Zappa was right all along.
