How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 12

Bounie et al. conducted an anonymous online survey in two French graduate schools in order to examine the factors that influence the probability to increase/decrease CD purchases after acquiring MP3 files. The results originally published in a 2005 working paper suggest “(…) that there exist two populations of music consumers: people who sample music a lot (explorers) and those who do not sample (the pirates)” (Bounie et al. 2005: 1). This result indicates that music fans among students prefer to sample music and, therefore, their purchases of CDs tend to increase, whereas students with little interest in music use MP3 files as direct substitute for CDs. More details you can find here.

How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 8

Martin Peitz from the University of Mannheim and Patrick Waelbroeck from the Ecole nationale supérieure des télécommunications in Paris focus in several articles on the impact of file sharing on music record sales. In a 2004 article in the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues they provided empirical evidence that music downloading have caused a worldwide reduction in music sales of about 20%. In contrast, they argue on the basis of a theoretical model in a 2006 article  in the International Journal of Industrial Organization – based on 2005-working paper – that due to the sampling effect the record labels do not necessarily suffer from file sharing activities. How the come to these different conclusions can be read here.