How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 23

The economist Jordi McKenzie of the University of Sydney published the first study on the impact of music file sharing on music sales (physical and digital) in Australia. His article in the Australian Economic Papers entitled “Illegal Music Downloading and Its Impact on Legitimate Sales: Australian Empirical Evidence” is based on a working paper from August 2009 and was published in December 2009.

With a similar methodological approach to Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007) he came to the conclusion that “(…) the evidence suggests no discernible impact of dowloading activity on legitimate sales“. More details on his approach and his findings are given here:

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How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 20

In an article entitled “The Effect of Digital Sharing Technologies on Music Markets: A Survival Analysis of Albums on Ranking Charts” published in Management Science, Bhattacharjee et al. (2007) made a comparative analysis if the survival time of albums in the U.S. Billboard top 100 weekly charts differs after the time period of mid 1998 to 2000. This time span represented a watershed period in der music industry’s history. In these years the MP3 format was introduced and rapidly gain popularity. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act was passed in the U.S. Napster was emerged und popularized the use of P2P file sharing networks. DVDs gained popularity as well as online chat rooms and computer games and it was the beginning of a downturn of the overall economy after the dot.com bubble bursted.