The Recorded Music Market in Brazil, 2000-2013

Brazil is the ninth largest phonographic market in the world according to the latest IFPI report, despite the fact that the revenue from recorded music sales has decreased by 58 percent since 2000. However, the Brazilian market for recorded music is more or less stable for six years now due to relatively high music video sales and the considerable growth of the digital music segment. Thus, the digital music sales have increased by 82.2 percent from BRL 24.3m to BRL 136.7m with music streaming playing an increasingly important role in the sales mix. In the following I highlight the Brazilian recorded music market by figures reported by the Associação Brasileira dos Produtores de Discos (ABPD).

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The recorded music market in the US, 2000-2013

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently published the sales figures (shipment figures) for the recorded music market in the US for 2013. Accordingly, digital sales increased by 7.6 percent to US$ 4.36bn from 2012 to 2013. Nevertheless, overall sales (digital and physical) slightly decreased by 0.3 percent from US$ 7.016bn to US$ 6.996bn in 2013. Thus, the sales decline of 12.3 percent (US$ -325m) in the physical product (CD, vinyl, DVD, SACD) could not be compensated by the growth of the digital music market. All in all, digital music sales accounted for 64 percent of the overall recorded music sales in 2013.

The strong increase of digital music sales is fueled by the booming music streaming and subscription segment, which grew 39 percent in 2013, generating US$1.4bn in revenue. However, single track download sales shrank by 3.3 percent (US$ -54.6m) in the same period. Digital album sales have slightly increased by 2.4 percent or US$ 28.7m from 2012 to 2013. These figures seem to indicate a cannibalizing effect of music streaming on download sales, even if we consider recent price cuts by digital music distributors.

The following analysis does not only highlight the digitization process of the recorded music market in the US in past thirteen years, but also the tremendous change of the digital music market segment.

How Bad is Music File Sharing? – Part 25

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EU Commission recently published a study entitled “Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data” with remarkable results. The authors, Luis Aguiar and Bertin Martens, concluded that music file sharing as well as music streaming have a significant positive impact on legal music downloads. The study is based on Clickstream data from Nielsen NetView. The database contains all the clicks of 25,000 Internet users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom for the calendar year 2011. In the following the main finding “(…) that digital music piracy does not displace legal music purchases in digital format” will be further investigated.

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:

How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 18

After several revisions (Hong 2004, 2005, 2007), Hong published in July 2011 a working paper entitled “Measuring the Effect of Napster on Recorded Music Sales”, in which he tried to measure the effect of file sharing on recorded music sales. Since he did not directly observe file sharing activity, the author compared a treatment group of Internet users with a control group of non-Internet users before and after the advent of Napster in 1999 and attempted to eliminate the time effect and isolate the so-called “Napster-effect”.

How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 4

Liebowitz’s article “Testing File-Sharing’s Impact on Music Album Sales in Cities” was available as an extended working paper version in 2008 (Liebowitz 2008a), before it was published in the journal Management Science in the same year (Liebowitz 2008b). However, it was originally made available as a working paper in September 2005 (Liebowitz 2005) and in a revised version in April 2006 (Liebowitz 2006).

In his study Liebowitz examined the extent to which file sharing had caused the decline in sound recording sales in the U.S. from 1998 to 2003. Since no direct measures of file sharing exist, Internet penetration was used as a proxy for file sharing. This assumption implies that the higher the Internet penetration the higher is the level of music file sharing.