On June 26, 2015, the Internet platform “Debating Europe” of the Friends of Europe and the NGO Europe’s World, which is supported by the European Council and other European institutions the question “What would save the music industry from digital piracy?” was posed. I had the honor of starting the discussion on Skype. Find more…

On December 6, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the first file sharing platform Napster for copyright infringment. This was the start of a still ongoing campaign against file-sharing and related practises. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of RIAA’s lawsuit against Napster, I would like to retell the story of…

On December 6, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the first file sharing platform Napster for copyright infringment. This was the start of a still ongoing campaign against file-sharing and related practises. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of RIAA’s lawsuit against Napster, I would like to retell the story of…

On December 6, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the first file sharing platform Napster for copyright infringment. This was the start of a still ongoing campaign against file-sharing and related practises. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of RIAA’s lawsuit against Napster, I would like to retell the story of…

On December 6, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the first file sharing platform Napster for copyright infringment. This was the start of a still ongoing campaign against file-sharing and related practises. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of RIAA’s lawsuit against Napster, I would like to retell the story of…

In the past few days two studies on the impact of music streaming on recorded music sales surfaced. The Country Music Association (CMA) presented study results that streaming services are more successful in fostering music sales than radio. It was reported that more than a quarter of the respondents purchased music after streaming it compared…

HADOPI is an acronym of the French government agency “Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet”, which was created by the so-called ‘HADOPI law’ in 2009. Its main aim is to screen internet connections in France to prevent the exchange of copyrighted material without prior agreement from the…

In a recent working paper by Robert G. Hammond of North Carolina State University the impact of album pre-releases in file-sharing networks on physical and digital album sales is analyzes. The paper comes to the conclusion that album sales benefit from album leaks. “[A]n album that became available in file-sharing networks one month earlier would…

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…

The objective of Brigitte Andersen and Marion Frenz’s study entitled “The Impact of Music Downloads and the P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music”,(2007/08), which was later published in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics under the title “Don’t blame the P2P file-sharers: The Impact of Free Music Downloads on the Purchase of Music CDs in…

A widely discussed study on music file sharing is Felix Oberholzer-Gee’s and Koleman Strumpf’s paper ”The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis”, which was originally made accessable online to the public as a Harvard Business School working paper in 2004 and was eventually published, after revisions, in the Journal of Political…

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…

The study of Tanaka (2004) “Does File Sharing Reduce Music CD Sales?” was based on the the one hand on micro data of CD sales, which were collected on a weekly basis of 30 best selling CDs from June to November 2004 in Japan. On the other, download figures were obtained on each weekend in…

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…

Michel’s working paper is based on 4 chapters of his dissertation thesis entitled “A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Impact of the Digital Age on the Music Industry”. In addition two articles in the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues are also based on the findings of the dissertation thesis. Michel constructed a…

In the article “Do Artists Benefit from Online Music Sharing?”, which is based on a 2003 working paper, Gopal et al. (2006) present a model of music file sharing to explain the impact of technological and economic incentives to sample, purchase, and pirate music. The results of the model indicate that lowering the cost of…

In his 2009 working paper, Leung constructed a dataset from 884 undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota to demonstrate that music file sharing does hurt record sales. However, music file sharing contributes approximately 20% to iPod sales. How the author came to these results by a conjoint analysis is further discussed below.

In his 2006 working paper Lee investigated how price and free music availability jointly affect the consumer’s willingness to buy and how price and non-price factors (rating of singers, genre preferences, number of songs on CDs, and music consumption style) change the “free” vs. “non-free” Internet availability conditions. The results of a survey of about…

Rob/Waldfogel’s article in the Journal of Law and Economics is based on a 2004 working paper entitled “Piracy on the High C’s. Music Downloading, Sales Displacement, and Social Welfare in a Sample of College Students”. The authors used a survey-based dataset of music downloading and purchases of 8,200 albums by 412 college students. The repondents…

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…