„Sound Beginnings. The early record industry in Australia” by Ross Laird seems to be the first and only book on the early Australian music industry. Laird did not only tell the story of technological progress in phonographic industry, but highlights the history of the main players of the Australian music business in great detail from…

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…

On 17 January 2011 Dennis Collopy and David Bahanovivh from the University of Hertfortshire presented the results of the panel study on “Music Experience and Behavior in Young People” in a workshop at the Institute of Culture Management and Culture Studies at University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Until now results are available for…

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and Koleman Strumpf’s paper ”The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis”, which was originally made accessable online to the public as a Harvard Business School working paper in 2004 and was eventually published, after revisions, in the Journal of Political…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…

Holland Mortimer’s and Sorensen’s working paper does not directly address the relationship between file sharing and record sales, but the authors indirectly show that file sharing affected the trade-off between sales of recorded music and concert revenues. They come to the conclusion that the advent of file sharing in 1999 appears “(…) to have eroded…

Wendy Chi examined in a John Hopkins University working paper (Chi 2008) whether file sharing crowds out purchases of physical and digital music by using Forrester Research’s consumer mail surveys for the years 2004 to 2006, which are representative samples for the U.S. and Canada. In her study, Chi comes to the result that “illegal”…

In April 2006, Alejandro Zentner published in the Journal of Law and Economics an article entitled “Measuring the Effect of File Sharing on Music Purchases”, which was based on his dissertation of the same titel, published the year before. Originally Zentner presented the results in a 2003 working paper, and a 2005 article in Topics…

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…

In their working paper Curien and Moreau (2005) proposed a model of the music industry under “piracy” in which they took into account quality, variety, as well as price adjustments and showed that P2P file sharing networks could have a positive impact on the music industry as whole (recorded and live music as well as…

Bayaan (2004) not only theoretically investigated the impact P2P file sharing on record sales but also examined how technological advances in the recording of music affected the music industry. He assumed therefore that firms exercise monopoly power over artists and examined the effects of technological change on profits and the number of artists signed. He…