[microsound] p2p is not killing the music business

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

interesting study in pdf form found here
http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

snipped from www.boingboing.net:

> Empirical data on file-sharing's effect on album sales
> Koleman Strumpf, a conservative, Cato-affiliated economist at the University
> of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just co-authored a paper on the effects
> of file-sharing on album sales, based on the first-ever empirical data
> analysis in the field. Koleman watched the file requests on OpenNap servers
> (to get numbers on which albums' tracks are being downloaded) and compared
> them to the sales-figures for each album, correlating file-sharing popularity
> against sales data. His conclusion: file-sharing isn't killing record sales.

    -- excerpted from the study:
> We analyze a large file sharing dataset which includes 0.01% of the world¹s
> downloads from the last third of 2002. We focus on users located in the U..S.
> Their audio downloads are matched to the album they were released on, for
> which we have concurrent U.S. weekly sales data. This allows us to consider
> the relationship between downloads and sales. To establish causality, we
> instrument for downloads using technical features related to file sharing
> (such as network congestion or song length) and international school holidays,
> both of which are plausibly exogenous to sales. We are able to obtain
> relatively precise estimates because the data contain over ten thousand
> album-weeks...
>
> Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed
> to displace a single album sale...high selling albums actually benefit from
> file sharing.


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