Music Industry Should Stop Whining
…..and critically look at themselves and their aging business models, instead of criminalising their customers.
In the Netherlands international record companies broke up contracts with Dutch artists, claiming declining profits due to filesharing as primary reason. The artists believed the story. Harvard Business School sure doesn’t:
A long standing economic question is the appropiate level for protection of intellectual property. The internet has drastically lowered the costs of copying information goods and provides a natural crucible to assess the implication of reduced protection. We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world’s downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales. (via Martin Dugage at Mopsos)
Now let’s see if this filters through to main stream press, who have been accepting the music industries explanation without critical examination.
This further backs up the story from Australia where the music industry just had their best year ever, and tried to cover it up, to not undermine their crusade against file sharing.
Oh and if you want to contribute to ending the scam, and getting artists their earned income: Gary’s out to slay the RIAA dragon. (see his list of related entries)