Study: P2P effect on legal music sales “not statistically distinguishable from zero”

Yes, another study proving what people (smart, respected industry folks at that) have been screaming at the music industry for years now:

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Entitled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” the study matched an extensive sample of music downloads to American music sales data in order to search for causality between illicit downloading and album sales. Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

Yes, its true. Will this keep them from claiming under oath with a straight face that downloading a single song can cost them upwards of $10,000? No.


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